I’ve been seeing a worrying number of these people on Lemmy lately, sharing enlightened takes including but not limited to “voting for Biden is tantamount to fascism” and “the concept of an assigned gender, or even an assigned name, at birth is transphobic” and none of them seem to be interested in reading more than the first sentence of any of my comments before writing a reply.
More often than not they reply with a concern I addressed in the comment they’re replying to, without any explanation of why my argument was invalid. Some of them cannot even state their own position, instead simply repeatedly calling mine oppressive in some way.
It occurred to me just now that these interactions reminded me of nothing so much as an evangelical Christian I got into an argument with on Matrix a while ago, in which I met him 95% of the way, conceded that God might well be real and that being trans was sinful and tried to convince him not to tell that to every trans person he passed, and failed. I am 100% convinced he was trolling – in retrospect I’m pretty sure I could’ve built a municipal transport system by letting people ride on top of his goalposts (that’s what I get for picking a fight with a Christian at 2AM) – and the only reason I’m not convinced these leftists on Lemmy are trolls is the sheer fucking number of them.
I made this post and what felt like half the responses fell into this category. Am I going insane?
You must log in or register to comment.
This rings extra true for me because many of the redfash that I used to follow (before russia invaded Ukraine and they went mask off) were actually ex-Evangelicals. Later it struck me how they’d just exchanged one fascist ideology with another.
Wild to me that people actually think liberal democracy isn’t authoritarian, it is literally the dictatorship of the bourgiosie
This has got to be a troll, right? A liberal democracy is by definition not authoritarian, what do you even think it means?
Nah, I agree with the original point. Liberal Democracy is only one form of Democracy, and is particularly good at resisting popular change and supporting whoever has the money to lobby. You can see in the US, for example, even presidents who win the popular vote, lose!
More direct democratic forms, whether that be direct democracy, participatory economics, parlimentary democracy, industrial democracy, and so forth are all more accountable to the people and capable of positive change that the public desires.
Despite being overwhelmingly popular, the US does not have: Legalized Marijuana, Medicare for All, Student Loan Forgiveness (outside loophole forgiveness), Enshrined Abortion Protection, and more.
Read up on the types of democracy here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_democracy
A liberal democracy is a representative democracy with rule of law, protection for individual liberties and rights, and limitations on the power of the elected representatives.
From your link, sounds like the exact opposite of authoritarian to me. Just because authoritarian “neo-liberal” places like the USA choose to call themselves liberal democracies doesn’t make them correct.
What is “authoritarian” if not a method to suppress popular opinion and exert the will of the minority? Those are the stated goals of liberal democracy, but not the function.
Where are you getting these “stated goals”? Who is the minority, elected officials? What am I missing here?
The stated goal of liberal democracy is to “enshrine personal liberties, the rule of law, Private Property, and political freedom” via a representative government in a Capitalist state. In another phrase, it is a Capitalist state with representatives.
In practice, the purpose of a representative, rather than more direct forms of democracy, is to provide the wider public with a set of predetermined choices, not to represent the views of the public. This results in political parties that are good at fundraising being the only viable parties.
Furthering this logical chain, those who appeal to those with the most ability and interest in shaping the state will be the representatives the public can vote on. Ie, those who can convince large corporations and the ultra-wealthy to make significant donations, are the ones who retain power.
The reality is that in Capitalism, a minority controls the majority of the wealth, and this minority is the Capitalist, owner class. Capitalists lobby and advertise for candidates that do not fundamentally challenge their profits or positions, which leads us to presidential elections that appear to be a constant “lesser evil” voting process. The evil is the point! We just choose which flavor is easier to suck down, which is normally the side willing to make more concessions.
More direct forms of democracy remove this barrier.
I think I get your point, but it seems to ignore that plenty of places have successful labour parties that have the backing of unions rather than wealthy capitalists.
presidential elections that appear to be a constant “lesser evil” voting process
Sounds like you’re basing all your arguments on one particular county!
ask informed middle easterners or south americans if they think you aint authoritarian.
or the informed people in your own homeless camps. or your own black and queer people. or your own immigrants. or maybe Assange, Snowden and many others.
What do you mean “you”? Do you think I’m an American? And do you think that I think the USA isn’t authoritarian?
I explain my comment to ilovethebomb
That comment has nothing to do with my actual question, you can’t just vaguely gesture to some graphs
The graphs and studies and comment elaborate on why liberal democracy is authoritarian.
