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.
Young/old divide.
A young person from a conservative family flips easier than a young person from a liberal family.
An adult middle-aged conservative is terminally brainwormed.
Big thing I find is also how much propoganda they subject themselves to. You wont radicalize anyone if they are die hard fans of Maddow or Tucker Carlson. They'll just get sheep dogged back into the fold when they can learn a talking point about any issue.
Yeah it's important to push people onto communities and spaces where they will continue to receive a further collective education. This has been a big part of why I push people onto ANY leftist spaces. My interaction with a person does not exist in a vacuum, it exists on a timeline of many other interactions that other leftists will have with that person and we should be facilitating the occurrence of those further interactions.
We must zoom out from our own interactions and consider them in the context of a whole. A liberal is not turned into a communist by one person, conversation or interaction. They are turned by a collective effort over a period of time.
Disrupting the media bubble that they currently receive and replacing it with socialist media spaces is essential.
In my experiences, no. There are more brainworms to work through with chuds. I think it's easy to hate liberals more when you become a leftist. They position themselves as the moral and caring side, but in reality they offer little material support to those who need it most. That being said, many liberals will never have the same base level of bigotry a chud has. A little theory and a some one on one conversations can go a long way with libs
Yeah, I think it often comes down to why they're against leftism. The chuds are often so full of confused racism and bigotry and that's their entire reason. Some kind of grand conspiracy and racial panic. Liberals think they can get to a point of outsmarting capitalism, that all it takes is a few tweaks here and there and the system will be perfect forever. Since the chuds are coming from a position of incoherent nonsense, it can sometimes be easy to get them into at least something like unionizing or mutual aid, or that can be incredibly difficult. Who knows.
I'm biased though because every liberal I've known has been a professional class college educated type who has at least some awareness of what leftists believe so they've made a conscious decision to remain a liberal. Conservatives I've met usually don't make a distinction nor do they believe there's anything more complicated politically than "good christian conservative white Americans" versus "everything I don't like."
Conservatives are harder to convince, but it's more likely to "stick" if you get through to them.
2022 Liberals are defined by their willingness to trust the media and popular institutions, so even if they appear to agree with you, even claim to "want the same thing", they are often unreachable because anything you get through to them is subject to being done away in an instant once MSNBC and BreadTube says it's bad, helps the GOP etc.
Compare and contrast what happens when Trump talks about v**ines and Bernie talking about Israel. Trump's fans boo him when he says something they all oppose, Bernie's fans make excuses.
Radlibs are liberals, and likely the easiest of any group to radicalize.
There is a subset of right wingers who aren't especially bigoted and are just as pro-worker and furious about elites as leftists are, but just have incoherent views. This group probably is more easy to radicalize than your average blue MAGA type.
I think the problem is neither liberals nor conservatives are monovalent groups - there are many flavours of each, and their bell curves of ease-of-radicalization overlap. But IMO radlibs are the easiest, as they're likely already familiar with a lot of the horrors.
Radlibs also aren't a homogenous group, because some of them sit there out of a lack of awareness that further left options exist. Then others are aware and become incredibly bizarre, throwing out the word tankie and siding with imperialism deliberately
Then others are aware and become incredibly bizarre, throwing out the word tankie and siding with imperialism deliberately
So most of :reddit-logo: then
:deeper-sadness:
I don't even know anymore. It depends on which state you're in and the person's race, class, and gender. Conservatives in New York, Texas, Urban Florida, California? Absolutely not. Conservatives in Michigan, Ohio, etc.? Depends on if they're rich or poor. Conservatives in West Virginia? Generally, yes.
There are chuds who hate liberals, and chuds who love racism. There is hope for the former
Wow. That´s... accurate. This hit´s the nail on its head when it comes to my own experience as well actually.
Every lefto I know was a liberal earlier in their life, so I'm gonna say from experience that no it's not easier to convert conservatives.
same, all my close high school friends and I were obama libs and now we stan xi jinping :xi-god-emperor:
I made the journey from neocon to Obama lib to Bernie lib to ML lib, so there's that
This might be geographic, because of the handful of people I've swayed over, all of them were conservatives, but that's probably just because conservatives comprise 95% of people where I grew up
Most of my experience in trying to turn people was during the two times I tried unionizing my workplace. I don't have a lot of experience elsewhere.
In that regard, there was a complete 100% split between conservatives and liberals that depended entirely on if they went to college and if had more job prospects. The liberals went to college and were much less receptive to unionizing, since they thought it was unnecessary. The conservatives are of course full of absolute conspiracy brainworms and ambient racism, however they were far more receptive to the unionizing effort. A lot of them had never even heard of a union before. The libs were aware of what I was talking about and without fail every single one of them realized it would have made their ascension to management more difficult. Ultimately, one of the liberal types who was on board blamed the failure to unionize on "stupid people," who were supposedly too uneducated to know what was good for them. One of the conservatives blamed it directly on the boss and a hostile workplace.
This isn't to say I think conservatives are more easily swayed. It came down to a matter of class distinction. The conservatives viewed themselves as workers first and foremost, whereas the liberals I knew were already ideologically associating with upper management. My rural chud idiot relatives who scream about Qanon and great replacement see themselves not as workers, but divinely powered holy crusaders protecting America from communist hordes, so I doubt I could get anything across to them, including unions. Doesn't help a lot of them are small business owning dipshits too.
