Yeah, it's ridiculous, especially when (as this post shows) you can just make shit up wholesale and people will pile on so long as it supports something they already believe. Changing people's minds is usually going to be an uphill battle, but it can be done.
This is probably the biggest question facing the left, and the biggest barrier to growing the left to where it can hold real power at a national level. A few thoughts that are by no means comprehensive:
It's going to take time, at least for most people.
Some people are far easier to bring around than others. We should focus most of our attention on people most likely to come around the soonest, but it's good to have at least some outreach to everyone.
The most likely (sizeable) group to become leftists is probably left-leaning libs. The second most likely group is currently apolitical folks who would directly benefit from leftist policies, but the Bernie campaign showed that overreliance on this group is risky -- it's likely that a lot of apolitical people are going to remain apolitical.
We need a highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow approach, because different people will respond to different approaches.
It's going to be easier to build a socialist coalition around domestic policies (e.g., Medicare for All) and then turn them into anti-imperialists than it would be to lead with anti-imperialism. Most people care first about their immediate material conditions, not the conditions of someone they've never met on the other side of the planet, but if you get them started down the socialist path with domestic policies it's not hard to turn that thinking international.
De-stigmatizing just the word "socialism" is crucial, and is far more important than insisting that people use a theoretically-precise definition of "socialism" (to the extent one even exists).
It's far more useful to have 10,000,000 quasi-leftists who support something like Medicare for All than it is to have 10,000 "True Leftists." Only one of these has the immediate potential to become a mass movement that actually gets anything done. It's counterproductive to be too critical of groups that are at least trying to have mass appeal on the grounds that they aren't True Leftists.
It's similarly counterproductive to write off any leftist who gains an ounce of notoriety or success as a grifter. Attacking people who are at least trying to move others left should be done selectively.
While it's obviously better to talk to people in real life, social media is modern propaganda and most people get at least some of their political opinions from what they read online. Posting may not be praxis, but it can be persuasive.
Being an asshole online has limited potential to persuade anyone, no matter how right you are. It has its place, but we shouldn't ratchet it up to 11 for anyone but chuds. Anyone remotely persuadable should lighter bullying, and less of it.
You're absolutely right that this should be a major focus of the left, at least until we get a lot bigger.
I'm not referring to achieving socialism in the US though. I was talking more about how to bring people out of this anti-China mindset. I'm not sure about appealing to material conditions first. I'm skeptical that a movement like that wouldn't just stop at european social democracy. They'll be happy to exploit the rest of the world as long as they have healthcare which to me sounds like an intensification of imperialism.
Libs can be turned into socialists, and socialists can be turned into anti-imperialist socialists. It's much harder to get people to go straight to anti-imperialism because that rarely speaks to their personal material conditions (and Americans aren't particularly interested in other countries to begin with).
The problem is that if you talk to some non-socialist about China they don't actually care either way. It's just not a factor in their day-to-day life. So even if you make great points and they nod along in agreement, none of that really takes root, and all of it can be easily undone by a few CHYNABAD news cycles. It's purely theoretical to them, and on stuff that exists only in a theoretical vacuum you can't compete with the vast media apparatus that unabashedly supports the State Department. You see this all the time with libertarians -- you have good conversations with them about the evils of U.S. interventions, but then they'll lap up so much "scary foreign country is now the devil" propaganda (especially regarding socialist states) that they'll wind up supporting all sorts of imperialist policies.
But if you turn them into socialists first? Then there's a wealth of anti-imperialist literature that comes with the socialist canon. Then the hardline anti-communism that permeates American culture softens or disappears entirely, which prevents backsliding as soon as there's a big media push to demonize some socialist country. Then they become comfortable with giving a shit about people they'll never meet.
Well, no. About the only people calling out anti-China propaganda in the U.S. are socialists. Not all socialists are calling it out, but the only ones calling it out are socialists.
Jeffrey Sachs isn't a socialist and he was calling it out. There was a thread on r/worldnews about the US being the greatest threat to democracy the other day. I checked some of the profiles of people calling it out and many of them didn't seem socialist.
Okay, setting aside absolutes: you're far more likely to find socialists calling this out than non-socialists. And as I outlined above, I'm a lot more confident that socialists aren't going to backslide as soon as the next breathless report comes out.
Yeah, it's ridiculous, especially when (as this post shows) you can just make shit up wholesale and people will pile on so long as it supports something they already believe. Changing people's minds is usually going to be an uphill battle, but it can be done.
How though? Should we be organizing brigades? We need strategy, desperately.
This is probably the biggest question facing the left, and the biggest barrier to growing the left to where it can hold real power at a national level. A few thoughts that are by no means comprehensive:
You're absolutely right that this should be a major focus of the left, at least until we get a lot bigger.
I'm not referring to achieving socialism in the US though. I was talking more about how to bring people out of this anti-China mindset. I'm not sure about appealing to material conditions first. I'm skeptical that a movement like that wouldn't just stop at european social democracy. They'll be happy to exploit the rest of the world as long as they have healthcare which to me sounds like an intensification of imperialism.
Libs can be turned into socialists, and socialists can be turned into anti-imperialist socialists. It's much harder to get people to go straight to anti-imperialism because that rarely speaks to their personal material conditions (and Americans aren't particularly interested in other countries to begin with).
The problem is that if you talk to some non-socialist about China they don't actually care either way. It's just not a factor in their day-to-day life. So even if you make great points and they nod along in agreement, none of that really takes root, and all of it can be easily undone by a few CHYNABAD news cycles. It's purely theoretical to them, and on stuff that exists only in a theoretical vacuum you can't compete with the vast media apparatus that unabashedly supports the State Department. You see this all the time with libertarians -- you have good conversations with them about the evils of U.S. interventions, but then they'll lap up so much "scary foreign country is now the devil" propaganda (especially regarding socialist states) that they'll wind up supporting all sorts of imperialist policies.
But if you turn them into socialists first? Then there's a wealth of anti-imperialist literature that comes with the socialist canon. Then the hardline anti-communism that permeates American culture softens or disappears entirely, which prevents backsliding as soon as there's a big media push to demonize some socialist country. Then they become comfortable with giving a shit about people they'll never meet.
I'm unconvinced. Even the so-called socialists today help demonize China. They end up becoming even more fervent demonizers if anything.
Well, no. About the only people calling out anti-China propaganda in the U.S. are socialists. Not all socialists are calling it out, but the only ones calling it out are socialists.
Jeffrey Sachs isn't a socialist and he was calling it out. There was a thread on r/worldnews about the US being the greatest threat to democracy the other day. I checked some of the profiles of people calling it out and many of them didn't seem socialist.
Okay, setting aside absolutes: you're far more likely to find socialists calling this out than non-socialists. And as I outlined above, I'm a lot more confident that socialists aren't going to backslide as soon as the next breathless report comes out.