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.
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.
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?
Exactly. I never actually say “I heard all of this shit back when Kamala as POTUS was a laughable notion and Biden was considered our saviour from fascism” but I should probably start doing so. These lib cheerleaders have inherited their master’s desire to only acknowledge history if it somehow benefits their short-term goals. Maybe Trump getting elected will prompt them to think about fascism beyond Death Camps and being mean to minorities for fun. Probably not though.
In moments of weakness (or when they’re incorrigibly fascist) I do a little dunking, but I try to think about what rhetoric would have worked on/for past me and use that.
Huey P. Newton:
True, very true. I suppose that lately I’ve decided to focus on studying theory more now that I have the time, but also because I think I’ve hit the wall when it comes to getting liberals to understand that revolution isn’t something we have to totally make up from scratch. Plus I haven’t completed some key texts. I just don’t think that I could ever successfully play a role evangelizing libs to be leftists, since that is apparently what we’re talking about here.
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.
Indeed. I fr think that the past 25 years of seeing chaotic imagery in the middle east on CNN has desensitized the vast majority of North Americans to violence that is outsourced. As someone whose childhood perfectly overlapped with that period, it applied for me as much as it disgusts me now to admit it. Not an original thought of mine, but the US learned a very valuable lesson after Vietnam which is that as long as conscription is off the table and that type of interventionism happens via an abstraction layer of Proxies, the American public has a vastly higher tolerance for imperialism.
The Kamla stans demonstrate this by accepting(!) that some kind of genocide is going to happen and that Trump Is Worse in the reality where he wins. The version that Kamahalah practices is then implicitly more “under control” and better but it’s still a genocide. They are aware of this. They patently accept the reality that genocide must happen for their government and status quo to operate. If they didn’t do this math before endorsing the program then in their own words, caveat emptor.