I fucking hate living here. The culture is poison. The economy is a fucking disaster. The education is designed to leave a huge portion of the country illiterate. Every single atom of it is white supremacist. The land is all stolen. The capitalists are completely above the law. Fuck cars. Fuck America,
This is a risky move because you can easily end up confirming and supporting the audience's fascist beliefs. Always, always, always work in a lefty spin on why those actors are destructive and how things should be fixed.
My big thing is to focus on working class internationalism, most chuds I've met will either be receptive or suddenly be on the defensive and insecure trying to explain why an international movement against the ruling class is bad and only "real Americans" can save the world from the elite they vaguely recognize as the enemy. At that point it's easy to push them to reveal their mask off fascism and they will get embarrassed and stop talking.
That's pretty awesome, I've never tried that tactic. What do you usually lead with?
Start by quickly emphasizing the existence of a global elite/ruling class, which most will agree with, and then explain why a global elite requires a global response that will involve every worker. You can even call them the liberal elite and say we'll need everyone, from every country, to organize and take down the liberal elite. At this point I'll explain that the source of the elite's power is their control of multinational corporations and make the case for democracy in the workplace (can even be framed in Jeffersonian "consent of the governed" language) and bring it back to why it needs to be an international movement or else we're just making American citizens the new global elite to lord over the rest of the world. If they are ok with that outcome, they're a fascist.
That's the only move you have if you want any chance to actually get to people.
If your goal is to make people agree with you, then step one is finding common ground and agreeing with them on something. You can't start with confrontation and debate people into doing something they don't want to do, that's not how real world works.
Obviously some of their opinions are shit, I'm not telling you to agree on everything. I'm just saying focus on the things you already agree on. I'm sure you can find plenty of things to disagree about even between the left, name more iconic duo than leftism and infighting. That's why it's important to talk about the things you agree on.
That can only work for a long-term engagement, though. Confirming a budding fascist's biases and then not seeing them again is only a 100% bad thing. It would be infinitely better to state a socialist position clearly and plainly, though that doesn't mean announcing death to America lol. Can just talk about how bosses don't actually work 10X harder than workers and workers should have more say over how the business runs, for example.
If it's a co-worker you're going to talk to for months, maybe you could lead with talking about "the swamp", but you're gonna have to find a way to turn the corner from Trump to socialism.
the swamp was just an example to use instead of usa, I didn't mean to always open with specifically the swamp
“Oh, I don’t know about that” is a far more productive disagreement than actually confronting whatever horseshit they’re saying, it lets you segue into more nuanced discussion of issues where you cloak explicitly left politics in a veneer of “common sense” rhetoric.
If you can cite the saints and canon of US civil religion (founding fathers, originating documents like the constitution, Jesus, that sort of thing) as justification for your position it’s like arguing on easy mode and they’ll agree with almost anything you say.