cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49991990
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
177 points (98.9% liked)
Political Memes
12240 readers
2224 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
1) Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
2) No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
3) Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
4) No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
5) No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I know a lot of liberals that fit the first definition. The only real difference being they enjoy symbolic empathy.
The people I see living in my neighborhood with the "all are welcome here" pride + blm flags in their yard; the same people that show up at our town hall meetings fighting public transit, affordable housing, housing for the homeless.
They spend a lot of their energy having to explain why "maintaining the character and culture" of their neighborhood is all they want. Sometimes I prefer the rascist I grew up with in the south. You don't have to spend 30 minutes to realize their garbage people. They at least tell you straight up.
There aren't any liberals that would like Trump if he was a Democrat. Because he doesn't do the symbolic empathy. That's why they loved Obama so much. They used him like a BLM flag in their yard.
I mean, a lot of people like to pretend Berkeley, CA is a liberal city. I don't think they realize that the hippies were mostly kids of conservatives who wanted to do drugs and not go to war. That's about it. The summer of love was just that, a summer. The hippies turned into yuppies and traded weed and magic mushrooms for cocaine in the 80s
That movement was largely a place for young liberals, interested in resistance to Vietnam, to go and be useless and not become socialist. It was a means of keeping them separated from a growing militant resistance to the apartheid in America (Malcom X, Black Pathers, etc).
If you're smoking weed and telling everyone "just give peace a chance" you can stand idle as the violent state attacks black neighborhoods for mass incarceration and condemn "violence on all sides". Which is just allowing the violence of the oppressive state to be justified.
Being against bad things while telling everyone else "not yet" when they try to fight to stop the bad things. That's American liberalism in a nutshell.
Hell, listen to Kings frustration.
Or in song form by Phil Ochs: https://youtu.be/3cdqQ2BdgOA
Pointing to historical examples that liberals of the past failed on is hard for modern day liberals though. They know the Jim Crow south was bad. They know the Vietnam war was bad. But they're unable to realize it until after the fact. Israel took them 2 years of genocide to start acknowledging.