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I think we should have sympathy. Better late than never, and nothing will ever change if people aren't allowed to learn and grow.
MAGA is a community, and a lot of MAGAtards are only there for the community. If progressives aren't willing to accept personal growth, there is no reason for them to grow.
Progressives need to take the high road and welcome the MAGAts who have finally seen the light.
An eye for an eye only creates blindness. Someone needs to stop the cycle.
Yeah, people need to remember that most of the maga base are from the working class. They're not all southern gentry descendants of slave owners living comfortably on their family's generational wealth while using their social privilege to actively make life worse for everyone else. Those are just the leaders of the movement, but they wouldn't get very far without the support of roughly half of the working class.
The entire reason those working class people were able to be radicalized in the first place were a combination of the following: ignorance and shitty education; economic hardship and marginalization; distrust of the government and the elites; misplaced fear and rage that was actively stoked by those in power and directed towards political targets to create a sense of "us vs. them"; and overall just years of destitution and discontentment that the corrupt fascists took advantage of to radicalize these people.
Most of those things are deeply working-class issues that many of us face; it's just the conclusions that they were resultantly radicalized towards that were misguided. Many of them are in the cult too deep and will never let go of it, never admit they were wrong. The rest have the potential, though, if they're shown the way forward, and a few million less of them and a few million more of us might ultimately make all the difference.
This whole notion of "chase away anyone who remotely resembles a conservative without even asking what their beliefs and opinions really are, what they struggle with and what's important to them, etc." has always been a losing strategy. Yet people have attacked me as if I'm defending conservatives whenever I point out that many of these people might actually fall on our side of the fence if we stop pushing them onto the other.
Nope, sorry. The time for that was 2015 - 2017, or at the absolute very least after the attempted coup and stolen election lies. No sympathy at all now, It's scorched earth. These people deserve reeducation camps where we try to deprogram them and they do hard labor for the glory of an egalitarian, enlightened U.S.
Well said. Also, if you get too picky about your allies, you might never win the war.
I know what you're saying is probably the best course of action. But they are so disingenuous I just cannot trust them. Their entire basis of voting for him was out of selfishness and hate.
If I were Brad Pitt at the end of Seven, I would absolutely pull that trigger. I'm sorry.
Sympathy for what though? He's not a victim, so what is there to sympathiz about?
Did he actually learn anything or is he just going to vote for the next fascist with an R next to their name?
It's very likely that they don't learn what they aren't thaught. You don't teach anything if there is no contact, and moments like this are opportunities for contact.
Yesyes, I get it, it's not your job to teach them. The issue is though that nobody else will, except of course propagandists on the right who are happy to teach them.
Here's the thing though the entire internet is available for them to learn things themselves. It shouldn't be our job to teach them anything.
I 100% agree. And no, it shouldn't be our job. But unfortunately, it kinda is.
I mostly grew up in a right wing/conservative environment. The only reason why I'm not a right winger is because I always had a curiosity for different ideas and ways of thinking and wanted to actually understand people's views.
Eventually, as frustrating as it was, I had to come to terms that many people don't share that curiosity. Most people are focused on other things and only seem to kind of adopt concepts they are told, often without really thinking about it.
And more often than not, it's right wingers telling them stuff and it's right wing stuff that sticks, as right wing stuff is quite simple and easily digestable (simple concepts, clear enemy, simple problems and simple solutions). However, oftentimes, it does not stick very hard and the only reason why it sticks is because they are simply never challenged. In a lot of cases, it slowly falls apart if you challenge them, as long as you don't give them an easy excuse to dismiss you.
But unfortunately, this is typically not a fast process. So yeah, it is very frustrating, especially because people have access to all the knowledge they need.
But the hard reality is that chances are they will sooner go down a crazy right wing conspiracy rabit whole. In order for them to move towards the left just by themselves, they would need to throw their entire understanding of virtually everything they know out the window, and by that point, the right is more comfortable because you can just build your world however you want.
If we want the world to be a better place than it absolutely is our job. Conservatives see it as a job to brainwash and create propaganda.
We should see it as a job to bring these people back from the edge, and to reintegrate them with society. Ignoring them, and blaming them, will continue to make the problem worse.
When an entire segment of the population that are maga nutso Christian nationalist want me to not even exist, no it's not my job. It's not my job at all to educate fully formed adult humans who have the breath of all information of the entire world at their fingertips but they refuse to expand their minds and use it.
The cycle will continue then, and nothing will ever get better. You can't hope for things to get better without also putting the work forward to make those changes.
You want them to think you should exist? Then emotionally appeal to them and remind them that you're a person. This only really works on the ones you know anyways, but if no one ever steps up to teach them, then you can't expect them to ever change.
How'd that work out with the Confederacy? Did turning the other cheek teach them the error of their ways? Or did it just create a society that makes excuses to justify its racist "heritage"?
You are explicitly describing a situation where the people didn't actually change at all. If you remember the whole Reconstruction period it was basically white Southerners refusing to change and waiting the north out. As soon as the north gave up they quickly undid as much as possible.
Fucking miles different than someone actually chaning their mind or regretting their past actions. The south did neither
My point is, they won't regret anything. A few might...for a minute. And then they'll go right back to voting whichever way Fox News and Steve Bannon tell them to. All the same people who are currently pulling their strings right now, will just wait a little while and then start doing it all over again, once the heat is off.
Which makes it exactly the same as what happened after the last civil war...which you described quite well. Trust me...that's exactly how it will play out again, unless some serious changes are made to US society.
People do change, but you have to let it.
Honestly the view of its impossible for people to change is just as stubborn as most conservativism. If we reject the possibility for people to change how do we fix any of this? Do we need to kill about 50% of the population?
This idea of pushing away those that come to their senses only helps the conservatives achieve their goals by forcing them back to their old views.
It's odd to me that conservative media celebrates converts and uses that to feed their propaganda machine which then increases the "converts". But then we're going to go out of our way to help them retain people by pushing them away when they start to doubt the propaganda.
You say "people change". But, they don't. Not really anyway.
This is exactly why history will always end up repeating itself. Because people never fucking learn. We're literally running through the same cycle, over and over again, just with slight variations on the same theme...and folks like yourself will always convince yourself that the best thing to do is exactly the same thing we did the last time, hoping for different results.
It's the definition of insanity.
If we assume people can't change, which is bullshit you believe people can change but you just falsely assume they can only change in one direction, what's your solution?
If we believe your people cannot, there is no solution besides a whole lot of death or giving up entirely.
Also I have no interest of "doing the same thing as last time". If we go back to the Confederacy every memeber of their government should have hanged. In modern times we should actually bring our public officals to trial for their crimes.
We need major changes to our society as a whole. That's only going to happen if we get people to switch sides to achieve a majority. Or the less savory option of trying to murder the other half of the population while they try to do the same
It's insane to believe we can change a system and not change its people
Btw human history isn't the past 150 years of American politics. People have an immense capacity to change and learn.
I don't know that a Trump voter holds the same culpability as a Confederate soldier.
More culpability then, I agree.
More.
That's only because the civil war hasn't started yet.
It's a community in the same way fans of a TV show are. Parasocial at most. Shared imbecility, more probably.
The sentiment of your post is commendable, but I'm skeptical that any magats are "finally seeing the light". They've been fully supportive of bigotry and facsism for a decade now. I'm relieved that support for trump is beginning to dwindle, but it's not because those supporters are now becoming more progressive. Its because their gas prices have gone up. They will blindly continue to vote red in the future.
Cautiously optimistic, until they turncoat on us.