But but but, uhhh, RESTAURANTS RUN ON RAZOR-THIN PROFIT MARGINS

Aw shit, uhh PIZZAS WILL COST $50 IF WE RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE $1

:spray-bottle:

Luckily, this (and Bernie campaigning for Hillary in 2016) pretty much ends this conversation for all but a few weirdo holdouts. It never really caught on during the 2020 primary, which is when it would have mattered.

I’d say a subreddit railing against Sanders late in 2021 qualifies as a “weirdo holdout.” It didn’t land with most people, as evidenced by him leading the primary until the coordinated drop out/endorsement of Biden.

A glimmer of hope on the topic is how the “Iraq has WMDs” propaganda completely disintegrated. Of course there are counterexamples (people still believe all sorts of wild shit about the USSR), of course we aren’t going to occupy western China and have a highly-publicized search for evidence, but it is possible for a manufactured narrative to come undone, and to come undone in a way that the lie becomes common knowledge.

Say 10-15 years from now there are undeniably still Uyghurs in China, and their population has even grown. That would take a lot of wind out of the story’s sails.

A large section of the US left are fundamentally petty bourgeois socialists who turned to it because they were denied comfy professional jobs and houses after 2008.

This part seems correct, but they may not be that easily bought out. They’ve lived the majority (or all) of their adult life in precarity. At some point that makes one belive that any upswing will be fragile. You saw this a lot with the generation that grew up in the Great Depression.

So maybe leftists who luck into money won’t always see it as a permanent ticket out. This seems especially likely if they’ve seriously engaged in theory over a long period of time. Engels was loaded, after all.

They key is who they blame it on, and what solutions they’d accept.

If you’re poor, socialism doesn’t work because it makes you poor! If you’re rich, you’re a phony champagne socialist who’s betrayed the people!

:parenti:

Couldn’t be me in any grand strategy game

To make it more theoretical you could describe it in terms of exactly who bears the costs and who reaps the rewards.

Basically “if there was a button that would give you a billion dollars but kill a million poor people, how many world leaders would push it?”