I hope this is relevant for this community, because I don’t know where else to post this. I’m honestly scared to post it anywhere else.
I live in Eastern Europe. I’m a university student, and recently, we got an American exchange student. They’re a very outspoken liberal.
A few days ago, we took them out with a few mates out for beers (they’re under 21, so they didn’t drink, even though you can here if you’re at least 18) to break the ice and make them feel comfortable. We got talking and because I’ve never been to the US, I asked them what I thought was an innocuous question. For some context, I’ve been a communist for a very long time, and joined the communist party the day I turned 18.
I basically asked them: Why would I vote for Harris? How would that improve the situation in the US and abroad? I’m not too familiar with her, but her politics don’t seem too appealing, especially her support for Israel and her incarceration background.
That made them launch into a screaming rant about how I’m a conservative for doubting her abilities and deserve to be jailed for wanting to infringe on the rights of women. There were a few more insults targeted at me for asking that question, I didn’t really understand them. The entire time, I was not even saying anything, I was honestly too shocked to react, but they just kept screaming until they got up and stormed out in a rage after calling me a Trump supporter, misogynist, and a fascist. My mates were equally confused. We tried to figure it out, but everyone is equally stumped.
I’ve been thinking about that entire situation for a couple days, and I’m so confused about their reaction. They even refuse to speak to me now.
What have I done wrong? Can someone please explain? ☹️ I really don’t understand what happened. We have liberals here of course, but even the worst ones never behave like this.
In the US there are no real politics. Average people have near zero power to affect any change in their country. So the concept of engaging in politics has shifted to solely a cultural identity.
Now even though they cannot effect their material conditions positively in this system, the people still driven to adopt these cultural identities still get something that matters to them out of their participation. One group gets to punish those they hate/satisfy their anger and hatred of libs (this is the republicans the more opening fascist party). The other group - the liberals - who tend to be more affluent, college educated, etc. vote for the democratic party to feel morally superior/assuage guilt for being affluent/college educated in the most unequal nation on earth.
Interrogating an American liberal on their positions regarding politics is to them an assualt on the foundation of their superior moral character - which is soley defined by “voting blue no matter who.” To call into question the lesser evil of the democratic party is to say that they are not a good person.
In short, the US is not okay. We are never sending our best. Death to America of course
American Liberals are above all else defined by a smugness that is backed by a total and complete naiveness of the word without the inability to understand that Socialists/Communists still exist in the world outside of the US and China. American Liberals believe their is only one opposition to their views, the uneducated unwashed masses who is backward in character and without any virtue.
American Liberalism is largely a believe of credentialism that simultaneously somehow proves their moral virtue.
smugness that is backed by a total and complete naiveness
Their treats feature Adults In The Room that Make The Hard Decisions and Get Shit Done, so they believe that by nodding along with the smirking realpolitik war crimes enjoyers in their P R E S T I G E T V treats that they’re also very smart and sophisticated and know the cold hard truths about the world.
Yeah it’s another form of American Exceptionalism and White Man’s Burden. Even if libs don’t actively think about it, it’s heavily ingrained into their ideology.
Malcolm X had a speech about this where white liberals will insist on taking up leadership and administrative positions within black organizations, instead of asking what the existing leadership wants them to do. It was largely why he spent most of his career not wanting to do any organizing with white liberals, even when they claimed to be allies. I think this is ultimately regretted the way he brushed aside one white woman and woud talk about the interaction years later. She did the correct thing in asking what she could do as a white person to help.
American politics are purely based on identity that this point. To the liberal mind, there are only two teams, and you’re on the other team unless you give your undying loyalty to your team.
I have so many coworkers who think me criticizing the sitting president or his heir to throne makes me a republican. Any possible grievance I have will be countered with “but trump will be worse?! Check mate.”
Every single person I know who spent a semester abroad is even more insufferable. They will talk about this trip to europe the rest of their life, inserting it into every conversation to give them a false sense of being well traveled.
Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. So much intellectually stunted Marvel brain.
Thanks for the comment. It’s really strange, because here, there’s very little politics-based tribalism. Sure, you have some crazy right-wingers and ancaps that have sprung up after our socialist system was murdered, but if this student is anything to go by, they’re still tame by comparison.
I can see how this student would get isolated, then come back to the U.S. telling everyone how horrible our country is because nobody wanted to talk to them.
