Recently I've gotten my Republican father to definitively agree billionaires should not exist. It was a long uphill battle, but he actually agrees now. But the moment I start talking about actually taking their wealth and companies and using them for the good of everyone, the decades of propaganda kick in and he shuts down. If we could just do something about the media, then we could radicalize the poorest of them who'd be most receptive to leftist radicalization. At times they can get so close, but yet so far. America really has mastered the art of propaganda better than any country before.
It was a really slow process and I don't think it was just any one specific thing. But for the most part I noticed he already disliked specific billionaires like Bezos for the usual reasons a conservative would. So I focused on directing that dislike away from reactionary reasons and toward leftist ones. Eventually he started to grasp just how much control all billionaires exert on us, how ridiculous it is that they aren't accountable to anyone but other billionaires, and how much excess they have while others are barely scraping by.
He's still extremely reactionary and jingoistic, and I don't know if I'll ever get him to care about people outside of America, but he does have some amount of empathy for people within the country. When I stick to showing him things like just how bad the homeless have it here is when I get him to really start questioning things.
But overall the decades of propaganda are way too ingrained, and I doubt it'll be possible for him to become a comrade before he dies of old age. But when I see that sometimes he can change on small issues here and there it gives me some more hope that with more time and with heightening contradictions maybe younger generations like gen x will have a chance to one day understand.
Recently I've gotten my Republican father to definitively agree billionaires should not exist. It was a long uphill battle, but he actually agrees now. But the moment I start talking about actually taking their wealth and companies and using them for the good of everyone, the decades of propaganda kick in and he shuts down. If we could just do something about the media, then we could radicalize the poorest of them who'd be most receptive to leftist radicalization. At times they can get so close, but yet so far. America really has mastered the art of propaganda better than any country before.
How did you get him to agree that billionaires shouldn't exist?
It was a really slow process and I don't think it was just any one specific thing. But for the most part I noticed he already disliked specific billionaires like Bezos for the usual reasons a conservative would. So I focused on directing that dislike away from reactionary reasons and toward leftist ones. Eventually he started to grasp just how much control all billionaires exert on us, how ridiculous it is that they aren't accountable to anyone but other billionaires, and how much excess they have while others are barely scraping by.
He's still extremely reactionary and jingoistic, and I don't know if I'll ever get him to care about people outside of America, but he does have some amount of empathy for people within the country. When I stick to showing him things like just how bad the homeless have it here is when I get him to really start questioning things.
But overall the decades of propaganda are way too ingrained, and I doubt it'll be possible for him to become a comrade before he dies of old age. But when I see that sometimes he can change on small issues here and there it gives me some more hope that with more time and with heightening contradictions maybe younger generations like gen x will have a chance to one day understand.
why don't they like him?