This would happen with my dad, years ago. We would spend hours talking about politics. I would convince him that we basically live in the Confederacy, that the Confederacy lost the battle but won the war (since slavery is still an important part of the American economy), and he would agree, and then the next time we spoke, within a few days, it would be as though our lengthy conversation had never taken place. He was back to “everything will be fine if we just get rid of Trump” mode.
These days I’m stuck for lengthy periods of time in the company of another lib. This one is younger and much more aggressive, but as usual liberalism just isn’t up for a fair debate with Marxism. I talked about slavery in the USA with this guy recently, and he told me that it’s not a big deal because the USA isn’t “explicitly” about slavery (???). After we had finished talking, I checked to make sure of something I suspected: the OG US constitution never mentions slaves. Even the 3/5 compromise only mentions “other persons” lol. It isn’t mentioned until the passage of the thirteenth amendment—when it creates, in a stroke, jim crow and the prison industrial complex. So actually, before the civil war, slavery was “implicit,” and after the civil war, it became “explicit”! I still managed to hit him with a “the purpose of a thing is what it does” and “we live in a genocidal slave empire” before we finished talking. And he just laughed. He has called my diatribes nihilistic and pessimistic. And I’m like…bro, I’m pessimistic about amerikkka, but optimistic about the world.
Interestingly enough, the Confederate constitution is word-for-word the same as the US constitution, except they threw in a few clauses about how slavery rules and no one should fuck with it. I haven’t broached the topic of politics with this lib since then because I’m worried that it’s going to cost me my job, but I just have the feeling that nearly everything I say to him doesn’t matter anyway, that he forgets every word within minutes of separating from me, and just goes back to thinking about white people music (the only kind he listens to) and how we need to get the orange orangutan out of the damn white house. He got pretty angry when he was talking about how goofy republicans are for voting for politicians who screw them…and I was like, dude, how are democrats any different?
Anyone else have this experience or know what I’m talking about? If liberals had any kind of self-introspection, they wouldn’t be liberals. The thing is, I can remember, when I was a liberal, being embarrassed on multiple occasions by people whose politics were further to the left than mine. Maybe I suppressed some of those memories, but a bunch of them still stuck in my conscious mind. Do they stick with liberals and do they just not talk about it, or was I just a confused Marxist all along?
This is very evident when talking with random L*dditors. They still cling to MSM like the BBC. You see the same with people’s brains melting when they start watching Fox news or reading tabloids like the Daily Mail. IMHO, as long as they still watch those news media and passively absorb liberalism, it’s a complete uphill battle. This is why I always stress that politically apathetic people are more reachable than nominally progressive people. And much of the reason is because they don’t get brainwashed by Western news media. There’s still the issue of other forms of media like movies and videogames of course, but that’s different from news directly telling them what to think.
For those other media, they still have to succeed through the framework of their media, meaning you don’t necessarily have to dissuade people by going over their trash politics. For example, both the BBC and COD push Western imperialism, but you don’t have to say that COD pushes Western imperialism in order to persuade someone to stop playing COD. COD has shitty shooter mechanics, COD singleplayer is a glorified railroading cover shooter, COD multiplayer is just teens calling each other slurs, and so on. You can give a variety of reasons about why COD sucks, but you really can’t give a reason the BBC sucks outside of saying that it’s British state media.
Agree. A prerequisite for pulling people away from liberalism is that those people have to make the conscious choice to dismiss that media and start actually thinking and engaging their brains. Only through conscious and deliberate choice does a new thought form that isn’t dictated to them via passively absorbing whatever is the current bourgeois-line being pressed by the entirety of media.
This goes for both conservatives and liberals too, they’re captured by two different media ecosystems and only conscious choice by both groups drags them out of it.
Once they’ve made that conscious choice to start thinking about shit for themselves you get the beginnings of a leftist who just needs to go on a journey where they learn a whole lotta things. People develop leftwards over time once you hit a few prerequisites that break them out of the mind manipulation system, some faster than others depending on their total access and engagement with real leftist content.