Ya, that’s just how Americans are, this coming from an American. All the looting of other nations goes to your head. She has probably never been asked that hard of a question before. To be honest she is probably just super alienated from reality.
You’re probably right, it did occur to me that you have to be from a certain socioeconomic background to be able to study here.
I have one related question, which also stems from me not knowing much about the anglosphere: I’ve read a few responses, and some people are assuming this person was a woman. I didn’t specify their gender on purpose in the OP, but they were a man. Why did people assume they were a woman?
I basically asked them: Why would I vote for Harris? How would that improve the situation in the US and abroad? I’m not too familiar with her, but her politics don’t seem too appealing, especially her support for Palestine and her incarceration background.
I think they misread this as applying to the lib rather than to Kamala.
yep that’s exactly what it was.
Right, I understand now. Thank you 😊
I think for me it was a few different things, that largely boil down to
- Misremembering the post (i.e. “her” referring to both Harris and the lib, the accusations of misogyny being a weaponization of the lib’s gender)
- Making assumptions based on my own mind’s eye
- Reading singular “they” more like a marker of social distance than a marker of explicit gender-neutrality, and thinking that women are more likely to get they-ed than men, because men are often a little ashamed of associating with women in a way that women aren’t with men (this requires assuming OP is a man)
- Reading JaredLevi’s comment first and assuming it was correct about the lib’s gender
And these things are honestly all pretty problematic, I should’ve done better.
Nah, comrade, you’re cool.
Liberals are insecure. They reflexively start name-dropping news agencies, universities, dudes with British accents, or whatever they can so you affirm their beliefs and not a single one outside of their bubble. Also someone studying abroad typically has means so they were likely coddled their entire life (I am guessing here).
I ran into one recently that kept name dropping associated press and Reuters with regards to denouncing Palestinian resistance and their so called “violence” essentially justifying the genocide and saying such and such paper stated Iran tricked the resistance into Oct 7th. Dumb shit like that.
The worse revenge you can do to a liberal is ignore them. They hate that the same smugness they treat you with.
Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.
The slightest inconvenience to liberals, including access to treats or vacations, makes them thirsty for blood. Well, thirstier because liberals tend to love bloodshed when it’s presented for their entertainment from embedded footage of war crimes on screens.
Settler-colonies I would say fundamentally operate on a completely different Overton window from normal countries. I’d say you can blame this exchange student’s thin skin on her being close to institutional power; you can blame the “seeing anyone who doesn’t support her form of fascism for being the other type of fascist in her country” on her spending most of her life completely isolated from actually having to face the contradictions of settler society; and you can blame the general tribalism of national politics in the USA at least partially on settlers needing to absolve themselves of guilt by demonizing the “other side” that supports 95% of the same things.
I’ve started to informally distinguish between three types of US citizen abroad: my own type are “Americans”, we are polar opposites to “Seppos”, and between us Americans and those Seppos is an unstable middle ground that I call “Usonians”.
From my own typology, I might label the exchange student you met as a “Seppo” just from this description — her refusing to speak to you means that she is likely wholly disinterested in, and will in all likelihood actively try to avoid through kicking and screaming if necessary, coming to terms with the contradictions surrounding your country’s relationship to the USA, and what this relationship says about the USA itself. If she intends on returning to the USA after she is done with her studies, she must actively not build roots in the local community in which she now resides, and making her confront her own relationship to imperialism and settler-colonialism quite simply interferes with this.
The outburst you witnessed is in other words what I consider a “repair strategy” through which the settler-colony prevents “settler hemorrhage”.
However, I could always be mistaken and she might really be typologically more like a Usonian — that despite that outburst you witnessed, she could actually one day become informed and genuinely empathetic, in which case she could become an American. But I have an image of what the typical US-born exchange student is like, and with the class background I’m imagining, I wouldn’t bet on winning her over to our side.
Not an American, but have spent a lot of time there. They have two right wing liberal parties, and a political system that actively resists any changes to that setup. As a result, they think that those are the two political extremes, and everything between them is centrist. Anyone outside of that is an extremist and not worthy of consideration. So when you criticise their party of choice, you obviously must be on the “other” side of the political spectrum, which to them is the other US political party.
They just don’t know any better, it’s outside of their realm of experience.
One of the two right wing liberal parties gets away with calling itself socialist, because sometime in the 20th century Americans forgot what socialism even is.
You could post this in c/askchapo or lemmygrads question comm, for future reference. As others have said, here is fine too.
