Hey everyone!
Thought it would be helpful to have a thread in the community that isn’t just about constant armchair political analysis. Feel free to chat about anything here, as long as it fits with the community’s rules!
I had a weird conversation with a older friend that is involved in local politics last night. She’s a dem and I, of course am not. So I try to meet her and my other older dem friends a bit in the middle but mostly where they are at with political discussions. Mostly on topics of women’s rights, or worker reform, and other things that tend to run parallel with our respective camps of thought.
But China got brought up and I had mentioned I wanted to explore their political atmosphere more. She dropped the whole “China is an authoritarian regime” bit. I said something to the effect of how the US “is fairly authoritarian dontcha think?” , and her retort was freedom of speech in the US, which I feel is mostly a thinly vailed means if keeping the masses sedated at this point. We have some freedom of speech but we also have antifa members getting shoved into vans at protests. I said as much and she acted like there isn’t any such thing happening.
I think what mostly bugs me about her saying this is that we marched together at the woman’s rights protest when RvW was overturned. I feel like that should be some sort of push for her to realize that we don’t have the freedoms in this country that we are told we do when your right to bodily autonomy can just be taken away from your but a majority vote fro the SCOTUS.
This is mostly me just venting.
The Red Scare never ended, it simply slithered back to it’s lair to slumber, and like any good dragon, its lair projects it’s authority on the region even while it sleeps.
People are complex and they will have complex and conflicting views. Also depending on just how old this person is, the Cold War could have been very real for them. For me, it was simply history, or campy set dressing for entertainment in games and movies (looking at you Red Alert 1/2/3).
But I hear you. The political discourse with my friends group is all over the map. It can get exhausting. It’s also hard when you can see they’re right at the threshold of understanding but are just refusing to dig deeper. Patience is key I think.
She definitely is old enough to have lived through the 60s so that would have been the height if the Red Scare, Vietnam, Civil Rights Movement, etc. But she also does that thing that most libs these days will do and say she’s “about as liberal as they come” which I think meant something different in a time now passed.
The major frustrating part is that I am the local Democrat’s Club acting secretary(long story short, they needed someone that could use computers and I was friends with some of them already) but the rhetoric lately since we all live in a very red city in a very red state is “how can we get more people involved?” and every time I say they need to move more to the left. It just seems to fall on deaf ears. It’s like the have this unwritten understanding that everything is wrong about Capitalism except for the capitalism part.
I keep telling them, they need go to the 2 local colleges and help reboot the clubs there. Last night I even mentioned there is a new resurgence of Christian deconstruction that is ripe for the picking and they didn’t seem to care. And I know there is one because my wife is a Christian leftist. We’ve talked a lot about it. I’ve suggested I can reach out to the local DSA club and every time they are like “ewww socialists?” I mean they don’t say that exactly but it feels like that, you know what I mean?
And I am the young guy and they keep asking me if I have any friends. I do but guess whats, they are all either radicalized, closet leftists, or are Zoomers and Millennials that can barely survive because the economy is shit, housing market is shit, the price of eggs went up 8x in a year and no one can afford anything so they all pass the time by sharing gaming memes on discord. Like, give them a reason to care, y’all!
Yeah I know people in that age bracket and they do the same thing. They’re not very politically involved so it’s excusable to some degree. However, you would think that if you’re in politics you would have read up on and understood things like Marxism-Leninism, or any other political school of thought. Even if only to have an awareness of them.
I don’t know, maybe I’m brain broken, but I enjoy reading theory! I’m not even remotely in politics…
But coming to the conclusion that we need decommodify housing and maybe even encourage mixed use zoning over single family zoning is probably a hard pill to swallow when you were born in the 60s and lived in suburbia your whole life. It’s a lot easier to just say nice things about minorities and freedom and democracy and whatever, then it is to admit that the foundation of the figurative house is crumbling and coming up with a plan to fix it.