Honestly I haven't met very many typical American liberals. There weren't a lot where I grew up and I'm kind of antisocial now. My impression is they're a complete wildcard, because they're generally either a liberal out of confusion or they know how the sausage is made and are liberals at some core level. I think maybe turning people depends on how ideologically committed they are. Most people in America who identify as one political stream or another just do so because that's what their friends and family are, they often haven't thought very hard about it.
This rich liberal coworker told me “okay we get it. You love unions.” His parents own rental properties in LA and Lake Tahoe. I should have knocked him out.
I think I despise people who grew up with rich parents more than anyone else, if they don't break out of their ideology that is. It's like the worst aspects of general lib/chud shit mixed with infuriating smugness. They're so often reprehensible on both an ideological and personal level.
It’s the smugness and lack of compassion toward anyone that I can’t stand.
Hard disagree, a good number of chuds I know believe being trans is a sin, just to pick one issue. They eventually stopped making transphobic comments around me but they still do it in a different chat. One person/"friend" said he would get fired before he would be forced to use someone's correct pronouns. You might be able to turn these people Nazbol but that's not progress. They may eventually come around but that's on them.
Meanwhile I have two lib friends I'm working on who are close to getting it. They're not even hardcore against socialism, they just don't think our problems as a country and planet are serious enough and that socialism isn't a practical option (and since they're only looking at change via electoralism, can't say I disagree there.)
I guess we have very different crowds then. I live in europe where practically everyone around me is leaving the church right now. Liberal or conservative, or even my old catholic teacher is without confession now. And when it comes to intenet interaction, I rarely ever see people arguing from a religious point of view. So in that sense, I have very little issue conversing with those considered conservative here. I´ve never met any truly religious crazy person except maybe one, the ex-friend of a cousin, and I only found out because they broke up over his evangelicalism fueled anti-vax bs.
I totally get you. I wouldn´t even know how to talk to a cultist on social issues like they seem to be relatively common in the US.
Ah yes, very different social contexts between the US and Europe, for sure. The settler colonial mindset here is very powerful, especially among white chuds.
You made a mistake not mentioning that you were talking about eroupe in the post. As you just mentioned this is a completely different question entirely in burgerland which when asked like that is usually a hard lol no.
I live in europe
This is a mostly US based site. You are totally right that in the rest of the world, conservatives are more likely to align with working class views.
As I said it´s all anecdotal for me.
And of course you will get a lot of liberals to say this is bad and that is bad, because they are fundamentally closer to the left in terms of ideals. What I say is, that i´ve yet to see any of them actually turn radical. To actually want to archive meaningful change that can´t come through voting and following the rules laid out by the rigged system.
Uneducated liberals are either complete ghouls who don't actually care about how fucked up they are and only care about themselves, or are brainwashed idiots who panic when presented with anything slightly unusual. I mean brainwashed to the point they think the only way to learn a skill is to do it as a job or go to school and pay money for it. The kind that take the requirements on a job application at face value and will try and snitch on people for working around the contradictory rules and requirements at work.
Among younger people, nearly the only difference I see between conservatives and liberals are cultural things that aren't that important. Most younger "conservatives" are actually just fascists.
You have to be brainwashed to the point of being able to have the truth in front of you and not be able to see it, or have some material stake in it to not see that shit is broken and collapsing. Being a liberal in the modern day is wearing a blindfold.
If by liberals you mean people ideologically committed to liberalism or a liberal party, then maybe. If you mean apolitical people with liberal leanings then no.
I've had more luck converting bogans in Australia (chuds?) than labour voters (our libs).
For us, class and being a bogan are quite heavily linked. The cast majority of these people, my own family included (and me at a younger age) bought into the idea that we were being oppressed by Chinese investment / Muslim immigrants / sexual predators from India etc. As far as even thinking that Indiginous Australians were somehow better off because of 'all the government support they get'.
Mention any of these topics at a train station in n Melbourne's suburbs, or a bus stop in Hobart, and you'll get a chorus of agreement. White, lower class people in Australia have been thoroughly tricked.
20 years on from being a fucking wanker and Incan have conversations with these people now. I can acknowledge their struggle and if we talk long enough I can lead them to recognising class, not race, as the thing that divides us. They can independently come to the realisation that this division is on purposez that it only serves those in power. Everyone from that background has been dogged before and the pure hatred when they realise that it was those in power, those with capital, that have been digging us all along and putting us against each other is so great.
It doesn't always work, it often takes a long time. Just planting these seeds grows a tree in these people's minds though. They radicalise themselves from there, they start to see how capitalists play tricks all around them. Far stronger than a labour voters who just thinks we need to change a suit, or a greenie who thinks we just need to play the political game long enough these bogans are more than willing to see the illusion of capitalist freedom for what it is.
I've converted family, I've had long conversations with strangers, I even once had a heart to heart with a bloke who tried to mug me over a durry. They all recognised it.
I've had multiple week conversations with evidence and sources with Reddit tier colleagues and 'friends' who remain staunchly against communism and just keep taking about fucking Nordic countries and it kills me every time.
TL;DR - you can turn a bogan because even if they are wrong as hell about the causes, at least they recognise that they're being fucked by someone. They just need to be pointed in the right direction. A lib? They're too comfortable to change.
P.S. writing this late after a long day on a mobile phone, sorry if it's a ramble.
I feel it. I had soo many endless conversations with a lib friend and he still thinks I shoud get shot for my views (he says it 'jokingly' but I know there is truth to it). Because I´m pretty open about wanting to destroy the corporate systems that he as a master student wants to rise in