Specifically the point I was making was that liberal democracy under capitalism is only democratic for the ruling class. It is an authoritarian dictatorship because it gives one class full authority to dictate the actions of another.
I understand how this can be difficult to grasp immediately if you don’t have an understanding of class dynamics and the history of labor. I don’t expect you to get it because of some comment on lemmy but do think about who really has power in capitalist neoliberal society.
This video is a decent entry point to my line of thinking here
neoliberal
I think this is the problem, you’re using “liberal” and “neoliberal” pretty interchangeably, right? Most people do not think ‘protect the rights of individuals and don’t tell them what to do’ and ‘let business and the ultra-rich do whatever they want’ are the same philosophy!
Most people do not think ‘protect the rights of individuals and don’t tell them what to do’ and ‘let business and the ultra-rich do whatever they want’ are the same philosophy!
They work out to be pretty similar in practice, though. Like, you can see how private property (not personal property important distinction) as a right encourages the buying up and scalping of pretty much anything that can be qualified as private property by, basically, random chance as according to the free market, right? So, the first one creates the second one. I.E. 9 times outta 10 they boil down to effectively being the same philosophy in practice.
They have a point for the USAs flavor of democracy specifically. I don’t have a choice on the ballot to vote for a working class person who shares my struggles. My options are those who came from very wealthy families and have tremendous influence.
You need a lot of money and power to get on ballots and to actually win anything. So yeah we have a democracy, but we only get to vote for the wealthy who are largely influenced (or bought and paid for entirely) by corporations and other ultra-wealthy people who want policy written for themselves.
Yeah, but I wouldn’t call the USA a very liberal place at all
You know, that’s fair too. We are pretty right-wing compared to most of Europe.
.ml domains always have the goofiest takes.
The owning class gets what they want while the working class seldom does.
You see how flat that line is? The percentage of the public that wants something has very very little effect on policy
The owning class (bourgiosie) has the authority to hand down dictates that the working class (proletariat) must abide by despite have essentially no influence on the nature of those dictates.
Don’t worry about getting banned. You didn’t post on the .ml instances after all! ;)
Seriously though, you’re not crazy. My advice is to not get emotionally invested in any of those types of interactions. If they’re being too stupid for you, just block them. You’re mental wellbeing will thank you for it.
In the long run, blocking them just cedes the floor to them.
Dude, everything on the internet is fake.
“People who say murder is bad are exactly the same as people saying being gay is bad because both say something is bad.” You are very smart.
“Authorianism is bad”
“Wow this guy litteraly sees nothing wrong with murdering gay people!”
Did you read the post? Like at all?
I’m not saying that conservative Christians and leftists have the same views. I’m saying they use the same bad faith tactics. They believe that nothing short of perfection in a single go is worth pursuing, and that anyone who dares to pursue it is at best wasting their efforts and at worst a traitor.
My comment was more on the original post. You can’t just switch the content of a point because another one is made in a similar way and say it’s basically the same. Guess i got cautious with all the “Climate change activists are like a religious cult” arguments. Just because two groups are advocating strongly for something doesn’t mean one of cant have good arguments and the other one isnt full of shit. That being said, I agree that not willing to compromise to a certain degree or aim for intermediate goals is stupid and not productive.
Did you forget leftists are the people organizing unions and protests? Some of them even push people to vote, not all of them are against voting. It’s weird that people don’t realize leftists aren’t one big group of people with exactly the same beliefs.
This thread sure had me fooled.
I mean it’s what you get for reading a lemmy thread made from an inflammatory post.
Stop trying to divide the working class against itself.
We are all working class.
If you’re fighting against reform and shill for China and Russia then you’re acting against all of our own best interests, don’t get mad when people retaliate over your bullshit.
I am being called a fascist for voting for a left of center politician who is not far enough left of center, and I am the one dividing the working class?
Tbh, I wouldn’t think someone calling you a fascist for voting Biden should be taken seriously. Although, as an abstentionist, I disagree with your strategy. I value other ways to act and can’t resolve myself to vote for this kind of politicians.
That being said, we have our estimates of what will actually stop fascists and what cannot. Voting, imo, is a strategy. If someday I’m not able to contribute meaningfully to the type of political endeavors I’m taking part in, I’ll probably start voting for this kind of candidates.
My own motto would be “do as you believe us best, as long as you’re trying to do something to slow down of repel the fascists. We’ll see what was and wasn’t effective later”
This is it tbh. In the vast tapestry of society we all find our own places and our own ways to contribute, and there’s never just one answer. Resistance to fascism in all contexts is a good thing.