This reads to me like there was some context left out (I assume be accident), possibly communication difficulties that you weren’t aware of. I really need to think there were other things said or maybe wording that implied something you didn’t mean, or something like that, because it’s a very unnatural reaction.
If what you relayed is the full and accurate picture, the person you are talking to is hopelessly unstable and you did nothing wrong. In the future, to avoid stepping on landmines, it would probably be good to start with some less challenging questions to see how they respond before you give them a prompt as heavy as what you gave. A lot of people aren’t ready to be given such a challenge so abruptly, and might feel like they’ve been ambushed or “put on the spot”.
I gave pretty much all the context. We were sitting at a pub, they has a Harris pin and were very political from the get go. Very excited to share their political beliefs. So that’s what lead me to asking that question. It seemed like fair game with all the political messaging
Alright, yeah, they’re just really unstable then.
LMAO, they’re so open about their politics until somebody disagrees with them. Classic blue maga delusion
You did nothing wrong, the American liberals are getting now little bit too emotional. It kind of turns out, that it’s not the opposite side but them who are acting very morally badly, similar to well known regimes in past which they love to mention so much…
The contradictions are sharp enough now that simply acknowledging the terrible things the dems do/have done the past 4 years can provoke a full-blown chimp out. Trump Would Do Worse makes up the vast amount majority of everything I hear from them whenever they pester those like us who can no longer stomach the rat race. I think the reason they’re so aggro this cycle is because deep down they know that they don’t really have a leg to stand on beyond bluanon crap. They can’t accept that the fact that you simply can’t claim to be anti-cop and anti-genocide and then not only vote for them, not only stump for them, but also piss and moan when we refuse to. It stresses them out to address that contradiction and call it out for what it is, self-interested fascist apologia. This is what happens when your only perception of what fascism is comes from Spielberg movies and other holocaust oppression porn.
If I were you I would probably either ignore them or corner them if you’re already stuck in a conversation and ask point blank if non-American lives are worth sacrificing to them to get what they want: Trump crying on election day so they can gloat and over-post about it for the next 4 years and go back to being blind, deaf, and dumb to geopolitics (whilst pissing and moaning ineffectually about SCOTUS and congress every day).
Thanks for the very detailed response. It’s interesting insight.
I don’t think I’ll speak to them again, or want to at all. They have already angered a few other people, and I think they’ll eventually get isolated because nobody will talk to them (apart maybe from the couple other American exchange students). We really did our best to make this student feel included despite their unrelated mishap (calling our school racist because we didn’t have any black people, in a country that’s 95% culturally homogenous and speaks a Slavic language).
because we didn’t have any black people
Yeah that tends to happen when your country doesn’t abduct over 20 million people and take them across an ocean to another continent so they can be used as slaves lmao
Yeah, it sucks but we’re not therapists or priests. We’re leftists. We can’t give them absolution for the despair they feel about the fact that their way of life is threatened, or the guilt they feel about choosing to live in denial. Which is what I honestly think they’re looking for when they do the “well what DO we do except vote?!?1” thing. I had to hit rock bottom a couple times before deciding to change the way I think and dispose of old ideology so I guess that’s what it’s going to have to take before they maybe open their minds.
We can’t give them absolution for the despair they feel about the fact that their way of life is threatened, or the guilt they feel about choosing to live in denial
Honestly, I don’t want them to get absolution, or to escape their guilt. Not until they finally figure it out, come to terms, and start acting like decent human beings (ie. not supporting genocide directly or indirectly, for a starter).
Until then, I’m perfectly fine with them continuing to make an ass of themselves, or even heading in self-destructive ways before imploding or ending one way or another. Fuck them, genocidaires and their ilk get what they get.
The rest of the world, thankfully, is not made of AmeriKKKan libs (and even of Anglo libs, those who have a shred of decency will eventually move on- those who won’t, will stay libs). And the rest of the world has moved on past their murderous ways, at least, the vast majority of humanity has, and sees them for the faux-progressive, chaunvinistic, brainwashed aberrations they are.
They can figure out human decency, or head straight to oblivion. The metaphorical beatings (of being faced with reality and the facts they are terrible people and everyone knows it) will continue until they either die or learn their lesson. Either is perfectly fine by my books, either is an ideal outcome when we’re talking about genocidaires.
