cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26226188
cross-posted from: https://lemy.lol/post/39626252
We have to agree where we ARE before we stand a chance to agree about what we do from here.
Look at your retirement go! Good thing everyone who has a dick is forced to go into the dick restroom:
This is the correct way to do it. We’re all in the same boat no matter what choices we made that brought us here. If we keep up with the petty I told you so’s or doing things out of spite of others choices were going to stay falling down this nightmare path. A lot of people make bad choices but not everyone is doing it cause they are a terrible person.
Or just grow up, admit you were wrong, and do something about it. “It’ll make them feel bad!” Good, they should feel bad. They voted for an openly hostile, dumb, Russian bootlicker of a president. I just don’t get this post that keeps being reposted and why coming together means forgetting how we got here.
Imagine an abusive wife trying to come back to her husband because she didn’t realize she signed a prenup and wants to say she was lied to about leaving now that life is hard. Like, no, not going to take any responsibility for my temper/violence, or even say I’m going to change, let’s just pretend I didn’t know that punching you in the face was gonna leave a black eye because I didn’t think it would hurt my hand.
We keep treating Rep with kid gloves. No more.
how about this.
you were lied to, we told you as much. you refused to listen. listen now. stand down, and the only thing hurt will be your pride.
you stop at you where lied to, you do not need to do the I told you so, you do not need to shame them. If you want to bring people on board you do not antagonize them more than you have to
No more. Get out of the maga cult or get out of the way.
Encapsulating people in these little ideological bubbles and walling them off from one another with technological barriers in order to more cheaply extract labor from them is more-or-less the thesis of “The Network State”, the guiding doctrine behind the modern Trump administration.
You need your Red Team and your Blue Team to be fully alienated from one another, insisting that each side is this horrifying inhuman entity incapable of reconciling with the other. And then you can have the Gray Team - the Objectivist neutral rent-seeking arbiters - moving between them as overseers and police agents, to extract surplus and compel obedience by implicitly setting the rules by which the Reds and the Blues live.
MAGA exists as this hyperactive immune system, intended to polarize a segment of the population against the whole. And on the flip side, you have these ultra-orthodox neoliberals doing the same thing but from a “Woke” side of the fence. They’re both fiercely capitalist. They’re both fiercely identitarian. And they’re both obsessed with compelling obedience from the top down - whether its crushing campus student protests for being antisemitic or purging RINOs from state and local governments or consolidating media markets into mega-corporate behemoths like Sinclair and Clear Channel and the Gates/Bezos monolith.
You’re not going to get people to leave the MAGA Cult because they’re not going to hear you. They’re segregated and pumped full of anxiety such that they don’t dare leave their enclosures. At the same time, you’re being walled in yourself. You’re told not to set foot inside a church or show up at a rival political rally or otherwise have any social contact with anyone in a Red Hat (except to participate in some kind of retaliatory violence). Don’t talk to your neighbors if you see them showing the wrong kind of swag. And always be wearing your own colors, so people can instantly identify which team you’re on in public.
Its an ugly state of affairs.
Thank you for the interesting read but i don’t think this forgive and forget narrative fixes the problem. I wish I had an alternative I could provide because it seems irreconcilable when this “other side” advocates against your existence to your face.
i don’t think this forgive and forget narrative fixes the problem
I don’t think this is forgive-and-forget. Its recognizing the source of the conflict as fascist propaganda, not some intrinsic impulse within some subset of people.
Rather than trying to debate bro your parents on Trumpism, try cutting their cable line and see how their opinions shift without a steady diet of reactionary TV.
I don’t disagree with you.
Gonna be real hard for me to hold hands and sing Kumbaya with a group of people who vote against democracy by elevating rapists and felons who illegally attempt to overturn elections and who have a ton of racists and sexists in their ranks.
Wouldn’t have said that 10+ years ago, but they’ve crossed all sorts of lines since then. They don’t really deserve to be forgiven.