The only thing I really challenge people on is a) a shared understanding of our history and where that’s put people today and b) the desire to connect with a community, support others and be supported themselves. Those are the pieces, the structure and implementation is up to others to build for themselves.
I am being called a fascist for voting for a left of center politician
Ten years Biden would have been called conservative.
The only reason he’s not now is because of how batshit insane Republicans are now.
Democrats have markedly moved left on things like climate change, gay rights, and abortion.
Immigration policy I’ll agree though, that seems to be an old Republican viewpoint for Democrats at this point, which is disappointing.
And here I’m the one who keeps getting banned from .ml for not worshipping Stalin hard enough.
This^
The more we infight the more time the billionaires have
The Nolan Chart used to be taught in intro to Poli-Sci. I’m not sure if it is anymore, but it should really be taught in high school.
Here’s the quiz (oversimplified by today’s standards), that will give you an idea of your political ideology position on the Nolan Chart.
Finally an explanation for a dumbass like me. The quiz might be oversimplified, but it seems like a decent starting point for what I should do my research on
It’s helpful for learning the difference between economic and social legislation. They’re displayed as two separate axes, demonstrating that political ideology is more of a spectrum that is defined by two independent variables.
Economic: More tax socialization - liberal, Less tax socialization - conservative
Social: More social liberty - libertarian, Less social liberty - authoritarian
This is basically how you get horseshoe theory, but if you come at an authoritarian leftist with horseshoe theory they’ll mention the nonsense fishhook theory.
We’ve seen Horseshoe theory in the development of several dictatorships. However, I don’t really follow how fish hook theory is anything more than a defensive suggestion to mask authoritarian progress.
I met him 95% of the way… and failed.
That’s because the people you’re picking fights with only care about being right. It’s why the American government undergoes a political ratchet toward the right: the people pushing for radical change at all costs and the people seeking compromise are not evenly distributed.
There’s this half baked idea that keeps bouncing around in my mind, let’s give it a engagement friendly name: Scam Theory.
Scam Theory, stated simply, is the idea that most of society is composed of scams. Scams, in this case, are any relationship where a large group of people come to believe lies that harm them and others, told by a small group of people who peddle those lies because they benefit from that harm.
It’s like Category Theory, where you start to see the commonality across many disparate domains of math; except in this case it’s commonality across many different social groups, and the commonality is the cycle of abuse.
Under Scam Theory, there are only minor implementation details that differentiate political zealots and religious zealots. Given some time, I could probably think of dozen more commonalities between leftist revolutionaries and christian doomsdayers. Or any other religion’s extremists for that matter. Or people that buy into get rich quick schemes. Or capitalism. Or any other type of scam.
One of the main aspects of commonality amongst all scams is that there are the in-group, who participate and get to go to heaven/live in utopia/become fabulously wealthy/find happiness/stay young forever/etc, and the out-group, who didn’t participate get to burn in hell/get walled for being counterrevolutionary/stay poor/be miserable/grow old and die alone/etc.
All you have to do to support Scam Theory is be vigilant of scams, spread this info, and don’t be like one of the easy targets who will suffer (scams) for not buying into Scam Theory
I don’t completely agree with your point but I feel it somehow. The question would be : what would be the opposite of this ? As you surely know, compromise, while crucial, also has its dangers.
Interestingly, Bertrand Russell made a similar argument about Marxism and Christianity, so you’re not alone in feeling this way.
I think the tendency you’re describing is real, but it only holds among a tiny minority of people, who happen to be quite loud in mainly online spaces. There’s no significant organisation of any kind that holds those views or is doing anything to implement them as any kind of policy, anywhere in the world.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of evangelical Christians!
My advice dealing with either is to politely engage, explain your views and, if they start being rude, stop talking to them.
Nobody making money from being a tankie doesn’t really make tankies better
Sorry, I don’t understand the relevance of this comment. I didn’t mention money and nor did OP. I don’t think tankies are better than Evangelicals, either (which I assume is what you meant). I just think the Evangelicals are more of a problem, because of their greater influence.
There’s no significant organisation of any kind that holds those views or is doing anything to implement them as any kind of policy, anywhere in the world.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of evangelical Christians!
You’ll make it really hard to have a debate with you because I have an absolutely no idea what you’re saying.