Agreed. I just don’t have any sympathy left. Seeing the fake leftists immediately get with the program as soon as the dems shed their skin and crowned Kamala really made me realize that USAmericans like them fundamentally don’t understand or care about the nature of their empire. The most galling thing I think is the Buying Time assertion, wherein voting for the dems will give leftists the space they need to work against fascism. Just don’t ask them what that actually entails, or what they’ve been doing since 2020 and 2016 when that talking point was also deployed. Nor should you ask how that can be true when the dems have been actively quashing free speech since last October, going so far as to legally codify dissent as anti-semitic “hatred”. It’s extremely self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing thinking that conveniently lets them defer any serious political action until after they know they’ve gotten what they wanted. I’ll remind you once again that that was what these same libs said in 2020 and I think we all know that they’ve pissed away all that time buying into poli-tainment as usual instead of “preparing” as they put it. I’m going to just start asking “buying time for what?” because I genuinely have no idea what they mean.
Couldn’t have put it better myself. If they can’t get with the program (of not backing genocide) then they can go straight to hell and I’ll be glad to see them go. Those who clown for Klanmala deserve nothing less as I see it, they aren’t friends, they aren’t comrades, hell, while they’re technically of the same species that is only a mark of shame on the rest of us.
These scum could have a thousand, or a million years even, and it would never be enough. If they cannot demonstrate the bare minimum of human decency as to stand against the empire, the genocide, the warmongering, racism, etc. here and now they can and should die for all I care, I’m glad the rest of the world is moved past them and I’ll cheer on the destruction of the west should society at large continue to fail at that lowest possible criterion of humanity, even if I go down with it. They’re nothing more than another competing variety of fascist in the clown show of empire (where all the various fascists are accusing each other of being the “true fascists”).
Yes, I’ve had to reevaluate my own models of why American “leftists” do what they do this past year and engage in some self-crit.
Even after all this time I was still operating on the admittedly liberal logic that they just didn’t have all the facts and were propagandized and that our duty was to provide that information. I failed to understand that they’re only human and won’t turn on the ideology that’s provided them with what they materially want and need. It’s not that it’s impossible to convert them. I just think it’s likely that lib idealism eases their contradictions more effectively than ML ideology does.
The worst part about it is that I was also roughly on their level only 2-3 years ago. I know exactly what they think. They think that there will be some magic combination of elected representatives to defeat the SCOTUS and the parliamentarian and all the other obstacles and booby traps their system throws up to protect itself.
I guess the bottom line here is that history tells us that cooperation with libs holds very little promise of us getting what we want because they are not living in reality and as such will not behave realistically. I’m willing to be wrong if any comrade can explain why but I see no way to make them understand.
I’ve been where they were once myself, as well (several years back now). Killing off the last ignorant seeds of electoralism in me has been a process that probably only really died completely in the later years of Trump, if not during the Biden term (not an American- Canadian- but nowadays I won’t so much as touch that trash, frankly if I did it would probably only be a spite vote for the more “accelerationist” and disruptive domestic party- which in itself would be the opposite of acceleration for the rest of the world as the western regimes as-is have nothing to be salvaged from whatsoever).
And it’s because I understand these “leftists” that I have no sympathy for them whatsoever. They can either get with the program- or not, and hopefully die with it instead. They can convert, but the rest of the world won’t wait for the slave-owners, the genocidaires, the “golden billion” in their garden to take their time to do so, and right up until they do I have nothing pleasant to say to them or think of them.
The rising anti-Asian hatred and preparing to destroy the prosperity of China (as an ethnic Chinese) and ASEAN (where my family is from) already had made me bitter and alienated as all hell. Then the outright crusading against Russia and the goosestepping towards yet another front for WW3 simply confirmed that bitterness. But seeing industrial genocide against the Palestinians was truly a complete breaking point; by all means, these scum (liberals) deserve everything they get and more, right up until they learn or die from it. And one way or another I suspect they’ll either learn or die from it, considering how the empire is spiraling, and that can only be a good thing.
If they want to promote death so much, if they want to promote the so-called “lesser evil” (that is every bit as evil as its counterpart), if they want to “buy time” and “comfort” at the expense of the rest of the world, then they can and should have all the death and evil in the world done unto them, and they can and should choke on it.
The worst part about it is that I was also roughly on their level only 2-3 years ago. I know exactly what they think.
