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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:It's okay to be against things. Against fascism, against bigotry, against inequality and oppression. Political groups who fear anger and disruption will always lose to the ones who don't. Republicans win because they don't care who they make mad, because they are for and against things - incoherent and repugnant though they may be. This guy appeals to action in the same breath as he frets over a "radicalized" left. I also find that for many liberals, how liberal you are is defined by how strongly you are against Republicans/conservatives, rather than what you support yourself. Like, when many people think of "the most radical liberals" what comes to mind is the people who laid down the sickest burns against Republicans. But in reality someone can be vehemently opposed to Republicans and still not be particularly left-wing themselves. I see this in my dad, who I consider fairly representative of Baby Boomer liberals in general; his liberalism seems to be largely motivated by a sort of "gently caress you dad" against Republicans and the idea that being a liberal = being open-minded. He follows a bunch of liberal blogs, and they almost always focus exclusively on talking about how terrible Republicans are, rather than defining and discussing any of their own long-term goals. While I won't necessarily argue that it's necessary for a political movement to be successful (though it might be), I think it's generally a positive and healthy thing for a political movement to have clear goals they support and are working towards. Liberals are generally lacking that, with their behavior usually defined either by resistance to Republican measures or by individual legislation that, while good, doesn't really tie into some "grand vision." edit: bag em and tag em posted:I think the key here is how do we radicalize someone who is comfortable? The people you are talking about have what they need and at this point a lot of the fighting to be done would be done for other, distant people over there. The GOP is largely consistent of people who are not fighting against some kind of oppression, but for personal gain. More money for me, gently caress you, is often quoted as the mentality. Unmotivated liberals with institutional power can sit around and go "well it would be nice for other people to benefit from progress so i hope they get on that." But they have no personal need to fight for it. I think this is a difficult problem (and possibly an impossible one to fix). I know a bunch of wealthy liberals, and they sorta-kinda care about helping people in theory but it never goes beyond discussions and is almost always limited to ideas that wouldn't be considered "radical." I think this is partly because wealthier people don't really understand what it even means to deal with hardship, in the same way as a man doesn't know how it feels to be a woman. Their lived experiences basically render them completely and utterly ignorant about what it's like to not have a comfortable, happy life. And these are people who I think, at their core, are good people. But it's impossible to communicate to them with just words what it's like to experience difficulty. As a result, it's impossible to really get these people to feel any sort of urgency, since the very concept of urgently needing help is foreign to them. I distinctly remember this one time I was talking to this guy and he told me about how the most difficult and painful thing he had ever experienced was not being accepted into Harvard for undergraduate (he was accepted to NYU Stern, which is the college we both attended). He was dead serious and had absolutely zero clue that this was an absurd sentiment. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Jan 20, 2017 |
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Jan 20, 2017 00:43
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Ocrassus posted:It is really hard though. I have this argument with so many people and the temptation sometimes to just get angry at their apathy can be overwhelming. You know, I honestly kinda prefer the ones who just go "gently caress this, my life is awesome and I'm gonna enjoy it" to the ones who try to pretend their goal is to help people. I don't really demand that they go out and volunteer at a soup kitchen or something; I think it's more useful for them to just support more radically progressive/leftist politics (that may result in higher taxes for them depending upon how wealthy they are). If anything, direct involvement with charity sometimes results in people thinking "I'm doing the right thing!" and sidelining any sort of discussing about more radical political change (this isn't to say it's bad to be involved with charity, but that I think it can often have some negative psychological side effects when more fortunate people use it as what you described as a "goodness tax"). I think that convincing the wealthy of these goals is ultimately futile, because they (as a demographic, there might be individual outliers) will never consent to anything that crosses a certain line (generally the point where it would noticeably affect their quality of life) An anecdote related to this is related to the aforementioned guy from my previous post (the one who talked about how not getting into Harvard was so difficult). A few years ago this guy created a company that basically focuses on recruiting young investors from universities and linking them with financial institutions (investment banks, hedge funds, etc). If he were doing this just because he thought it was fun/interesting to run a company, I would be totally cool with that. But he talks about how his goal is to help students who are worse off than him. And, like, he might have a point if he recruited from a wider range of universities, community colleges, etc, but he recruits solely from elite schools! These are people who don't need help! 99% of university students at Stern or Wharton or whatever who are interested in investing/trading would have been fine anyways! I think that people like this guy feel some sort of guilt/"responsibility" due to their good fortune and have no clue how to channel it usefully. But they aren't willing to really sacrifice anything and are biased in favor of "solutions" that don't cost them much, and I don't really think there's any way around that.
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Jan 20, 2017 19:05
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It's important to keep in mind that, in a roundabout way, the existence of more radical leftists also lends credibility for the less radical ones. A "the existence of the black panthers makes MLK more palatable" sort of situation. You need both groups to make the relatively more "moderate" version agreeable to more centrist liberals.
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Jan 20, 2017 22:44
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