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?
I admit I haven't tried it at the local dem party office, but a lot of libs seem pretty willing to nationalize big tech companies if you talk about the level of public power they have as platforms of communication. You'd be surprised how agreeable they can be if you lay out some logical benefits. Libs slurp up "logic" like crazy.
I think it's very easy to convince an educated liberal of the material benefits of progressive, if not transitional or revolutionary policies such as public and democratic control of industry. The obstacle these people can't get past is the question of their feasibility. Even the most carefully-crafted and scientifically-devised revolutionary Marxist program for such a person will at first glance appear to be every bit as utopian as the most ultraleft anarchist/radlib political demands.
A well-meaning educated liberal technocrat might say something to the effect of:
The problem a good conscientious educated progressive has, is that their ability to conceive of what's possible is bounded by capitalist realism. For this person it's not a matter of whether should XYZ be done, but whether it can be done. And if we suppose this person is familiar with the history of attempted socialist and communist revolutions, they will immediately cite the inevitable capitalist retaliation (capital flight; trade sanctions; reactionary coups/counterrevolutions) as an inevitable result of trying to accomplish policies outside of what capitalists will allow.
They might not realize it's the result of retaliation by international capitalists - they may understand that dispossessing capitalists or simply raising their taxes too high is an inevitable recipe for poverty - but may have been taught by some university economist that such poverty is a natural reaction to attempting socialist policies like expropriation of industry from private capitalist ownership, every bit as natural as a Jenga tower collapsing under the force of gravity when the bottom pieces are removed. These people have to be shown that this is the result of human behavior rather than the "natural" forces of the market. They have to be able to figure out that capitalist wealth isn't all but fucking untouchable and completely out of reach.
Often this doesn't happen until immiseration happens to them, or if they're fortunate enough to directly observe their preconceived understanding of what's possible completely fall apart in front of their face, in the course of witnessing or participating in people's struggles, e.g. the BLM protests last year which brought the question of police defunding into the Overton window. A lot of bullshit-unlearning has got to happen, and bearing witness to hard-won partial successes resulting from active working-class struggle, especially that might have been previously inconceivable according to the prior model of what's "politically feasible", that can force such a person to at least begin to re-examine their (not entirely conscious) assumptions about what's economically or politically possible.