I think you’re trying to suggest that tankies are some kind of political organization the same as extremist Christians. They are absolutely not. They have no real power they’re basically just annoying online people they effectively do not exist in the real world.
Are you having a bad day or something?
Bertrand Russell made a similar argument about Marxism and Christianity
Of course he did. He wrote entire textbooks on philosophy of language that amounted to “X is actually just like Y for some mathematical transformation T”.
But that’s the thing about mathematical transformations. You potentially lose a bunch of information when you transform an apple into an orange by saying “They both look like fruit to me.” And Russell spent a bunch of time tackling the problem (ultimately unsuccessfully, as evidenced by the modern state of data compression) in a way your average Reddit-tier philosophy undergrad rarely does.
Sure trash is gonna act like trash. They want their fascist orange tumor to get back in so they can be violent and anti american.
Evangelicals come with serial numbers now?
I mean, how long do you expect people to participate in a game where there is no way to change the outcome for the better? People can act stupid, but that doesn’t mean they are stupid - more and more people are starting to see how this spectacle that the political racketeers and their media cronies insist on calling “Democracy!” really works. If you expect people to just bounce back from such realizations and simply “vote strategically” you’re in for disappointment.
I’m not USian… but if I was, would I go vote with you? Sure. But that’s only because I’ve had a long time to digest the fact that my vote means absolutely nothing (so-called “representative democracy” is a racket everywhere - not just the US), and would only do it out of solidarity with all the people who are terrified of what is coming next.
I’ve seen the ways that people have tried to get out the vote for this year’s election in the US… and I’m afraid to report that, so far, it’s not working - and that’s not your fault…
The difference is that revolutions HAVE happened throughout history, and have been successful.
Comparing a political act that has historical precedent to a bible story with no basis in fact is probably the most flaccid “both sides” centrist argument I’ve ever heard.
Most revolutions don’t result in a better world for the common person. They result in warlords taking power.
So how long does it take to go from “overthrowing the new warlords” and “we have to stay this way because this is the way it is”?
Like I know you didn’t mean to, but you just made a pretty good argument why a revolution isn’t inherently a bad thing: it’s replacing warlords.
Be a use even if you’re right, and every single prior revolution has resulted in warlords gaining power…
That doesn’t mean the next one will too. And the alternative is living under a system that’s inherently corrupt and was created by warlords whose main desire would be maintaining power and preventing change at all costs.
Like, you can say you don’t want to try, but why try to talk others out of the chance to make things better for everyone including yourself?
Why shit on people who want to make the world better just because they care to even talk about trying?
Meaningful change happens through incremental progress, which is what I believe OP is advocating for. Revolutionary change usually involves a charismatic idealogue who is capable of stirring up revolt in the common populace towards their own ends.
See: Lenin refusing to concede power after losing the election following the Bolshevik revolution.
This simply isn’t true. Throughout history you will observe longs periods of stagnation followed by a period of rapid change. This pattern is noticable in many things but especially in human political arrangement. Feudalism didn’t decay capitalism and capitalism won’t decay into socialism
Incrementalists reject the idea of punctuated equilibrium.
To be fair, the Socialist Revolutionary Party split up right before the election, and the right-wing retained the name. The Internet didn’t exist, so the public largely wasn’t aware. The left wing program won the majority of votes, even though the right wing SRP, who did not support the left wing program, won the vote.
Adding onto this, there were 2 governments, the constituent assembly, and the Soviets. The constituent assembly additionally did not recognize the october revolution or the legitimacy of the Soviets.
Lenin then took the Bolsheviks, disbanded the Constituent Assembly, and took power through the Soviets, where they had the majority support.
All that to say, the constituent assembly election was largely a mess, and it can be reasonably argued that if the decision to retain the constitient assembly and retain the right wing SRP had witheld, the popular will of the people would not have been upheld and the White Army likely would have returned Russia to Monarchism under the Romanovs.
It really wasn’t a situation with a clear democratic process at any time, neither before or after, which is the reality of a revolution during war time, so we can only speculate from hindsite what might have happened.
Meaningful change happens through incremental progress
Name one large change that happened slowly over decades that wasn’t a slow build till the dam burst.
It’s be nice if you used America, but you’re not gonna find an example.
Minimum wage increase? LGBTQ rights? Hell, even segregation took a few decades to fully go away, and depending on who you ask, it still hasn’t.
Of course we should be disruptive and protest and riot. But let’s also focus on one issue at a time instead of saying “anything short of perfection in a single step is not worth fighting for at all”
Minimum wage increase?