Almost all of us were some number of years ago, and we know exactly what they think because we used to think them. It’s pretty funny/annoying when they say we’re in an echo chamber/bubble, as if we haven’t been receiving exactly the same indoctrination, education, and propaganda as they our whole lives. Everything they know, we also know, so who’s the one in a bubble?
chimp out
Isn’t this phrase associated with, like, stereotypes of Black people being aggressive?
Yeah, use of that term is very sus to me.
I really have no idea, I can’t say I spend much time in the same space online as racists.
It’s probably best you don’t use that terminology in the future: it’s already dehumanizing on its surface and it’s very popular among cryptofascists to outright nazis.
Duly noted.
The only other time I’ve heard that phrase was in that wow_mao video “I CAN BE WAY MORE RACIST THAN YOU”, where it was uttered by some Anglo nationalist who also kept calling the other guy that term for people with Down’s syndrome with roots in 18th century racial pseudoscience
That “Other Guy” was Haz, lmao
Isn’t Haz that dipshit with the “American Communist Party”?
Yes, the very same
The same Infrared Haz, dipshit spokesman of the “American Communist Party”, who was banned from Hexbear way back when?
Ok. I don’t know who that is.
wow_mao isn’t someone I pay much attention to, but he was on The Deprogram not too long ago because a bunch of classified Pentagon documents were leaked in his Discord server last year, and my cousin likes wow_mao and we talked about him once. My impression is that wow_mao mostly just makes shitposts.
Speaking as someone from the US my whole life who became communist only in recent years, my general sense is people like me are raised to think that: 1) the world revolves around the US and everything else is secondary to it (not true). 2) the US is a people’s democracy (it isn’t). 3) democrats are the more moderate/progressive party (they aren’t, if they ever were truly - maybe going back to the FDR coalition, they were a bit).
But if you believe all 3 of these, and you strongly believe that Trump is a threat to a people’s democracy, then you might have a strong reaction to the idea of not supporting the alternative. To be clear, I’m not saying their behavior is reasonable at all. But I can kind of see how they arrive at it, with headspaces I’ve been in at times in the past, and the propaganda people tend to believe in the US.
Tbh, they sound like they are deep in western chauvinism, coming to your Eastern European country and yelling at you about their elections. As if you are supposed to be involved in it too somehow (this is where point 1 comes in). You did nothing wrong. Blue maga, aka: “vote blue no matter who”, the special brand of USian liberal who has adopted a stance of voting for a half-eaten ham sandwich over voting for Donald Trump, is not well-grounded in reality. In effect, I think whether they realize it consciously or not as what it is in substance, they are panicked about the neoliberal order crumbling and being replaced with naked fascism (e.g. no decorum to cover it up), but they lack the framework with which to see the neoliberal order as already being fascistic, so to them this is the absolute worst case scenario for their country and life. Meanwhile, people who see beneath the curtain are going like, “Is it really the worst thing if liberals start to see the US for what it is, rather than continuing to believe in the pomp and ceremony?” Migrant kids in cages went from being an issue liberals cared about under Trump to being a nothing under Biden.
People in this state of mind are effectively duped by the liberal decorum and really believe it’s better for that reason.
Thank you for the comment.
The funny (or sad) thing is that in school, we’re taught to view the US in exactly the three points you talked about - that it is only thanks to the U.S. that we’re now free (as opposed to the oppressive tyrannical regime we lived under during socialism), the U.S. is a perfect example of democracy, and that, I shit you not, Democrats are center-left and Republicans center-right.
I used to believe that shit too, until I started visiting the U.S. internet through Imgur at first and then Reddit. The realities of the U.S. were finally laid bare, and that’s the moment the illusion shattered and I became a communist. It was similar with Germany; we were taught how we were some sort of subhumans compared to Germans, and that Germany is the best country in the world with no problems, and that everybody in Germany is rich.
Our people are also duped by U.S. agencies that run rampant in our country, and it’s honestly sad.
That is extremely sad to hear. There’s nothing more sad and pathetic than willingly colonizing yourself for a group of countries that see you as disposable.
Liberals have excess valence Hitler particles, which makes them unstable and highly reactive
Pocketfish did nothing wrong.
When you believe you’re working to save the world, you come to think that anyone who opposes you is a fool and react thusly.
But we are actually saving the world and are completely justified in thinking anyone who opposes us is a fool… right?
No, not a fool. What communism oppose isn’t some misguided evildoers, that’s an entire ruling class working in their own interests, regardless how they see it.
