I know it isn't a single a-ha! moment for most people, but there must have been something that flipped the switch that informed your views into coming to understand that this country is the barbarism route of Luxemburg's Socialism or Barbarism.
For me it was the Iraq War, and the Michael Moore documentary Sicko that pushed me onto that intellectual and emotional understanding.
I think it depends how old you are. Whatever fucked up shit was going on when you were 15-25. America makes new disillusionment material all the time...
For me it was the Iraq war under Bush and then the bank bailouts under Obama. Made me question if we’re the baddies both abroad and at home, under both parties, who is this system actually designed to serve?
Yeah there's a pretty constant barrage of clearly evil shit, so it just matters which one happened when you were old enough to notice.
Yeah, that's what did it. Stories about soldiers violating children in front of their parents (although to my knowledge unconfirmed) really just shook me , in addition to the Abu Graihb revelations.
Just a descent into disillusionment and disgust from there.
there was this correspondents dinner , where bush was searching the white house to find the Weapons of Mass Destruction...
The Audience the "who is who " of the media , did find the joke hilaroius ....
Thats when i knew , it was a single thing....
Might be what you're thinking of
Remarkably brazen (and the Dems in that article of course only care about American dead)
It was Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast episode titled "American Peril". That one covers how the people of Cuba wanted independence from Spain and started a war of independence. So the US helped out (the Spanish American War) only to turn around and fight the rebels once the Spanish were out and take over ourselves (Dan points out the US coveted Cuba going back to at least the founding fathers, so of course taking over was the plan all along). The episode doesn't get into Batista or Castro, it stops at Teddy Roosevelt. And Dan isn't a leftist, but that was enough to get me to question what I'd learned about US history to that point. Because growing up all I'd ever been taught about the Spanish American War was that the USS Maine was blown up so we fought a war. Not the truth, that it was a war of colonial expansion that just so happened to coincide with the closing of the frontier.
Trayvon’s murder and the reaction of the white populace to it made me ill. Mike Brown’s murder and the events in Ferguson and watching it happen again fully jokerfied me
Yes, you described it perfectly. I was young, just starting to vote and vaguely liberal in a politically illiterate sense, I viewed Obama as a hero and a beacon of progress. Ferguson shattered all of my illusions.
I had a high school history class about the arab Israeli conflict and walked away with a really bitter taste in my mouth about Israel and America.
Also, I wanted to do a research paper about substance abuse and the statistics I came across were only in terms of lost productivity for workers who had to miss work to go to rehab. I thought it was gross.
As a ~12 year old, watching some random person's music video to a punk song with extremely brutal images of the Iraq War (child with half their head blown off is the one that I still see when I close my eyes).
I mean really it's continuous mini realisations - I don't even live in the US anymore but US propaganda is strong and it's hard to kill the US imperialist in your head lol. The feeling that my high school was racially segregated in a way that my elementary school wasn't. The family history of a friend of mine, whose parents were refugees - his mom fled American bombs in one country and his dad in another :') Seeing American hypocrisy re how they condemned state violence at e.g. the Maidan and then used similar or worse state violence at Standing Rock and Ferguson. Etc etc.
Around 2015 I was a recovering AnCap who fell back into vague South Park Liberalism / Libertarianism. Seeing the open bloodthirst of Trump's election campaign (and the base of /r/the_donald specifically) kinda jump-started the empathy center of my brain. It was the first time in a long time I remembered "Oh, other people exist and don't seem to be having the same experiences as me... I should look into that...". Basically the vitriol and garishness of the Right under Trump helped me check my privilege for the first time.
Then, Trump getting elected single-handedly convinced me American Exceptionalism couldn't be more of a sham and Capitalism couldn't be less of a meritocracy. I suddenly saw the rot, I could see the direction every part of this country and planet was hurtling toward and it looked like Children of Men at best... So I was radicalized and disillusioned then and there. The US wasn't "an ambitious egalitarian experiment with some forgivable mistakes", it was just a mass-slaughtering machine sucking the life out of everything around us. There was no Master Plan, there were no Great Men, there wasn't even an Illuminati, the problems weren't clandestine they were right in front of us, banal and broad as daylight. For the first time, I realized institutions weren't coming to save us, institutions I had assumed were fucking magic and full of Aaron Sorkin type specialists with their hands on the rudder. NOPE. That priviledged as I am, I had more common with sweatshop workers in Indonesia than I did with my employers. I realized nobody was coming to save us. (And with Bernie out of the picture, now it's safe to say nobody is coming to save us. I've lost any hope he could have anyway.)