…
Uh…
The federal minimum wage was last updated in 2009…
What was the campaign slogan of the president who won the 2008 election? I can’t remember, but I’m pretty sure his campaign wasn’t about sudden change was bad and we should move things slowly.
Besides, we’re talking about incremental change. And I guess “every 15 years” would be an increment, but Biden hasn’t talked about raising it, and trump won’t, so the best we can hope for is “every 20 years”?
Like, you didn’t get three words in before you started arguing my point homie.
You’re too hung up on labels and not on how most voters want the same stuff.
If you want incremental change with the federal minimum wage, neither party is giving you what you want.
The federal minimum wage in the United States when it was introduced was $0.25. Any increase since then is exactly the kind of incremental change that OP was talking about.
And, yes, we have to fight for even those incremental changes. But they are always more longstanding than the kinds of changes that result from an idealogue riling up his followers to revolt, which will be overturned as soon as the next idealogue amasses a big and angry enough following.
You know, when I wrote in the original post that leftists didn’t read more than the first sentence of a comment before writing a reply, I thought I was exaggerating.
What about LGBTQ rights and segregation?
How about any country with universal healthcare? Or do you think that the UK and Canada got our healthcare systems through violent rebellion instead of parliamentary action?
Now, go ahead and name any country that was better off after a revolution. Cuz all I can think of is China, Russia, and [ waves vaguely in the direction of America ].
Cuba. Haiti. The Chiapas. Uhh, probably brazil. I dunno, I guess my point would just be to kinda of gesture at anticolonial action more broadly, but yeah.
Or do you think that the UK and Canada got our healthcare systems through violent rebellion instead of parliamentary action?
What?
Do you think the only sudden change is violent rebellion?
Do you think that an unconventional candidate like Bernie Sanders or even Trump winning a democratic election is a revolutionary change? Sweetie, that is change within an existing power structure, which is the antithesis to “revolutionary.”
Revolutionary change is what the MAGAts attempted on January 6th.
Why shit on people who want to make the world better just because they care to even talk about trying?
I almost think that’s the intent of the original post. Lots of people are doing important justice work, but in some circles they are treated like traitors to the cause if they aren’t threatening class warfare.
and none of them seem to be interested in reading more than the first sentence of any of my comments before writing a reply.
I feel like that’s the important bit of what OP typed.
OP wants to make 20 claims in one comment, and expects anyone that replies to address all 20 in depth.
That’s known as a Gish Gallop. The point of it is to overrwhelm someone with so many false claims that they can’t respond to them all.
OP is claiming that instead of people doing that, they stop and address the first untrue thing OP has claimed…
Which is apparently their first sentence the majority of the time.
But the fundamental overall point of complaints like OP, is they feel there shouldn’t be standards if you’re on the same “team”. Which ironically is what it’s like for devout religious followers.
No matter the small disagreements, at the end of the day you’re on the same team.
The left tends to have more varied standards of what’s ok, and an unwillingness to compromise personal morals to fit in with the “team”.
Most people think that’s a good thing. The opposite is how we keep ending up with fucking nazis all the time.
OP wants to make 20 claims in one comment, and expects anyone that replies to address all 20 in depth.
No, I mean that I wrote a comment with five sentences and you literally only read the first one.
For the record, I wrote that sentence in reference to the post I linked to in the body. Take this chain, for example. Or this one where someone admitted point blank to not reading a single word I wrote.
Now. It would be incredibly hypocritical of me to not respond to the rest of your comment after chewing you out for not responding to the rest of mine, so I will. I do not think it is unreasonable, if I agree with 90% of your positions but disagree with the remaining 10%, to expect not to be treated like a fully fledged enemy. I absolutely do not think that saying I’m on the same team should be sufficient to demand respect, but I do expect to be given the benefit of the doubt, and to be able have a civil discussion about why the less-drastic methods I prefer to achieve the same aims you seek are insufficient. I was not in the thread I think you are referencing.
Can I offer a little advice…? I recently started doing this myself.
If the language starts to become emotional, nope out asap. These people just want a fight, and you won’t get anything else out of them.
At best they are emotionally immature and might grow out of it some day, at worst they are trolls trying to drain your energy so it can’t be used elsewhere.
That’s known as a Gish Gallop. The point of it is to overrwhelm someone with so many false claims that they can’t respond to them all.
