A place to discuss pro-conservative stuff
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We have to agree where we ARE before we stand a chance to agree about what we do from here.
If this "let's reach across the isle" approach was viable, the present thread would not exist. I'll go beyond, trumpists watched Jan6 unravel like anyone else and they still voted for him in 2024. So while I'm not advocating for hatred, I would not consider any plan viable that heavily relies on trumpists changing their minds.
St. Luigi tells me that what we have in common is greater than what differentiates us.
The fundamental problem with reaching across the aisle is that the people you're reaching to aren't influential in any meaningful capacity.
I've got family who voted for Trump. I can visit them, grab dinner, talk politics, reach sensible rational positions that would lead us both to be able to live freely and fairly. And none of it matters. Because neither of us write legislation, enforce the law, or adjudicate disputes.
Meanwhile, I've got friends who are working their way up the respective party organs at the local level. And I'll periodically ask what they think about this or that. They tend to be as annoyed and disgusted as I do (although I'll often get the "But your team is worse" rejoinder). Then I'll ask what they are hoping to change. And the simple response I get back is "We just have to be patient until we're in a better position". But they're never in that position. They're always subservient to some other vulgar asshole. They're always pandering to some gross freak of a mega-donor. They're constantly getting hoodwinked by the Elon Musk / Jeff Bezos political turn.
I would not consider any plan viable that heavily relies on trumpists changing their minds.
There are plenty of voters who went from Obama to Trump in 2016 and then from Trump to Biden in 2020 and then from Biden to fucking Jill Stein in 2024 and it didn't fucking matter. Even when you do get people to change their minds, they don't get to do anything with the new information.
Vote for Trump or don't, your district is as gerrymandered as ever. Vote for Beto O'Rourke for Senate or don't, the SCOTUS isn't changing hands in our lifetimes because the deck has already been stacked. If Dems retake Congress in 2026, it won't matter because they'll still be the same pack of sycophants courting elites in the Tech and Finance Sector that they were back in 2018 and 2006 and 1992. Many of them literally the same people just moldering in office for 40 years or more.
Winning doesn't mean anything in a system where the outcomes are predetermined. Shaping opinions among the powerless doesn't mean anything unless you can convince them to actually take back power for themselves.
Right now, its just voting for your favorite politician on American Idol.
people can take back economic power
Run for office.
Keep in mind, the amount of conservatives that have shown any regret in the slightest is an extremely small percentage.
The majority of them do not use social media outside of Facebook. They still get their news from Fox and Newsmaxx.
We do not owe them anything. Conservatives who have a conscience need to abandon POLITICAL conservatism. If you want to be socially conservative, go right ahead and do that in the privacy of your own home. But, if you think you’re going to cross the aisle and try to organize with leftists while still holding politically conservative beliefs you wish to eventually see enforced for everyone, then yea, fuck off.
They weren't lied to. They had a whole road map for this. They just didn't think they would also be affected.
They have plausible deniability. Some of them truly think trump doesn't mean most of what he says because he's trolling. They have poor critical thinking skills, so they aren't able to take a lot of information and pick out the truth. That's also why they copy each other. They want the easy solutions.
They need to be given an appealing way back to sanity. We need them and they need us.
I guess I feel like being a decent human being should be an appealing enough way. Even if they thought he was joking, what he was joking about wasn't funny. They were fine risking him, at the very least, being their mouth piece. Saying they were lied to removes the responsibility. It doesn't make them inherently bad people, but they need to admit they made a mistake (if that's what they truly believe) and want to come back into sanity because it's right, not because they feel bad that it's now their eggs and Medicaid that's being fucked with.
I think maybe that's the best we could hope for. They can't take responsibility and now they think its fine to lie and obscure, to gaslight like he does. He's a public figure who is allergic to accountability and has no shame. Should they be expected to behave better than he does, when he's like the Teflon man, no consequences stick and he just goes and plays golf, posts pics of himself in a crown as democracy dies?
If anything can make them turn against him and at least fake giving a sh*t or having morality then I'm all for it. Let's massage their egos and welcome them.
The average person will only spend 5 to 10 minutes a day watching news. The networks they watch are owned by billionaires. I bet most people haven't heard of project 2025 let alone know what it contains.
Just because you are tuned into politics, doesn't mean everyone else should be.
This is our curse. We know things, but if we want things to improve, we must also convince the average removed voter of the things. If we fail, we don't get to write off half the population.
I guess I'm just tired of always having to force this horse to the river to drink. We're told to make it more inviting, change the flavor, talk softly, and they still go galloping into manure, flinging it on the rest of us in the process. Then they look back, covered in shit, and go, "I didn't know the shit would have this much shit. Why didn't you warn us? Aren't you at least going to help us clean up?" It's like weaponized incompetence, but with politics.
~~but I'm also still incredibly bitter about the current situation. My anger is going to have to die down before I can be reasonable. Which is a me problem at the end of the day.~~
Your feelings are valid. It might be worth taking a break from the politics for a bit. Burnout is real and it is happening to quite a lot people after this last election.
I appreciate any attempt to win these people back. I mean, there's nothing to lose. But they were not lied to. Trump was honest about the big picture and it's exactly what they wanted.
These people are lost for democracy and for reason. To stupidity or to plain evil.
Just look how even people like Dick Cheyney saw this coming and tried everything to stop what's happening now.