Was ready to be radicalized, and luckily, took an American History from Black Perspective course shortly after. Went from "We need to restore America to when it was good, to stop the Make America Great Again people!" to "America has literally never been good. There is no political party demanding Leftward change except that one they outlawed. It's all a sham, and everything I have to my name was earned by dice rolls on top of a mountain of skeletons..."
Suddenly, it was like I could see the Matrix code. Every thing I was politically confused about was explainable with "Does this help the property-owning class make more money? That's why it do." Every shitty thing at work, every shitty thing outside, every shitty thing happening from top to bottom. "It's for the property-owning class. It's all being done for them."
Having the most soul-crushing job on Earth at the time helped a lot. I was already thinking "Why is some trust fund baby in a suit the owner of everything a thousand engineers and technicians work on? How does this guy own this building if he's never even set foot in it? Why is he in charge of anything at all?" well before I read Marx.
A harry potter themed explanation on the shortcomings of Liberalism helped a lot.
That Socialism for Dummies video by Richard Wolff helped a lot too.
A freaking civic option's flavortext in a Stellaris mod helped too. "Socialist Economy: The means of production are owned by the workers who use them. If you don't use it, you can't profit from it." That was my first "Oh, that's what Socialism is? That sounds ... great. Wait..." moment.
Just seeing the differences between Liberals and any kind of Red in Kaiserreich helped too. "Sexual, Racial, and Economic Equality, Worker Co-Ops, and abolishing Landlordism ... versus ... minor banking reforms and feel-good campaigns."
A picture of world leaders all sitting on toilets pooping helped shatter that weird Great Man idea I was raised on. Seeing a queen with her granny panties down as she stares listlessly at the toilet paper roll is ... well it helped remind me they're just human beings in fancy suits. They aren't geniuses from a crop of superhuman elites, they're just people doing what makes the most sense at that point in time for them.
Took about a month from learning the correct definition of Socialism for the first time in my life to realizing I was a goddamn Red.
___
A harry potter themed explanation on the shortcomings of Liberalism helped a lot.
This could be really good for using with libs. Got a link?
Driving down the beautiful highways they built for the tourists and peeking down the ravine to see overgrown rusted out trailer parks with only one grocery store in 10 miles is wild.
The urban centers are usually pretty well built up, but even 20 miles outside of town is just nothing.
Seeing my parents constantly stressed over bills and shit while they're also pulling 10+ hr shifts everyday. That pretty much killed the meritocracy idea for me, which in turn makes the whole "American Dream" come across as nonsense.
Even when I was a kid I remember seeing a homeless person on every street. Couldn't walk anywhere in town without seeing them everywhere. Even my stupid shitlib child brain knew that something was obviously very wrong
Fun fact, I was walking in a city neighborhood with friends many years back and they had to explicitly tell me not to give homeless and poor people on the street bits of spare money from my wallet when they begged for change, because I almost always coughed something up if my wallet wasn't empty. And I was a huge lib at the time. I was also very stingy when it came to spending on frivolous shit for myself.
I had a friend in high school whose church sent a group regularly to protest at The School of the Americas. I did some research into why and couldn't believe what I found. I think that what really did it for me was how long it had been going on--there was no room to try to make excuses for "isolated incidents" or whatever, the unfathomable inhumanity WAS the plan.
That led to realizing that the genocide and dispossession of the Native Americans was part of the same pattern, along with the enslavement of African Americans--there was no time or philosophy from the past to return to. The US was doing what it was built to do.
Sicko was easily Moore's most effective film in terms of piercing the veil. It dealt a massive blow to any perception of American exceptionalism I might have had before.
American exceptionalism has two meanings right? I see some people use it in the "America is exceptional" way and some people use it in the "America is always the exception to the rule" way.
Like "America is an exceptional country that can do no wrong" versus "x country is doing y, America is also doing y, but that's okay because America gets an exception"
I guess they kinda have the same effect on discourse, the first one is more of the nationalist/jingoist interpretation and the second is more of the rulebook lib interpretation.
In this case it's more like "America is capable of doing XYZ and since the US is among the best, that is close to the best any country can do" but then it turns out other countries are also effortlessly doing W which seemed impossible before but would be even better since it demonstrably was (and therefore the US couldn't possibly rank among the best).
I was sitting there dumbfounded, seeing Moore visit France and Cuba, seeing what I was missing in terms of easy, low/no-cost access to healthcare here in Yankeeland. After being told by the Republicans that the tradeoff was fucking death panels - which I would later learn was ironically a tremendous projection on the part of the reactionaries, considering the health insurance company which denies a claim for live-saving care or whose denial leads to medical bankruptcy is nothing if not a death panel.