I’m not really sure that a gish gallop can happen in a written medium. In this case, someone could very well just make an extremely long drawn out post that addresses all 20 points. It’s not like a live chat or a conversation where someone can talk over you, or actually just raise a bunch of new points that don’t make a lot of sense when bunched together.
In this case, someone could very well just make an extremely long drawn out post that addresses all 20 points.
And that would take a lot of time and effort…
For no chance of it working, your time is just being wasted
Why comment in the first place with only a single point that has absolutely no chance of working, then?
Outside of the word “capitalist,” literally nothing presented in the top half of the image is even political, let alone authoritarian 🙄 it kinda seems like you’re just using popular negative words against things you dislike.
“Any attempt at actual progress makes you a liberal” isn’t political? “I have a right to tell you what media you should watch” isn’t political?
What are you talking about?
You know, “Any attempt to make actual progress makes you a lukewarm Christian” is kind of a weird and ambiguous statement and seems like someone was working backwards from the starting point of being anti-leftist.
Related: one glaring thing of note is anti-leftist sentiment routinely conflates liberal and leftist together.
I’m still confused. The Tumblr OP explicitly did not do that, and neither did I. I acknowledge the difference so that I can be left of center without having to associate myself with people who think that voting for Joe Biden instead of <insert third party candidate here> makes me a fascist.
What do you mean? It specifically says leftist, and even you quoted in reference the part that used liberal.
The second comment has been removed, but the first one seems fair to me (I hope you won’t dismiss this out of hand as an authoritarian leftist, I’m not authoritarian at all). Trans people don’t choose to be trans, so calling them sinful just to endear yourself to a church member doesn’t seem materially different from saying to a regressive Mormon that, sure, black people bear the mark of Cain.
It just labels a vulnerable group as inherently problematic. It’s not authoritarian to be surprised or upset by that.
I elaborated more on why I conceded that point further down that thread. I would like to emphasize that I sincerely do not believe that being trans is sinful or in any way unnatural or problematic. Trans people have existed for millenia and history is rife with records of them. I realized that, since the person I was arguing with was not thinking rationally, I could not convince him with reason (plus, as stated in the post, it was really late at night for me (we lived nine timezones apart) and I really wanted the argument to be over so that I could go to bed – at least half of it was “fine, you can have this point, since I don’t have the energy to argue with you”) so, since I could not get rid of his transphobia, I tried to convince him, if he must be transphobic, to at least do so in the privacy of his own head.
I apologize for the insult to the trans community, and I will stress again that that concession in no way reflects my actual beliefs, but I believe it was a necessary evil.
In cases where convincing people not to be transphobic is not an option, convincing them to keep it to themselves reduces harm more than getting into a big fight over whether it’s sinful (which, since no two interpretations of the bible are the same, one cannot possibly win) and giving the transphobe ammunition with which to hate in the form of “lmao look at this snowflake”.
That’s not the argument. Leftists are fine with incremental change and improvements, they just do not believe continuing Capitalism counts as an incremental improvement. If a country isn’t moving towards Socialism, concessions are nice, but insufficient to count as meaningful change.
I think a lot of this whole “liberal vs leftist” stuff here roots in defederation, creating 2 large echo chambers with some bleedover but no actual crossing over. This results in a lot of (usually incorrect) assumptions and good-faith misreadings of original points and takes.
Additionally, Leftists are usually very confident in their views and takes, because usually they have at least read some theory, whether that be Marx, Goldman, Lenin, Kropotkin, or so forth, while Liberals usually form their world views based on their personal experiences and view of the world. Some leftists are very aggressive in confronting liberal views, which in turn can push liberals away, instead of learning more.
I think it is the juxtaposition with “lukewarm christian” that belied a sense of reverse engineering to me. It indicates a view of liberals as a degree of leftist, which is usually an oppositional perspective.
American progressives are crying for what’s already working in Europe. I am not sure the European norm is that revolutionary, tbh. But it’s “revolutionary” for Americans.
Not at all what’s being talked about in this post. More like the people wanting a civil war that will result in the deaths of millions.
I don’t know that most people actually want it so much as they’re tired of all the edging
Ah yeah, I didn’t read OPs body text. The authoritarian left and right are equally repulsive to most people. It’s always a small, but vocal minority that moves the needle on any issue, but not till they can get some kind of common ground with the masses. Advocating for extremist transformations is never going to fly.
So coming back to my original post, it would be “revolutionary” for America to become like progressive European countries w.r.t social policies.
