Just wondering what everyone thinks about this. In almost every place I've worked coworkers with right wing beliefs are never shy about giving their opinion and views on things.
The major talking points are usually variations of stuff like: we spend to much on beneficiaries and they should stop being lazy and get a job. That poor people have kids so they can get free money from the government. We need or be tougher on crime. Even absurd shit like being outraged that a homeless person had a smartphone and indulging in such lavishness is why they're homeless etc etc
Some of the shit I hear from otherwise seemingly lovely people is insane. I feel like I have to be so much more measured and have all my 'evidence' ready to defend my commie beliefs while these people can just say whatever bullshit they want and everybody just kinda nods in agreement.
Is this a normal thing in the Angloverse? Is it because their views are essentially the status quo already and they have just fully internalised the capitalist propeganda?
Please let me know
Yes, they have absorbed the hegemonic ideology and never face any real consequences for it
There's entire industries feeding them talking points and what to say in response to any criticism of the world. Although I find most of them can't actually remember the points that well, it's all just a blend of "I saw/heard somewhere" or "they want" stuff. Pretty pathetic.
I feel like the argument can be made that Trump lost in 2020 at least partially because so many of his supporters committed suicide via covid. Biden is also rightwing and his supporters are currently turning their brains into swiss cheese in order to keep his abysmal poll numbers up, but you get my point. We are at the end of the empire, which means that imperialists even in the core occasionally suffer the consequences of their actions.
If you're white and have a certain wasp "look" about you, they could think you're "safe" to talk to
This is a good point, I'm a slavic immigrant so not exactly waspy but still very much a mayo verriety. But these have also been fairly multicultural places which is even more bizarre.
Yeah I'm from a small town in the rural south and it always happens. It's unreal how many people think it's cool to just start saying slurs to strangers.
I find it funny when people will go off about immigrants and I have to remind them that I'm an immigrant. Often gets quite awkward but then they'll say "yeah but you're one of the *good ones *"
Yep. I'm white and have greying hair and a beard, and I've had instances where strangers will come up to me and start chud-talking like I'm one of them.
I'm not really a confrontational type, so I'll just "uh huh" my way through these encounters without looking at them until they get the hint and leave. I realize I'm adding to the problem by passively letting them have their one-sided rants, but my social anxiety keeps me from telling them to fuck off and that I don't agree with them.
Unlike us, they don't need to hide their political views since they're the default. We need to carefully craft literally every word we say benhind euphamisms so we don't make people literally violently freak out upon hearing something that they don't agree with, but they can all say "DAE we should legalize murder?" and everyone's cool with it.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Having to be so measured with what I say is the most frustrating part. I think that right wing solutions to problems are so simple and intuitively feel correct to people that it's easy to just say "well obviously if we have more crime we need more cops". Any further analysis requires them to actually think things through beyond this is too challenging to the worldview and requires too much effort.
CHUDDery is always the result of intellectual laziness, feeble-mindedness, or usually both.
They're very outspoken, which is hilarious because they think they're in George Orwin 1987 because they think communists run the media.
Yeah I honestly feel like we live in separate realities sometimes
Same here, I know a guy who has probably said all of these. He's also highly anti communist, secretely fond of our previous dictators, and ironically his grandfather was put into exile during the civil war for being with the communists.
Otherwise he's a pretty good guy, it's probably his fucked childhood and parents that made him like this.
I just conclude that the emptier you are the more you need to intervene with your bullshit beliefs.
Young people are also propagandised as fuck
it's probably his fucked childhood and parents that made him like this.
Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
we spend to much on beneficiaries and they should stop being lazy and get a job
Virtually every dollar that goes into welfare gets spent, meaning that it's a particularly good use of taxpayer money because it goes straight back into circulation and it props up economic growth.
(This next part answers the homelessness topic to a certain degree)
We need to have strong welfare networks available because otherwise we create poverty traps where people must sell their house, their car, (yes) their smartphone, and be on the brink of destitution before they become eligible for assistance which means they face a situation where they no longer have the resources to be able to find and maintain long-term employment.
Anecdotally, in my country the unemployment income support is so far below the poverty line that small business operators in fields that require moderate to heavy labour actively discriminate against unemployed candidates.
Why? Because people on unemployment have such little money that they are not well-fed enough to be able to make it through a single day's worth of work without crapping out due to exhaustion. So there's a perverse incentive that prevents unemployed people from getting jobs here.
That poor people have kids so they can get free money from the government.
