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To all the LibRules
(lemmy.tf)
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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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This isn't just a liberal issue, it's a political climate issue that everyone plays a part in. Liberal 'smugness' is a reaction to conservative anti-intellectualism. When their feelings are as good as your facts, there is nothing left to debate.
No matter how simple liberals try to explain things, it doesnt matter. Conservativism has stopped having substance worth debating over when it is no longer about policy, but all about taking the opposite side of every liberal stance.
Liberals are not at fault for the willful ignorance of rural voters. No one starts off being smug and condescending to people. This happens after they've tried to explain with civility a thousand times and nothing worked. When ego and pride, not empathy and understanding, are the only things of value to conservatives, liberals resort to contempt. There is nothing left but to resent these people for being pigheaded and small minded. Their world views are set in stone by fox news, and any attempt you make at showing them the truth is deemed as a personal attack.
I’ve managed to radicalize multiple of my blue collar, truck loving, baby Jesus spouting, coworkers. It’s a process, but so was my on radicalization, just a different one due to our different material conditions.
Obviously, you can’t change everyone’s minds, but in my experience, there’s not much mind changing that has to be done in a lot of cases, just education on the root causes of the things they already know and notice.
When one party is telling you that this is the best time in our history, while your wages have gone down for 30 years straight, and the other party is the only one addressing their issues, but is doing so through inflammatory rhetoric and outright lies, it’s easy to see why someone would lean towards one over the other, and why they’d come to believe one sides lies over the other side. The trick is that most rural atomized people recognize most of the same problems in our society, the same way the rest of us do, they’ve just had people telling them lies about why those things are happening.
If you want a mass movement, you have to meet the people where they are. If you want to feel superior, then dunking on rednecks is the way to go. That doesn’t mean accepting bigotry, but recognizing that everyone is at a different stage in their political development, and that it takes a custom catered approach towards each individual in order to best effect said development.
A big problem i see liberals having when trying to change the minds of both leftists and conservatives, is an inability to even consider any aspect of another’s perspective, and a belief in one’s own perceptions as objective reality. In doing so, they will argue against their perception of others beliefs, rather than actually discussing and finding what those beliefs are, or where those beliefs come from.
It’s almost like no one remembers that redneck meant socialist union organizer before it was corrupted to truck loving suburban hillbilly wannabe. The working class is ripe for radicalization, but you have to treat them like full people first, not caricatures.
I have talked to my conservative friends on Facebook about their problems and their perspectives and try to understand where we agreed on things; what I found was that we agreed on a ton of things. This is funny because they would often times believe I was conservative simply because I was listening to them.
The biggest hurdle seemed to be some kind of weird mental block whenever it was revealed that they were talking to someone who didn't religiously follow certain political stances or certain politicians. This bothered me because I wanted to discuss certain topics and politicians and the conversation would immediately end whenever doubt was introduced.
Meanwhile, it seems whenever I criticize a liberal ideal with liberal friends I would get a lively conversation and nobody hating anyone at the end. I want to know why it's like this!!
Cognitive dissonance.
“Coping with the nuances of contradictory ideas or experiences is mentally stressful. It requires energy and effort to sit with those seemingly opposite things that all seem true. Festinger argued that some people would inevitably resolve the dissonance by blindly believing whatever they wanted to believe.” Festinger, Leon (1962). "Cognitive Dissonance"
See my other comment. I think that wall of doubt is consciously or subconsciously knowing that if they agree with you, have a realization, and their thinking changes, they will stick out and face getting that same cold shoulder from their friends, family, and community forever. Peer pressure is very real, especially in rural places where there aren’t too many peers to choose from.
I find similar issues when I discuss things with liberals. So many are so religiously committed to their parties ideological stances, that they often don’t even realize they are ideological stances, but insist that they’re just “common sense” that the rest of us are too stupid to recognize. No, I won’t support your reactionary policy that neglects the foundational material conditions that create the very issue that you’re seeking to address. No, I won’t succumb to, “Yes what we did was wrong, but we’re past that now” when there has been no meaningful actions taken to ensure that it wouldn’t happen again, and evidence shows that it is still happening and never stopped. No, I won’t cheer on the alphabet agencies just because they’re attacking “the other team”. I think they should be dismantled, and that position doesn’t change based on who they’re attacking right now.
Most all of my friends are pretty liberal, and I enjoy a rousing conversation about policy with them, but the only ideological stances I've ever heard liberals not move on are human-rights type stuff, everything else is on the table. Without talking in vague overtones about generalities, I don't think it's possible to really dig into the issues you are talking about further.
The problem, as I see it, is that many conservative ideologues back in the 80s discovered that you can't get people out to the polls with boring policy stances, so conservatives started pushing wedge issues and the culture war. Ever since then, it's been impossible to pull some people away from their culture war battles. Now, this culture war has escalated so that legislation is targeting specific groups and having direct harm on people. And conservatives are celebrating this harm because there are so many perceived aggreviences already that who cares about actually governing, it's easier to score points on your opponent.
And rich liberals are just sitting back and banking on the outrage at conservative policies to just fix itself without any work. Making peoples lives better involves directly engaging them not speaking about them and around them. So, we are just in this stuck place where the majority is unhappy with everyone, and everyone sticks in their corner because everyone is outraged all the time. Rich people love this situation where everyone is blaming whoever the media is telling them to blame instead of blaming rich people.
Every conversation about how liberals or conservatives are the problem seems to avoid speaking about rich people and their influence on our entire way of life.