I’m a writer, sorry but this is really long, I’ve written about this twenty times before on hexbear too.

I have thought about this so much because I am surrounded by liberals or chuds almost whenever I’m around anyone and their presence constantly reminds me that I’m different and makes me ask: why am I different?

Is the answer dialectical? Yes. I was born different, but my difference was also nurtured.

Reich says everyone has two seeds inside them (two wolves): a communist side and a fascist/liberal side. Our environment nurtures one or the other or both at the same time.

One of my earliest memories is someone holding a styrofoam cup with change jingling in it in the winter in the city. Being bored and friendless in school. Constantly being told that I can do better. Becoming obsessed with books (reading and writing) and video games (and girls who weren’t interested in me) as a desperate escape. Getting A’s in my high school social studies classes because I actually enjoyed them, even though I was a lib and my teachers and family were all libs.

I’m actually re-reading A People’s History of the United States right now for the first time since high school, and even though Zinn has his own brainworms he’s complaining about capitalism on almost every page. How could anyone read a book like this and think that there was anything positive about this country? But that was exactly what I did in high school. (The book is pretty sobering because there have been so many huge uprisings in US history that just went nowhere.)

9/11 was my first Tuesday in high school. My mom hung an American flag on our house for a week or so, but thankfully my parents never did anything like that ever again. My dad was working one terrible job after another at that time and he was constantly complaining about corporations and I even made fun of him for it. (He inherited some money a few years ago and has comfortably retired with my mom and now they own two houses but we haven’t really spoken in years and they disinherited me because I couldn’t interact with them without screaming my head off…they’re just CNN libs…anyway…)

I supported the Afghanistan invasion but by the time Iraq rolled around I was against it. I supported Dean (who got ratfucked in a preview of what was to come for Bernard), then Kerry, but I would have told you that I supported him just because he wasn’t Bush. My dad stayed up all night to watch the election results. He really thought that W. was going to lose. When I got up for school, he was coughing like crazy, like just physically sick at the thought of another four years of W. But if Kerry had won, we would have gotten the same thing, of course.

Toward the end of high school, I got interested in alternative education because I was tired of being constantly told what to do by teachers and administrators who were deeply unimpressive. We had to make these huge portfolios with examples of all the work we had done over the last four years in order to graduate, and it was just such a pain and we all knew that the portfolios were going in the garbage once we finished. While I was reading some book on alternative education in the school library I looked up and wondered: why can’t we have a democratic economy? But there were no Marxist texts around to let this little candle blaze up into an inferno, so the light faded for years. I had a Trotskyist friend at the time but he never talked about politics with me.

I was enthusiastic about Obama in college. We had a huge party outside when we realized he had won. I was so happy there actually, just studying literature for four years, I had lots of friends, I loved my professors, I had no reason to ask serious questions about anything. My favorite professor had grown up in the USSR and introduced us to Soviet films, literature, poetry, and the idea that the USSR was not always a nightmare for everyone, even though she was actually a lib. She showed us the first part of Bondarchuk’s War and Peace on a relatively big screen, and it might have been the most impressive movie I’ve ever seen? I was really awed for every second of it.

I graduated and ended up teaching English in East Asia. I thought the country I lived in had serious problems (not China), and I needed to find out why. When you ask this kind of question, there’s really only two answers: either it has something to do with race, or it has something to do with society, history, economics. I knew the racist answer was ridiculous so I did my best to hone in on the society. I read lots of books about that place (all written by libs) and I learned the language. But it still didn’t radicalize me. I got married and had kids. We thought life would be better in America, so we moved back to my hometown. That’s when my radicalization really began.

This was just after Trump had won the presidency in 2016. I had phonebanked for Bernie because I knew from experience that universal health care was better, but I still voted for Hillary. But I had never really lived in the USA as an adult with a family relatively on my own, and it was shockingly more difficult and inconvenient compared with living in a social-democratic East Asian country, and what was even stranger was that no one seemed to care or even be aware that things could easily be better for 99% of people living here.

I applied for many nice jobs and even got some interviews but they all turned me down. Our savings dwindled. We were renting a small freezing house which was invaded by slugs, red ants, raccoons, hornets, and mice. My spouse was an RN in her her home country but needed to study for a year to pass the NCLEX and get hired as an RN here. Both of us were unemployed for a year, burning through thousands of dollars a month on daycare and rent alone. I made the incredibly foolish decision to run in local elections. I worked as hard as I possibly could. I knocked on thousands of doors. I ran on the same policies as Bernie in a blue area of a purple state. And I lost my first race, 31 to 69 (not nice), to a lib in a primary—a lib who never talked about policy and who promised nothing.

It was devastating to me. I had given everything I could to this race. During the campaign, I had already noticed sabotage and hostility from my fellow democrats (especially the actual officials in the democratic party and the wealthier democrats who were organizing Indivisible meetings), but losing that race really turned me against them. That elected government job was supposed to solve every problem in my life: it had decent pay, health care, all kinds of benefits, and lots of prestige. It was going to prove to everyone that I could make it. But I failed. And I started asking why, really asking why, applying the same kinds of analysis I had learned studying literature and history in college and also in East Asia, but now applying that to America. Why couldn’t I get a good job and provide for my family? (My spouse passed the NCLEX, got hired immediately, and saved our asses when we were down to our last few hundred dollars.) I had done everything I could. I had plenty of good experience. I had a college education. I worked hard and did my job. Forget electoral races—why wouldn’t anyone hire me to do anything that looked even remotely acceptable? Someone on reddit mentioned r/chapotraphouse, and the memes made me laugh, I could relate so much to everyone complaining about liberals, and they told me to read Marxist theory and history, and I did, and here I am. My radicalization has continued. The pandemic radicalized me further. Training and working in a blue collar field radicalized my further. Palestine radicalized me further. Because I was so desperate to talk with people who actually cared about these things, I started chatting a lot on Hellotalk, and now I have friends in Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Iran, and I’ve had to watch all of them wonder if they were going to get killed by the USA/isn’treal, and for what?

My anger is incandescent, my sadness is profound, but everyone around where I live is still doing 2015-style politics. I tried organizing here; it all went nowhere. I ran in more electoral races and even won sometimes, but I quit when I realized that the police really were going to kill me if I (an elected official) kept talking about defunding them. I would get killed or thrown in prison, and what would I have accomplished? When you win these races and find yourself at the table with other elected officials, you just have another layer you have to break through in order to help anyone who isn’t a fucking millionaire. As we all know, the police and the courts make it nearly impossible. Doing a revolution is simpler, or it would be, if 70%+ of this country wasn’t fascist.

I grew up white, cis, male, and relatively privileged. My family didn’t take a real vacation until I was 18 or so, but I never went without necessities. I had to get fucked so hard in so many different ways to finally conclude that actually, America isn’t a good place. America isn’t a good society. And the only good people are the ones who are actively fighting it. I didn’t become a Marxist-Leninist until I was around 30 years old.