Seriously. I have no clue why these takes have been cropping up lately, and I don't know what kind of galaxy brain first came up with this brilliant strategy, but it is the most horrible idea I've ever encountered here in a long, long time. Probably ever.
It seems like the source of this is the appraisal that the democrats have become the party of elites and republicans are working class or some shit now. This is moronic and simply not factual. Not because the Democrats aren't the party of the elites. Just because the republicans are even more so. Why don't you look up who minorities overwhelmingly vote for? Why don't you look up the average income of republican voters compared to the dems?
What is true is that the republicans are doing well at rural areas. For this the blame seems to be solely on libs being annoying on twitter, or the dems ignoring rural areas. Both have some truth, especially the second, and it should be avoided at all costs. But no, this is not the only reason, there is also the fact that rural areas pretty much everywhere in the world and especially the developed world are conservative. Again, not just the US, this is EVERYWHERE and it's been like that for ages. The same thing was the case even when Marx was writing. There are reasons for that, and I'm not gonna go into them right now, but it is stupid to ignore that this always happens and to pretend like this is something unique and only because the dems aren't helping them much (and the republicans ostensibly are lol).
All this is to say that it is a good idea to not talk down to people there and to work to get them on our side, but it WILL be harder than it is in the cities, and most of the people there that vote red don't do so because they are secretly progressive but they just don't like dems looking down on them, but because they really are more conservative compared to people in cities, which - again- is true in most countries for rural areas, and these people would never, ever, EVER vote for some "socialist" trying to be elected as a republican. Even worse, everyone who is progressive would never, ever, EVER vote for you either because they wouldn't vote republican either, and the party itself would never, ever, ever, EVER let any kind of socialist run for office with them.
Like, there is also this silly idea that it would somehow be easier to get into the republicans than it is to get into the democrats. Yeah, lol, the party that is fervently and extremely vocally (and in a way that is integral to its function) anti-literally everything the left advocates for, is gonna give you an easy time "infiltrating". Um, no. Just no. It seems to hinge on a childish perception of politics that republicans are just really dumb and super clueless. They are not. When someone in politics does something bad, it's usually not because they are dumb.
The only result this could ever have is stain the left and alienate the only people who remotely care. At least 80% of the people who would ever care about the goals of the left are people who vote democrats. It is super important to reach out to the other 20%, but the worst possible way to do that is to go with the republicans, because not only will you lose 80% of the people who already might care, you will also have to pretend to be something that is much, much different to what you really are and you will end up just making a mockery of the left.
Please please please purge these ideas from your mind, they are so genuinely terrible that even considering them is destructive. It's like people on this sub (who according to the last survey were like, what, 90% liberal before they were radicalised?) are so pissed at their former liberal selves, at Biden and at the democrats that their political instincts are completely blinded and they end up having some genuinely shitty ideas that only lead to embarrassment. The republicans are not turning working class, they can't be pushed to the left. They're doing nothing that almost every conservative party ever hasn't done a million times before. The dems dropping the ball big time with Biden thus making a tiny percentage of minorities and working class people turn to republicans does not fucking mean anything, it just means Biden is even worse than Clinton at convincing these communities, a "shift" won't happen in the foreseeable future. The only way it ever could in the coming few years is if there was a world historic, unprecedented event that is just not foreseeable. Please reconsider your opinions if you are persuaded by these ideas, think why you are being persuaded by that.
That quote is Marx talking about the peasantry in early 19th century France. In the 200 years after that, the peasant class has been dispossessed and wiped out in all of the advanced capitalist nations. The people who live in the rural areas of the US are not peasants in the Marxist sense, they’re not like subsistence farmers. They are overwhelmingly wage laborers in the working class.
The historical memory/ideal of self sufficient living might play a role in rural conservatism in the US, but at this point capitalism produces its own gravediggers in both the town and country.
The argument made by guys like Matt is less that 19th century French peasants and 21st Century American rural/suburban workers do the same sort of labour, and more that both environments create the same barriers to class consciousness forming via alienation.
It goes back to that William Levitt quote about how no man in Levittown could be a Communist, and how that is true, albeit not in the way that Levitt imagined.
People become members of a particular Class only when they perceive themselves to be one, before that they are just individuals. Proletarians come to view themselves as a member of the working class via mutual intercourse with other Proles (typically in contexts other than labour): by walking to work with them, going to the same social clubs, etc. Through mutual intercourse people eventually realize that their interests, which they previously viewed as individual to them, are in fact common to those who live like them, ie: their class. Thus, Class Consciousness is formed when individuals recognize that their interests overlap. From this they are able to stop viewing their perceived problems in life as them v.s the world, but rather their class v.s another class.
19th Century French Peasants were mostly halted in this process because they almost never experienced mutual intercourse with other peasants, their days were spent on their own small holds, or in the Church (whose propaganda was overwhelmingly a barrier to the formation of Class Consciousness). This is the cause of their conservative outlook, they were alienated from their fellow Peasants.
Matt's argument is that 21st century Americans in the Suburbs, Rural areas, and most of the cities, are also prevented from mutual intercourse with members of their class, albeit in different ways. They drive to work instead of walking with coworkers, watch T.V instead of going to a Pub with other workers, and consume T.V/media which serves the same propagandist function as the Church did. In fact the scenarios of mutual intercourse you do are typically guided by an outside force; for example when attending a Football game with friends you are all orientated around the game, and intentionally exposed to propaganda there. Sure they may do mutual intercourse freely in certain scenarios for example in online communities (hey Chapo.Chat maybe counts) but such cases are the exception.
In both cases a lack of mutual intercourse prevents the recognition of a commonality of class interests, and thus they are alienated from one another, and more likely to adopt a Conservative outlook for the reasons which Marx discussed.
It's almost as if Marxism were not just a system of political-economic analysis, but also the basis of a millenarian religion too.