I agree but we have to acknowledge that it’s not helpful. Like there is nothing MAGA can say or do to make me think they are good people, but if we can at minimum get them to understand the propaganda they swallowed whole we can actually do better, for all of us.
MAGA are evil people.
I don’t even consider them people at this point. They want to treat people like dogs and breeding mares then that’s exactly how I’ll treat them.
Follow the social contract or get fucked.
umm and how’s likes of biden and pelosi any less evil than these people. with palestine biden has more civilians blood on him than putin.
if you can hold your nose and vote for dnc then you can also work with ex-maga
The problem isn’t that they’re bad at spotting a liar, it’s what they were lied to about.
It’s the transphobic, anti working class, white supremacist ideologies that allowed them to be duped in the first place. Get rid of that and we can talk.
A lot of the people I know who fell for MAGA are the types to believe falling for a lie is a personal failing on their part, and will refuse to admit any sort personal failing out of whatever they think pride is.
Right wingers fucking around: “Yeah let’s deport all the ILLEGALS, lower our egg prices, and make the government fascist! MAGA!”
Right Wingers finding out: “Boohoo my benefits are cut, Canada boos at our National Anthem, and I have to sell my left kidney to buy groceries!”
Fuck these people. Conservatives were drawn in to Trump because of his hateful rhetoric and they only changed their minds when they were personally affected. They’ll vote with a hard R the next election cycle anyway and don’t deserve our sympathy. They were around and even voted for Trump’s first administration and wanted more of his hate.
Your strategy will continue to isolate you
They have no intention to change or move a little bit left. As mentioned they don’t have any sort of remorse for the pain other suffers, only that they got affected. So if they have no intention to change their ideas, what makes you think that there might be some common ground? Sometimes a bad ally is worse than an enemy
I wonder a lot about the subcontext of people using “they” so much. In it’s very essence it’s so derogatory, but if you actually used the proper terminology would you just look insane?
Right Wingers have no intention to change or move a little bit left. As mentioned Right Wingers don’t have any sort of remorse for the pain other suffers, only that Right Wingers got affected.
Like of course right wingers aren’t going left… they’re right wingers (talking about categories of groups, not individuals). Right Wingers don’t have remorse because they’re a group, not an individual. Like you can pretend all “Left Wingers” have remorse (compassion)… but that’s obviously not true. A lot of “Left Wingers” don’t care if “right wingers” get hurt, only that they’re coming after left wing groups…
Isolation or joining hands with fucking SCUUUUUM.
Hmmmm. This is a hard one.
It’s 2025. None of these people are poor sad lonely people taken advantage of by a slick conman selling a lie about a bright future. These people know what they’ve signed up for at this point. Ignorance isn’t an excuse anymore.
I suppose you voted for Harris because Biden was so energetic and the best president since FDR
You’re right, we should be like the Democrats who started cozying up to Liz Cheney for conservative Never Trumpers, that strategy worked really well for them. They’re only going to drag us further right with them if we ignore their bad intentions for having voted Trump in the first place. They will still see minorities as something to hate, they’ll still want to tear down the government to “hurt the right people”, and they’ll still hate you.
If you can’t see the difference between cozying up to republicans and saying fuck everyone who disagrees with you then you may be part of the problem…
I agree that befriending Liz Cheney and dick Cheney, one of the most unpopular politicians in us politics was a terrible move… so was trying to distance herself from progressives who basically support policy proposals that supermajorities of Americans on both the right and the left support…
What I think will isolate you in the end is saying fuck everyone who disagrees with you… you’re basically blaming the voters for being frustrated with their circumstances while dem leadership continues to disregard their own base while embracing corporate oligarchy…. You’re blaming the masses instead of the one who would rather have Trump in office than actually get anything done that would help regular Americans
fuck everyone who disagrees with you
Lol. It’s not about refusing to work with people I disagree with. It’s refusing to work with people who vote to HURT OTHERS, and they’ve had more than enough time to correct their ways if it was an honest mistake.
