This is just a vibe, so take it for what it’s worth.
But personally I feel like I’ve been experiencing, witnessing, or hearing less stories about people managing to “deprogram”/“convert”/“change” people in terms of their political ideology. Actually I’ve been hearing more of the opposite, accounts of people regressing: “A year ago I talked my racist uncle into being a Bernie bro but in the last 3 months he’s gone all the way back to QAnon.” That sort of thing.
It doesn’t seem to be just me, I’ve seen a lot of “Debate Bros” start to have increasingly strict rules about who they debate, or just abandon the whole protect of debating all together to just stream to their existing fans. Some (one in particular ) openly say it’s because they fell like their opponents have consolidated their base and there’s nobody reachable anymore.
And that’s what it feels like, consolidation. Echo chambers have become more effective, it almost fells like people have scripted retorts to whatever talking point might get thrown at them. Fuck, “Israel” just straight up as academies on how to do this shit. It’s like the internet has just perfected rhetoric so much that once you pull someone in they’re just locked into it forever.
Idk, I just feel like everyone who is a Chud/turbo-lib/Succ/Tankie RN is probably gonna die one at this point. Every ideology is just a Skinner box now.
Edit: And another thought, it is a bit ironic, I recall us Commies were the first ones to be saying “one-on-one debate is a often worthless performance, and most people who get too deep into Far Right ideology are probably a lost cause and not worth wasting energy to reach,” and everyone giving us shit for it and acting all noble about how the market place of ideas could fix everything. Now post-Trump everyone seems to be realizing we were right and Libs and Chuds alike are abandoning the whole affair.
Edit 2: I wrote this while drinking box wine and listening to Post-Punk, sorry. What provoked this was learning that “Why should we bother to reply to Kautsky?” quote by Lenin we all love is probs fake. Made me think about what truth there may be in it even if it isn’t actually real.
Edit 3: just woke up and Jesus I made some big ass grammatical errors in this post. Fucking box wine!
Material conditions are changing. Individual ideology is derived from material conditions. Folks have been and will continue to be moving, just maybe not in the direction we all hope.
Some people are learning from the Gaza genocide right now who previously were either too young or too indoctrinated to have learned from the War on Terror like I did.
To build on this. I had a well-intentioned but but libbed up friend send me an apology recently for saying that she wasn’t comfortable talking to me anymore after I called Israel and ethno-nationalist colonial apartheid state in December. I’ve since been (seemingly successfully) tearing down her worldview with laying bare how awful the empire has been for years across so many fronts.
Are there people increasingly holding onto and doubling down on their worldview in the face of global geopolitical uncertainty? Absolutely, but there are also many, many people realizing for the first time in their privileged lives what America (and really more broadly speaking the West) really is and represents and those people are reachable.
For real, I’ve never seen such a huge mass radicalisation event occur in my lifetime. Correct me if I’m wrong but the Gaza solidarity protests seems like the biggest protest movement in human history.
What’s beautiful about it too is that - with the exception of Palestinean diaspora participants - very few of these protesters have any skin the the game. They do not benefit in any capacity from protesting, it’s all stemming from pure solidarity and love for humanity.
I hope they can successfully build a wider critique of capital and imperialism beyond the current crisis in Gaza. My fear is if this is not done, then the momentum for a broader push for justice will dissipate once the ongoing crisis ends.
Well, I wanted to say that too but, I didn’t know how to say it in a polite way.
The left is very disorganized and seems unable to break out of a cycle of repeating all the actions that contributed to its disorganization. And we reminisce about the past to take ourselves away from those failings. I’m as guilty of it as most people are.
I am not sure this is true. I just talked to a dude at a party who:
- thought elon musk had climate change under control in the US
- thought climate change was something our grandkids would have to worry about
- had no idea what sort of consequences climate change would actually have
Yeah we can shit on the idea of raising awareness but people who don’t know shit about fuck except whatever propaganda piece has paid thousands of dollars to be shoved in their faces are everywhere
i’m definitely locked in, belligerently so
The George Floyd uprising in 2020 was the point of no return. If you didn’t come out of that espousing at least some kind of radlib or progressive politic, you’re locked-in to fascism as far as I’m concerned. If you see pigs in riot gear shooting rubber bullets at white soccer moms and not have second thoughts about your politics (assuming they previously weren’t progressive), then you’ll not have second thoughts if soldiers shoot protestors in the head and bury them all in a shallow mass grave.
At this point, propaganda is more about turning progressives into socialists or reaching out to really young zoomers and gen alpha who were too young to fully understand the scope of the uprising or possibly reaching out to diasporic communities who aren’t clued in on US politics. But if you have a reactionary opinion of what happened in 2020, you are a lost cause.