There's literally zero chance that a typical person is having children in order to get free money from the government. Even at its best, you might manage to break even financially but if you're that lazy that you're just having kids as a free income stream then you're going to have a really hard time with the fact that children, especially infants, demand a huge amount of time and work. You're not getting paid anywhere near minimum wage for the work required to raise a child unless it's receiving CPS intervention levels of neglect. It's much easier dealing with some Karen while you're wearing some goofy uniform for $10 an hour than it is to deal with some screaming, vomiting child at 3 in the morning for zero dollars per hour.
In any case, I want the next generation of children to be provided with adequate nutrition that they develop normally. I want them to have an education which is rich and which allows them to get good jobs and lead fulfilling lives where they're able to contribute to society. I want them to have healthcare which means they're capable of living long, healthy lives rather than being stuck with chronic and debilitating conditions.
Why do I give a fuck about what supports are provided to children when I don't have any and I have zero intention of having kids myself? Because these people are my neighbours, my community, and eventually my fellow workers too.
We need or be tougher on crime.
I usually start by asking people if they know what the typical punishment is for certain crimes. They never have a good answer.
Then I explain that if they aren't aware of the typical punishments for crimes and they're better educated than some lowlife criminal (lol, but stick with me - flattery will get you everywhere) then what makes them think that a criminal would know the typical punishments better than them? So what sort of deterrence does it have if we change a punishment from 2 years imprisonment to 5 years imprisonment when nobody is looking up this info before committing a crime?
These people aren't calling their lawyers that they have on retainer to weigh up the cost-benefit analysis of committing a crime before they do it. Get real.
Even absurd shit like being outraged that a homeless person had a smartphone and indulging in such lavishness is why they're homeless etc etc
If I was homeless I'd want to have a means to make phonecalls in case of emergency, to stay in contact with loved ones, to record important dates and to have access to directions, to be able to access information available on the internet, and to have the potential for getting a job.
How much does an outdated, shitty smartphone sell for second-hand?
How many nights in a motel is that going to get you? And then what? Go back out onto the streets after a night or two except without the ability to easily communicate and access information? Lol, okay.
That's not going to be enough money to pay for the cost of bond on rental accommodation. How far do you think $75 from a second-hand phone is going to get a homeless person? Next are you gonna complain that they've spent money on a pair of shoes rather than putting that cash towards paying for a single day's worth of rent?
All of these arguments are fine but they're unlikely to sway opinion very much unless you're dealing with a young person. The reason why I have them in my arsenal is because I want to turn every snide political commentary into an uncomfortable situation where their Fox News-tier received wisdom is rebutted by well thought out positions that they are unable to respond to by regurgitating cheap talking points.
I basically create an aura of deterrence around me for the people I have to deal with, like some sort of Pavlovian conditioning. If you're going to talk bullshit, I'm going to make it uncomfortable for you. I'm not trying to convince you or to prove that I'm right/you're wrong or anything like that. I'm just going to train you to shut the fuck up and keep your stupid opinions to yourself so that my mental health isn't compromised because you took it upon yourself to opine about topics that you don't know shit about.
Yes, I'm an asshole.
No, I don't hand out unsolicited political prescriptions to people in my real life. If you don't like it when I "get political" that's fine, I don't want to talk politics with you and I'm going to make it so you don't want to talk politics around me either. If you're going to make me uncomfortable then I'm going to make it at least as uncomfortable for you until you are ready to tap out. And we can go through this as many times as you need to before you learn your lesson.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I definitely agree with everything here and have used some of these counter arguments before. It definitely shuts some people up and makes them think twice about sharing their opinions with me at least. It can be a difficult thing to navigate especially when you have to work together with these people everyday.
Is it because their views are essentially the status quo already and they have just fully internalised the capitalist propeganda?
That's pretty close imo. I'd just add that most of them have never set foot outside of capitalist propaganda
Every part of their media diet is bourgeois media, because naturally the owning class owns that too. The views presented to them with any degree of fidelity are necessarily non-threatening to bourgeois rule, and they make up the range of views that people feel are normal. Conservative bile is acceptable, and liberal outlets for empathy such as charity and saying to
are tooMeanwhile, in much of the west including the US, it has been outright illegal in recent history to be left-wing. Even now that it isn't explicitly illegal in the US, we have Stop Cop City protesters being charged as an anarchist terrorist conspiracy
My reductive answer is because their beliefs cultivate such a deep alienation and incongruity with observable reality that they have to constantly affirm their beliefs and reassure themselves by saying their shit aloud. Edit: the alienation part is of particular importance because it compels them to involve other people by sharing their bullshit with others in a 'testing the waters' format.
