I don’t just mean outrage or regular rage, I mean shock that someone was to the left of “legal weed and free college but only for those that operate a successful business for 3 years in a disadvantaged community” takes.
I think federating took them by surprise, looking back. For about a week, those smug liberals were at a loss to even fathom what Hexbears were saying, and could only chant bullshit about how we’re Russian/Chinese bots.
Sure they still do that but they’ve slightly adapted to Hexbear presence.
the media are bad and duplicitous and lie all the time to make money for their capitalist owners. except about Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, China, Stalin and the DPRK, I still believe all those lies because I’m a good kid and so is America
When something bad happens in a socialist country it’s the government’s fault, when something bad happens in a capitalist country it’s the individuals fault (or it’s a good thing, actually)
Good points. When it comes to the DPRK, I think a part of it is that the weird and wonderful stories are easy to believe because anything could happen in a land of unicorns and necromancy.
the media are bad and duplicitous and lie all the time to make money for their capitalist owners. except about Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, China, Stalin and the DPRK, I still believe all those lies because I’m a good kid and so is America
They are first and foremost, nationalists. It’s unsurprising that they accept and go along with everything when they are told “this is good for america”. As nationalists they simply bat for their team.
We have to make them stop being nationalists first in order to get that to stop happening. Then the rest opens up.
This is a good ovservation. It seems to me that historically the rise of liberalism is paralel to the rise of the nation state. This may be a historical accident or may be because merchant capital and financial capital beneft from a strong state and viceversa. One would expect that as capital becomes international the libs would become less nationalistic. But there is still a large block that would semengly go against their own material interests starting stuff with china for example.
Nationalism is a competing ideological framework to class consciousness. Get people to identify with their “nation” instead of with their class and you can get them to fight and die in your wars for you instead of turning around and pointing the guns at you, the capitalist. Nationalism essentially won out in Europe over class consciousness when it came to WW1 and even the social democrats and socialists of most of those countries embraced it and supported their countries in that war EXCEPT for in Russia where the people embraced class consciousness and communists came to power.
The state itself rose as part of the need for the ruling class to have violent suppression against the classes it exploits. The nation state on the other hand is partially an accident of geography due to most people not travelling far(or having the means to), and liberalism today takes advantage of this as a tool of racial conflict dividing the working class but I think it’s most likely that this was simply a useful tool for adopting a hostile stance to indigenous populations. They’re “barbarians” therefore it is ok for us to kill them all and take their land. Very useful for colonialism.
Master race and untermenschen nazi ideas come from the ruling class justifying their right to rule as “betters”, and likely evolved as various capitalist families sought to adapt the divine right of kings to bourgeoise rule. In particular it rose during an era of far greater class conflict than we have currently today so they had a lot of cause to try and provide reasons for their rule as socialist sentiment boomed.
One would expect that as capital becomes international the libs would become less nationalistic.
American nationalism serves as a useful tool as it’s essentially the leader of the capitalist empire. If you view capitalism primarily as the imperial core(european+american global north or “international community”) exploiting the periphery (global south) with the US as the leading force of this empire then the usefulness of this nationalism kind of explains itself.
If we break the american soft-left libs out of a national mindset and into a global one where they no longer view themselves as citizens of america but instead as citizens of the world we will find ourselves a lot more allies.
