If you ever feel hopeless, just remember that in the course of time barely longer than a few years things have gone from a situation where being critical of the system and using the term capitalism would get you derision and you'd be marked as some sort of radical communist and people would shut off to your message while hurling red scare bullshit at you.
These days everyone shits on things like capitalism and imperialism.
They even name it directly.
The best part of it is that what used to signify very specific in-group values is now so widespread that it's incredibly common to find average "I hate the system" sentiment that is framed by using terms like capitalism.
Average people do not use the term "rat race" anymore, unless they are boomers. People just call it out directly. People rarely use terms like "the 1%" unless they're turbolibs like AOC who are trying to euphemise their message to garner votes.
Out in the wild, I have trouble identifying who is genuinely based and a comrade these days because everyone is out there openly shitting on capitalism directly on the regular. It's like the irl version of queerbaiting that happens in the media except it's comradebaiting and instead of it having cynical motivations it's really, really encouraging.
This stuff is completely normalised these days. Over the course of a few short decades the mainstream discourse has gone from "Globalisation bad" to "The 1% is bad" to "Actually it's just capitalism and it plain sucks".
This isn't some ephemeral fashion trend either - this is something that has gradually gathered momentum and it's a long-standing undercurrent in society.
If this can happen with a dirty word like capitalism or socialism, where decades upon decades of red scare indoctrination can simply be swept away in a matter of years, then take heart because it means that change is possible and that it's happening in real-time. The same thing is happening with decades of post-9/11 islamaphobia - I know it's part of discourse in places like this one to use terms like inshallah, mashallah, and alhamdulillah but this is not the only pocket of the world where Arab and Muslim cultures are being embraced.
Things are changing very rapidly and there's no sign of this pace letting up.
¡Venceremos! 💪
You are making the mistake in thinking that just because you were one of the minority of libs who became radicalized and turned left, it would also mean that every lib could have the same experience and trajectory as yours.
History has proven again and again that this is false. The vast majority of German liberals allowed Nazism to take hold of the country in silence. They were probably disgusted by the brutality of the fascists, and maybe even reacted emphatically with how many communists, socialists and social democrats were killed, but at the end of the day, getting rid of communist ideology and preventing it from taking root in their country were far more preferable for the liberals.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how many people are anti-capitalists in the country or how many people had been radicalized by the recent events. The only way to prevail is through having strong organized left wing movements, without which all of these protests energy will be channeled down the drain, and fascist violence will once again save the day for the capitalist ruling class.
Without an organized left in the country, the movement is certainly doomed to fail.
Sure, but you can only have such a movement if millions of people who aren't currently leftists become leftists. So the questions become:
Every time we have a "how did you become a leftist?" thread we find that a bunch of people had a lib phase before finding their way left. Tons of people also cite libs like Bernie as a major factor in their journey. There's a real pipeline there, and if we're saying that's not enough, then where else are we getting the people we need?
As a side note, we place way too much weight on the predictive value of Germany in the 20s and 30s. There are similarities and lessons to be learned, but the differences between that situation and the imperial core of today are almost too many to mention.