It´s just a hunch for me, but conservatives have already given up on the whole civility thing which I have yet to experience a single liberal abandon. When people talk about their journey towards leftism, it´s either they used to be chuds or they were never sold on capitalism to begin with.
This is just anecdotal and based on my scewed experience. Anyone got something to add or refute?
Every time I see a post like this I just go :jesse-wtf:
Granted I'm not the most sociable person but I have several conservative family members and their brains are all deeply fried from TV propaganda. Getting them to accept basic facts about reality is virtually impossible.
Tbh I think it's just the phenomenon where it's easier to hate someone if you can see a part of yourself or who you used to be in them. Since most of us used to be libs, we're more likely to find them frustrating because we can understand their mindset and see where it's wrong and it's like, "How do you not get this?" With conservatives the mindset is foreign enough that we can't see ourselves in it, so they can be less frustrating to some people. But it's because libs are more likely to go left that most of us are ex-libs and we find them frustrating and instinctively want to distance ourselves from them.
Like I guess it also depends on what you mean by "radicalize" like if you're just aiming for action without any sort of ideological understanding then maybe it's easier, but that seems dangerous imo.
The conservatives around where I grew up don't have too alien of a mindset for me to parse. I understand their rationale, but I also recognize that they're coming from a position of alienation and assumed white supremacy. They're products of the only experiences they've ever had, which is never leaving your hometown of 600 people and assuming white people are superior because only white people seem to have financial stability. They put the cart before the horse and guess their hometown is a reflection for the whole of reality, any suggestions otherwise are distortions of basic facts. Like I'm probably the only nonbinary person my relatives have ever met or heard of. They've also never met a black person who wasn't arrested every week. Everything they know about the wider world comes directly from FoxNews. A lot of them refuse to leave the county they were born in because they assume most places in the USA are full of riots every day.
Combine all of that with a general lack of compassion, unwillingness to believe anything about society could ever get better, and that life doesn't really matter because God will judge us for eternity soon. And that's really all their mindset is.
I think the other comment about conservatives who hates liberals had the right idea. If you already think there is something wrong with corporations controlling things and globalization then it is easier to direct their disdain to the actual problem than convincing a neolib there even is a problem
Most of the problems that my conservative family members care about are culture war BS. Very little of it has any material impact on their lives.
I guess maybe it's different for conservatives who are actually blue-collar, but I think the extent to which those things are associated is exaggerated by propaganda and aesthetics. I feel like the angle of, "conservatives are easier to reach because they're the real proles" both is influenced by and reinforces that propaganda, and I don't think it actually reflects reality.
I think it's pretty rare that libs "need to be convinced that there's a problem." Just, like, show them Last Week Tonight? Most libs are able to point to plenty of things that are actual problems, often it's just that they haven't really internalized the problems they've identified or followed them to their natural conclusions.
Liberals are generally aware of problems and believe the solution is mitigating the problem or hoping it will go away on it's own.
I agree with this