I think there is truth to this, that it is a sort of reality-testing people do when they are heavily propagandized, particularly when it seems contradictory to their other beliefs about themselves like "I am a good person" or "I am not racist and treat everyone fairly" or "people like me, unless they are bad".
But I think that there is another element to this, and that is that a lot of right-wing propaganda (in the US at least) has often been couched in a type of anti-intellectualism that is built on a sort of rural-working-class-trickster aesthetic, chiefly as an antidote to the smug liberalism of the more "cosmopolitan" democratic party. It is all bullshit, but I think the appeal is really, "Those know-it-alls are actually the real dumb-asses*"
You can see this in the work place in the first world, you are constantly encountering bullshit, so this lends itself to the same style of wit. Your bosses are all making dumb decisions, and even though all of those decisions have been a direct result of the profit-motive and the law of value, people in the US have been told that the law of value is actually an "invisible hand of the market" that always makes the objectively good decision for the betterment of everyone. Everything is on its head, and so instead of blaming the logic of markets you have people blaming their boss instead, because they hate their boss. They just identify their boss with smug liberals instead of a product of capitalism, so their fellow co-workers are either on the same page or they are smug liberals also.
I live in a smaller city with a large rural population so I have definitely experienced the reactionary behavior you're describing. There is often a hostile attitude to the big cities and their perceived liberal smugness. I've often heard opinions that the big city libs don't "live in the real world" and think that they hate the rural working class people. They see liberal solutions as too complicated and lacking "common sense".
There is definitely a generally positive attitude when I present left ideas but they will often dismiss that as idealistic or not possible. Although that's a result of decades on anti-communist propaganda.
I once had a very conservative coworker accuse me of successfully brainwashing her, since she had an encounter with a minimum wage worker and felt sorry.
My coworker claimed she had to listen to Joel Osteen to fix her brain after talking with me
I think about this too, and i keep changing my mind about the social function their brains are performing but currently i believe it is them checking that the things they are saying are the 'correct' beliefs by sounding off what they heard as the truth and checking their worldviews veracity in the very scientific way we all do. By running it by their peers to see if it is ok. I don't even think it's aggressive, like pushing, It's a fishing expedition because they're not sure they believe it fully yet.
Those raised in religious households do this the most. It pretty much goes in line with how Evangelicals behave about spreading their bullshit and taking any pushback as the sign of a victim fighting against the hordes for what's right.
I've definitely had mixed experiences with this but I'm not from the US and most of the religious people I've known haven't been evangelicals. There's some religious workmates and friends I've had which had been probably the most kind in regards to disenfranchised people. They would engage in stuff like food banks for the homeless, raise funds towards helping the disabled, usually through their church or mosque etc. Although many still had reductive views around the rainbow community and I guess a lot of their beliefs don't challange the fundamental structure causing the suffering in the first place.
In the face of proletarianization and capitalist decay, the working class has a few options. 1) Be “apolitical” due to alienation; 2) be liberal (includes both Democrats and Republicans in US) and try to fix problems through reform and electoralism; 3) be anticapitalist, look beyond manifestations toward root cause in capitalist contradiction; 4) be reactionary/fascist, agree with the anticapitalists that there are fundamental problems with society, but conclude it’s not capitalist enough.
For as evil as fascists are, they at least understand their personal material conditions are fucked, they are more honest to themselves about their reality compared with liberals, and are willing to make radical changes to fix it. The problem of course is “only” in the analysis and who is scapegoated…
…but sometimes it’s almost preferable to deal with someone who is wrong theoretically but at least accepts there is a problem. The frustrating thing about liberals is they don’t accept there is a problem. To the liberal there is no such thing as a systemic problem because capitalism is ideal according to laws of economics and of human nature, and history ended a long time ago.
Liberals are relatively quieter than the true right-wingers because liberals are largely already in power, they’re not radical, they believe in reform.
I was going to add, noting that I am not white passing so I don't think they feel confident "opening up" around me. My guess was that they feel the spaces and places belong to them but were somehow swindled away from them. Their forefather's vision was subverted so all the problems are an injustice and no moral, upstanding person could oppose their views. Dissent comes from a place of slimy institutions brainwashing children, sinister forces are the cause of violence, and their upstanding moral character is what sets them apart. In the same way it's hard for a communist to mask their compassion for their fellow comrade, it could be hard for a conservative to tolerate dissent from their status quo.