Spoiler Alert: It wasn’t. They know what they’re doing.
it is telling that there are a some Trump voters who honestly believe Trump is hurting the wrong people (as if we shouldn’t be working towards a common good)
Obviously, however there are also democrat voters who are saying the exact same thing.
Cheney isn’t just a random conservative voter. She’s a representative who cause the problems. The average voter does not hold the same beliefs. They’re just poor people without much time who believe the media when it tells them Democrats are evil and trying to hurt them and people they love. We need them if we want to do actual good in this world.
We need them if we want to do actual good in this world.
We need people that vote to hurt others because they’re stupid enough to believe a talking head on an entertainment channel?
I mean, at what point do we stop making excuses for them and accept that they are awful people. You know, awful people do exist.
I don’t see anyone making excuses for them. This post says they were lied to and they can recognize that and decide to change. That’s not an excuse. That’s called taking responsibility, and it’s a good thing.
The saying “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me” is apropos to the situation. Voting for him the first time may have been excusable if they didn’t vote for him a second time. They knew damn well the kind of evil he was and still they flocked to him. These idiots will vote for the next Republican to come along because they want tax breaks, or a lazy bigoted scapegoat, or any other selfish reason because they’re unrepentant self serving assholes.
A lot of the things we want run completely counter to their values. Yes we can agree Trump is evil, but what about treating women as more than walking incubators? Or minorities as human? How about increasing taxes on the rich to pay for social services? Can we at the very least all agree that law-abiding undocumented immigrants don’t deserve to be separated from their families and shipped to Guantanamo or be deported shackled in a military plane?
No, it isn’t. It doesn’t matter their reasons for doing it. Either they vote Republican again in the future or they don’t. It’s bad for us if they do. The only thing we get out of telling them they aren’t allowed to change is a feeling of superiority. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather create change than get revenge.
I don’t care about why they change their votes. We just want them to change. They (the voters) support the working class and poor mostly. We can use that to get them to change. We can use their feeling of being lied to. We can use their hatred for the rich. It doesn’t matter. Getting them to change their voting habit matters. Telling them they’re bad doesn’t.
I don’t understand what people like you don’t get. This isn’t about sympathy. It’s about winning. You shouldn’t care that you aren’t getting revenge. Revenge doesn’t actually help you get anything done. You’re only shooting yourself in the foot. If we can get only a handful of them to join our side, that’s still good. We need to win or we can’t actually get anything done. So, when this kind of thing comes up trying to appeal to former conservative of voters you don’t need to help out, just keep your thoughts to yourself. You’re only damaging the movement.
Frankly, it’s most important they admit to themselves that they were lied to.
Do you think they will?
Yeah. People don’t just deserve forgiveness. Acknowledgement of bad behavior comes before forgiveness. That’s standard operating procedure. They aren’t doing that.
Even more important that someone they liked and someone they thought liked them lied to them.
Trump openly stated he would do what he’s doing now. His campaign published project 2025. It wasn’t a conspiracy. They did it out in the open while crowing about doing it. There’s really no excuse for not listening when he told you his plans.
You either made a mistake because you were purposely uninformed or you agreed with what he wanted to do until it started affecting you. Either way you were wrong and need to accept and admit that before serious work can be done. Otherwise it’ll just happen again when the next demagogue rears their ugly head.
“It was supposed to hurt others. Not ME!”
Working class is working class, red or blue.
Dem leadership is as pro-corporate as the current admin.
Don’t underestimate the effect that propeganda ran by our very own government has on its citizenry.
Working class is working class, red or blue.
True but not relevant to what I said. Everyone of us needs to learn from our mistakes, but in order to do that we have to admit we made them.
Dem leadership is as pro-corporate as the current admin.
False, I doubt the Dems would have dismantled the government at the behest of the world’s richest man (along with giving him access to all of our tax and social security records) and also not relevant to what I said.
Don’t underestimate the effect that propeganda[sic] ran by our very own government has on its citizenry.
