These “the far right just wants normal relatable things” seem to be a relatively popular genre. We can all agree that freedom and safety and health and happiness are good things to have.
But we’ve all seen what the trumpers do when you start trying to give those things to poor people, or immigrants, or trans people. The question we need to be asking isn’t “do you like nice things?”, the question is “who do you think is deserving of nice things”
But then the deeper question is “why do you think these other people don’t deserve these things?” and then they tell you all about how they are sinful, lazy, violent, or whatever else that they use to justify shunning those other people which is obviously incorrect but it is what they believe so if they actually believe all of that stuff then obviously they are gonna be hostile towards those kinds of people.
It is better to understand and try and remedy why people are doing awful and horrible things than dismiss and judge them because the first option actually can lead to a solution and the other is going to isolate them and make the problem 10x worse.
Being empathetic is the first step to forming trust. Also by the way even though I am saying all of this it doesn’t mean that if someone is being rude to you or insulting your friends you should just turn the other cheek and let them stomp all over you. What it means is that you have to be assertive with who you are and what you stand for but also being willing to listen and understand (not necessarily accept) what other people are saying.
Edit: Also FYI the far right are people and not all of them are 24/7 talking about far right stuff. So statistically they likely do want “normal relatable things” most of the time.
If they were to vote for their values who would they vote for?
The democrats aren’t upholding these values either and while I agree that they are much better than the current republican party it doesn’t mean that voting for them would be voting in their interest but instead in the least bad option.
We vote blue not to change the system but because voting red makes the situation worse. The whole affair with the GOP stacking SCOTUS with Federalist Society jurists provides one example of many. At this time, they’re trying to neuter elections to push Democrats out entirely.
To change society we’ll have to do far more than merely vote. And to date, we’ve had to claw every right we have by force or coercion, and when the public isn’t a direct threat to the elite, they feel free to strip away our rights. Dobbs was only the most public of the provisions: most fourth- and fifth-amendment protections have been stripped away, again by the US Supreme Court.
All that I am saying is that I think we are way past the time were voting is the most important thing we should be doing to make the situation better. People in power are going to make whatever they want illegal and use political justifications for them. There have been many states that have majority blue and majority red power and this same shit of empowering the status quo is common in both kinds of states. So I don’t believe either party is going to protect my rights if it doesn’t benefit them somehow and instead I am going to trust in the direct actions I and people that want change are actually taking to make things better.
Can you show me a single peice of Republican sourced legislation that aimed to improve the average Americans situation? Also for a bonus round feel free to justify how bathroom bans and creating a trans panic help the average American since it’s a major priority of the Republican party. Both sides are the same if you are a gullible dunce, sure…
My experience with “both sides are bad” type people is that they don’t typically think too hard on the reality of the nonsense they drivel and instead assume it must be that way because it’s what they’ve heard. How about giving us even a single example of democrats attempting to invalidate broad swaths of votes to disenfranchise republican voters like Republicans do. Or even trying to pass legislation to overturn vote results they don’t like, like Republicans have done in several instances since 2021. Can’t let the people decide what’s in their interest, they might not vote “right”.
Hell that and propaganda are pretty much the reason the party is alive, what with if being filled to thee brim with traitors and seditionists that continue to lie and obfuscate their parties coupt attempt. Oh yeah how many times have Democrat’s tried to steal the head of our democracy? I know two off the top, January 6th where they weren’t successful and the 2000 election where the Supreme Court overstepped their bounds after Republicans staged the brooks Brothers riot and handed GW the win despite margins being razor thin, far closer than trumps loss in 2020. Maybe look at the players there, you will probably see some overlap in the enablers and perpetrators of the J6 coupt attempt. Who is Roger Stone, right?
In any case if you’re going to pretend to care about the average American, if there’s any legitimate interest there, maybe take the time to know you’re not just making things worse yourself. At this point a vote for Republicans is a vote against the interest of the average American. If you think otherwise feel free to give examples.
Come on, you’ve built a massive strawman going on very little. I agree with a lot of what you are saying, but the position you’re attacking is clearly not the position Danterious intended to express. You act as if they stated both parties are equally bad when they explicitly stated the opposite.
It bothers me that you’re being heavily downvoted for saying that direct action is more effective/important than voting, so I’m chiming in to say I agree with you.
This isn’t an ‘enlightened centrist’ position here, just a realistic one. I will continue to vote Democrat and encourage others to do the same, but I don’t have any illusions that doing so is anything more than damage control.
Our political system in the US is corrupt, not just the people within it. Changing it will require external support.
No, it won’t really, because all you would be doing is removing the corrupt people from power without changing or replacing the corrupt system in which they operated.
Systemic change happens on 2 fronts, both internal and external.
direct action is more effective/important than voting
The important, crucially important part here that there is no either/or scenario. Voting is action, and if you do everything else but not vote, that everything else gets kinda pointless. At least for now, in couple of voting cycles GOP will complete their plan to destroy the democracy, and then the voters apathy will be self-fulfilling prophecy. But for now it’s not there yet.
If you look at what the administration is actually doing and trying to do, there is a lot of going to the right direction. There is absolutely not enough of that, they probably could and definitely should do more, but it’s disingenuous to say that they do absolutely nothing for the working class.
I don’t think they hate black and trans people but whatever warped version of black and trans people that they have been told. There have been studies that show having a gay friend in real life make people more accepting and I assume that similar things could be shown for trans and black people.
Yeah, but when they won’t make that friend, that “fun fact” doesn’t help anyone. So they are, for all intents and purposes, de facto racist even if in a perfect world where we all hang out on Sesame Street they wouldn’t be.
The culture war is the only lever the GOP has to win elections. Their domestic/economic policy is so bad for the majority of Americans if not packaged with propaganda.
I know I’ve seen some articles on this but I can’t seem to find them again. There were studies done where they asked self identified right wing people to agree or disagree with political statements.
People were very likely to disagree with a statement like “I support universal healthcare”, but very likely to agree with statements like “I support laws which would ensure no taxpayer would enter into medical debt for obtaining necessary medical care”. Essentially, if you just described socialist ideology, without using the common words for it, a large amount of right wing people completely agreed with it.
But right wing also oppose government interventions to lower those prices. And no, the market will not fix itself. Some things are not bound to laws of supply and demand. When your kid is on the operation table, you’re not going to tell him « hey sorry it’s too expensive to keep you around, we’re putting you down ».
That’s authoritarianism. You don’t see the CCP edging closer to a civil war based on propagated polarising. AFAIK, that’s never been achieved in human history. I’m sure it’s unlikely to happen, but between all the international targeting from Russia, China, etc. and then the US’s own media and governments, the US is soaked in propaganda more than anywhere else. Absolutely surrounded by it.
But this is the interesting part. The more someone is propagated, the less likely they are to realise it.
America doesn’t even need to do that. It just convinces people to not trust anything that doesn’t come from pre-approved sources and that works well enough.
Yes. The difference is that its corporations doing the the majority of the propagandizing rather than the government directly. But propaganda is propaganda.
I’ve noticed the same in conversations. When I talk about socialist theory, people agree 100%, but as soon as you say a buzz word it’s, “Now I don’t want full socialism!”
This has been my anecdotal experience as well. Most of the time when I ask my Republican friends their opinions on specific policies I find that their views are very populist leaning toward socialist. They just happen to also be motivated by fear and easily swayed by propaganda and will readily vote against their own interests in exchange for a false sense of security.
They are then confused and frustrated when the scumbags they voted for do exactly what they said they would do and it turns out badly.
