For instance, I have an aunt who is definitely MAGA, and is flirting with Q-Anon ideas. However, she has pretty good views on the environment and animal rights. For instance, after travelling to Ecuador, she donates to some Ecuadorian land trust run by locals. However, if you start talking to her about the border or gender, she goes full Orbán.
Not family really, they’re mostly just lib or con (though I guess one guy is like a “moderate” lib but clearly understands the world and capital better than the others, but chooses to be a class traitor and make $$$ rather than being left-wing much at all) but I have run into a lot of, shall we say, idiosyncratic views at the local worker co-op coffee shop… you’d expect decent politics from people there, some of whom founded the worker co-op, but its really all over the place there:
1 with major terf-brain, one with almost-great politics but a closet misogynist, 1 regular who seems like a bernie type guy on the surface, but over time I’ve heard him multiple times discussing the republican primary candidates and seems to really like Vivek lmao, etc
I was talking to my Dad’s wife about the way capitalism controls us, including be media we consume, how all politicians are in the pocket of the capitalist overlords, and she was all in agreement, and yet she is a staunch Trump supporter. But she’s no stranger to hypocrisy, she also thinks that we should cut social spending while living off disability. It’s a real “rules for thee and not me” dichotomy. I do think she’d be a great ally in the revolution in a general sense tho.
Talking to some Trump supporters, I really think a good number believe that the things about him being racist and misogynist and such is just liberal media propaganda, and they don’t actually care much about many political topics but just know there is something wrong with the system. With slightly different conditions or experiences I could see a lot of them being comrades. There are definitely a number of dedicated white nationalist Trump supporters though.
I think you’ve got it. I don’t think many conservatives actually care enough to be coherent. They know something’s wrong, but all they’ve ever known is whiteness, apple pie, patriotism, that whole slurry of stuff. The last time they thought about civics was elementary school where they got the racist hagiography of George Washington. So that’s where they start as their framework.
I agree with this. However, I do believe a lot of them are racist in the way that the system guides them to be. I grew up right by a major hub of black poverty, where there was a lot of violence, drugs, theft, etc., and that is what was reported to us on the nightly news. This idea that black people are inherently bad and dangerous is what people grew up with and, for people like her who never get out of their little bubble and meet people different from her, that is the image they are stuck with. The same has happened with hispanic people recently, but she had met enough of them to see that they are “not all bad” (her words).
There’s this subset of mildly racist middle class white people who just don’t care enough to know better.
I’ve got family members who think consumers drive demand and don’t believe that capital both restricts and drives consumer “choice”
This is very common sadly, especially from people who have been fed modern econ theory that tries to convince you that the market is some autonomous mechanism that we can all control to the same degree and that it’s not controllable by the bourgeois class according to their interests.
China has a massive state surveillance and censorship apparatus,
Gee, I wonder why
There’s no way you can maintain control over your nation and protect your people against CIA / State Department coups without having an extremely large and effective surveillance apparatus.
It does far, far more than monitor for spies.
I agree with you that in a world where any state has an intelligence agency, every state needs its own intelligence agency.
I am not even coming close to defending the CIA, but its possible that the enemy of my enemy is not actually always a great way to run a society.
my brother is a tankie
Team up and deprogram your dad, then knife fight in the backyard later 👍
They already teamed up and made me homeless.
Anyway, its not possible to deprogram my Dad. Tried for years. He’s never wrong you see, because what about this unrelated complex topic he has no understanding of? He is a master of gish gallop and rhetorical trickery, and when he actually does obviously lose an argument he just laughs.
Tankie brother? Maybe possible to deprogram, but it would be pointless. He is massively neurotic, depressed and highly manipulative. Also very anti social.
Never took any of my advice relating to my decade of experience in the tech industry, never listened to what i was saying about econ or poli sci until a youtuber he watches told him about it, despite my degrees in econ and poli sci. And then he would either gaslight me and tell him that i did not actually tell him what i told him 6 months ago, or he would have a depressive breakdown and need my forgiveness and support everyday for 2 months.
I /could/ easily beat him in a knife fight, but at this point I am content for him to live the rest of his life knowing what he did to me and being a neurotic guilt ridden mess about it, while I sleep soundly on the other side of the county, never speaking to him again.
never listened to what i was saying about econ or poli sci until a youtuber he watches told him about it, despite my degrees in econ and poli sci
lol, please be doing a bit right now.
He is a friendless neurotic depressed drug addict who unironically still loves South Park and Rick and Morty. He still plays every Pokemon game that comes out despite being in his 30s, is terrified, literally terrified of any game with direct online contact with another player, oh right, and lied to T Mobile to engage the parental control mode on my phone and stalk me in his car and on foot, and then lied about doing that to the rest of my family.
Its fitting for a tankie to spy on his brother and lie about it though, so points for being true to form.
Liking South Patk and Rick and Morty is cringe, but do you really think it’s uncommon for adults to play Pokemon games
I get what you’re saying about the anarchists, but I have to point out that anarchism is a threat both to capitalist and socialist states from definition. They don’t have to be supressed for no reason, but if they’re organised and planning to do actual revolutionary action then a state has to supress them as with any other inside threat. Socialism is still a nessecary intermediate step to communism that requires a state to defend the interests of the working class until the classes fade away and a supressing mechanism such as a state would probably be unneeded at that point.
As of China, I’ll say that westerners are surveilled to an insane degree in the US and to a lesser degree in Europe too. I don’t like being surveilled in either case, but this is also not an inherent aspect of socialism as opposed to capitalism, it’s an inherent aspect of the state.
I agree with you that the logic of a state necessitates its survival over any principles it purports to uphold.
And yes, of course Western societies have terrible surveillance apparatuses as well.
Kind of all goes back to the whole ‘being critical of the concept of a state because it always has to maintain its own stability and existence over all other objectives’ thing.
Ron Paul Libertarian Aunt who works at national parks so she can be closer to the leylines.
