Spent last night arguing with my liberal friends about Dems failing to pass min wage. Argued from the center left. Said Dem leadership needs to get its shit together and start getting the party in line. Otherwise theyre getting bodied in 2022 and never getting back in. They flipped out on me. Saying I was advocating for them to be just like Trump and the republicans.
Ive genuinely given up on them. I just dont get it. I dont know what to do. We're all queer and disabled. One of them constantly goes to protests and participates in her community. This wasn't even one of my hard left points. Like how the Dems are all psychos. Or the entire system is rigged. It was a genuine good faith argument about how the Dems need to change or we're gonna die. Im at a loss. How can you fix this?
It takes a long time to change most people's ideology. Most people don't even know what they think, they never actually examine their own ideology. Getting someone to even stop and say 'Why do I think this way?' is a win.
For the politically active, ideology is wrapped up into their being, and by attacking their ideology you are attacking them personally. Or at least that is how it feels for thrm. You just gotta go slow. I tried convincing my Hilldawg friends/family in one go to vote Sanders and that was a total failure. But they are being slowly radicalized and talking shit about capitalism.
You can't bombard people with negative energy. My family always say 'Biden is really surprising me and doing good stuff'. Instead of instantly telling them why they're wrong, I try and say 'Ya he's doing some really good stuff, and if he just did this little bit more it would be so much better.'
Like the stimulus only lasting for a year - I mean how fucking ridiculous is that? Infuriating just thinking about it. 'We're gonna make people not miserable for only one year. Then it's back to soul crushing poverty'. Showing they have the ability to lift people out of poverty whenever they want but limiting it to a year is truly psychotic. But saying this to libs will just turn make them ignore you. You gotta make it sound like you have some skin in the game.
I have found precisely the opposite, but only with one topic, and making it very clear just how bad it is going to be.
Climate Change.
I've found the opposite with climate change. It is too big for a lot of people to comprehend and the measures a sufficient climate policy would need to take are too radical for them to imagine. All their lives they have been told that the scope of politics is to make small adjustments to the status quo and now you're telling them that everything will change. This makes them easy targets of climate deniers who offer them an easy excuse to ignore climate change either by claiming it is all a hoax or the far more incidious form of denialism where totally insufficient measures like a mild emissions tax and subsidies for electric cars are presented as a real solution to the crisis.
I dont think youre really explaining how much climate change is really going to fuck things then. You should read up on the Permian Extinction and really try to burn the image of the world portrayed as that into your speaking. It is a hard (and I hate this term) black pill that has to be swallowed when done this way. Like its not just that 50% of species or however many fungible terms humans have created to categorize the world die, its 99% of all individual life will perish if global warming continues, and the only actionable moment for doing anything to considerably stop that was 10 years ago, we have to be violent, now, or never.
Fun fact, by the time I had come to fully understand the material implications of my old neoliberal beliefs, I ended up drawing revolutionary conclusions and becoming a Marxist within a year. Bernie and Trump (not to mention experiencing gentrification and talking to working-class people) had a bit to do with that, but when you successfully compel a working-class liberal to look at the foundation of their beliefs, to make them recognize what compromises they're making, that's laying the groundwork for a later epiphany.
Effective Marxists can plant seeds in people's heads, including those of currently ideologically-committed people who wouldn't even conceive of drawing similar conclusions or taking revolutionary politics seriously.
deleted by creator
Bernie leaned hard on this approach and the results were underwhelming. I'm not convinced we should rely on it going forward. Some people really do just want to grill, or are so alienated from politics that they're never going to reliably do even minimal things like voting, or will talk your ear off about politics but never actually participate in anything.
The people most likely to be politically active are the ones who are already politically active. There are plenty of unenthusiastic Democrats out there who can be radicalized -- most people here are radicalized libs -- and we'll have more luck focusing on them.