Accurate, America is one of the most heavily propagandized populations in history, but not relevant because all they had to do was listen to the words of Trump’s actual campaign speeches or read his actual campaign literature to know what he was planning to do. He didn’t hide his intentions, people just thought he wasn’t serious about them.
Working class is working class, red or blue.
Yes. And one side votes in favor of the working class while the other does not.
Dem leadership is as pro-corporate as the current admin.
Then why do we see more tax breaks for the wealthy under Republican leadership than Democrat leadership? Why do we see more corporate regulations under Democrat leadership and less under Republican leadership? Your statement is false.
Thank you. This is what is needed.
Edit: obviously many people are not worth the effort but not even trying is not going to help. Don’t associate with Nazis, period. Not everyone who causes harm is a Nazi, however.
Also not endorsing the language 100%, however I do think this is a good start.
This sounds reasonable, but the logical conclusion of that is that the only people that associate with Nazis are other Nazis, or future Nazis (who may not realise it yet). This normalises nazism in a growing group of people because they don’t have any moderate voices highlighting their more extreme thoughts and pulling them back towards normality.
Your argument also make the false assumption that Nazis are irredeemable. I’m sure some of them are. But I’m equally sure that at least some of them aren’t.
I am not responsible for spending time around violent, hateful people in order to bring them into the fold and change their minds and ultimately their actions. My comment is about talking to people in your life already, who are more likely to actually make changes, I.e. picking your battles, in order to give chances to the folks such as those who are alienated but unsure.
Your argument also make the false assumption that Nazis are irredeemable. I’m sure some of them are. But I’m equally sure that at least some of them aren’t.
Thats not an assumption that I make although I could see how you would think I was saying that. In my mind people are people and probably most of them could make changes, but the work required to do so becomes greater over time and it does not fall on marginalized folks, including me, to do that work. But yes I don’t associate with Nazis. If you do something different that isn’t enabling and validating them and their beliefs and actions I would love to know what it is.
Has anyone sent it to their MAGA friend and the person responded “yep, you were right”?
I understand this has good intentions, which I support, but I think this still needs to be changed. I don’t care them admitting me they were wrong or were lied to, but I do want them to admit it to themselves, get past the divide and work together to fix what we have now.
I don’t need anyone to admit anything. I see maga voters getting on board, so apparently they already admitted to themselves they were too tired and stretched too thin, so were duped. It’s not like our educational institutions do anything to help that, especially in red states. We have consistently defunded education since Nixon.
All I need is their motivation to work together. We can work out ideological differences with patience and fortitude, forgiveness and understanding, as we do that
Are they getting on board? I stopped following the new ever since Trump got elected because it became way too depressing.
I don’t need anyone to admit anything.
It’s standard operating procedure in human civilization for someone who was wrong to admit they were wrong before the person or people they wronged can work together with them.
This isn’t some huge ask. They were wrong. People got hurt. They need to admit their error before they can be trusted.
I see maga voters getting on board
Do you?
It’s not like our educational institutions do anything to help that, especially in red states.
It doesn’t take Einsteinian levels of genius to look around you and go “Hmmm, shit kind of sucks and we’ve been exclusively electing Republicans in this region my entire life.” No, they’d rather blame libs in other parts of the country, or people with darker shades of skin.
All I need is their motivation to work together.
Cool. My motivation is knowing they’ve changed by admitting they were wrong.
We can work out ideological differences with patience and fortitude, forgiveness and understanding
They want women to be second class citizens and don’t want trans people to exist. How do you propose we get past a hurdle like that?
I’m not the one that was betrayed. It’s the Constitution, our fore fathers, and the millions of men and women that died for our freedom that were betrayed. None of them are here so all you can do is find forgiveness from yourself. But are you going to stand by the train tracks as an endless row of people are slaughtered or are you going to say something?
I’ve been saying it. And working for better. Good we’re working together.
Actions speak louder than words. I trust the MAGA voter holding a sign that says “Fuck Trump” over someone that can’t be bothered to walk away from their TV or video games.