He didnt lie about what his plans of action were, but he was telling everybody immigrants and foreign aid are the source of our problems. (Redunctionist i know)
So he did lie. And most people arent equipped for the disinformation age.
Its easy to say they should be smarter than that, but its also easy to say our administration shouldn't be fabricating reality to further their platform. Blaming the masses seems pretty pointless to me. We all want better for ourselves. Maybe some are more outwardly selfish or racist or whatever but when are we going to learn to not frame 50% of america as inherently evil? Whats the point of watering down our perception of others?
Don't Americans salute the flag and sing the national anthem every day at school, one of the main reasons being respect to the WW 1 & 2 veterans, who went through hell, and often died, to stop an ideology where some people have worth & dignity and others don't?
A very conservative Jewish German journalist, Friedman, held an insightful speech in a German state parliament recently, attacking the right wing party that Musk and Trump love so much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lizOiK1OHf8 (English auto subtitles are of very good quality.)
He is very conservative, been in the conservative party for decades (until they tried to pass an anti immigration law with the right a few weeks ago), strong supporter of Israel, but against Netanyahu's government. His parents were saved from the Holocaust by Schindler. But he understands the general pattern: Even though they don't directly attack Jewish people, at least not yet, they don't accept that everybody is somebody, as he puts it, and that's where it starts.
They were not lied to though... it was known they were going to do this.
They were all under the impression it wouldn't happen to them personally. While it is satisfying to say, "I told you so" it's never helpful. We kinda need to lift up our dumb compatriots if they see the error of electing a huge mistake.
They get their news from other places though, places that say Republicans are doing great things (lying). We saw this coming, but many of them did not.
Yeah, no thanks. These people were fine with all the hateful and cruel shit the Republicans pedal until it affected them. Whether it's because they themselves are cruel or just morons, that's up for debate. But either way, I will not consider them an ally in this. They've got to change their shitty ways first.
100% this. They didn't care at all until it affected them directly. They refuse to feel empathy for others so I refuse to feel empathy for them.
Nah, they should both admit that they were wrong and okay with extreme bigotry in the White House.
Meanwhile, the rest of us who will continue organizing with our fellow minorities, trans, and working class folks.
That's not how you get people to start moving over to our side here mate. Sure, what they supported is pretty fucked, but if you're not going to offer people a way to crawl out of the hole they dug themselves in, no one will want to leave the hole.
You're not wrong for wanting that, but in your righteous superiority, you're not helping to make anything better.
You are misunderstood. The path to crawling out of their hole of conservative bigotry is simple: abandon conservative bigotry.
It is they who want us to compromise our ethics and values. They want us to compromise on immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and helping the unhoused.
You can’t be a conservative AND join leftists in organizing a better future, sorry. Conservatism is antithetical to progress.
There's a quote from Robert A. Heinlein that I like to bring up:
Of what use, then, are the American Communists?
They serve one function extremely useful to you and to the country, so useful that, if there were no Communists, we would almost be forced to create some. They are a reliable litmus paper for detecting real sources of danger to the Republic.
Communism is so repugnant to almost all Americans, when they are getting along even tolerably well, that one may predict with certainty that any social field or group in which the Communists make real strides in gaining members or acceptance of their doctrines, any such spot is in such bad shape from real and not imaginary social ills that the rest of us should take emergency, drastic action to investigate and correct the trouble.
Replace "Communist" with "Conservative" and the quote works the exact same way. People don't take on awful political views in a total vacuum. Their lives and futures got messed up somehow, and in all probability by vast forces beyond their comprehension, let alone their control. And then they went looking for what felt like real answers, and someone was willing to say to them "I've got the solution to your problems."
On some level, their grievances are real. They just got sold on a lie about what could be done to fix them.
This is gold.
When I was a young teenager I was a communist because I believe in fairness and equality and on paper communism sounds great. Because of this I believed that Russia must just be misunderstood and maligned by the evil capitalist west - 2+2=4. I didn't have access to a lot of info and my idealism carried me a long way. Then I read about what had happened under communism and in Russia, and it didn't take long until my views changed entirely.
I think the (not sociopathic or psychotic) majority of MAGA supporters are that way because of what you said - MAGA uses real issues too - a clever mix of lies and truths, and because they believe the 'fake news' lies and immerse themselves in echo chambers of MAGA lies.
This has also happened in the UK with the BNP, EDL etc and now reform, which does well mostly in deprived areas (I wonder why?)
There has to be a point when they no longer believe the lies because reality directly contradicts them. But by then will it be too late?
Why in the fuck would I agree to give you people a second chance? Yall openly voted for the racist, criminally convicted sex offender. Fuck you, fuck your farm, and fuck your entire colonist bloodline.
Sure, you may want me to be beaten to death, but at least you admitted eggs aren't cheap now, this makes us allies.
If you are "conservative" in any manner, you've been voting for the destruction of both people and society in both word and deed for the past 40 years.
To be fair, they've also been lied to for longer than that, sometimes by their own parents who too we're lied to.
Mr. Pink doesn’t ~~tip~~ work with fascists
Good on you.
This doesn't work with cultists. Any reasonable republican bailed on the party with Trump.
~~Yeah. Definitely don't need to take an responsibility for your actions. You can be both wrong and lied to. It's not like there wasn't 4 years of this already and a very large group of people telling you what was going to happen if you repeated your past mistakes.~~
~~But no. Keep on blaming others for your fuck ups. No one is perfect. No one can blame you for this mess.~~
~~Fuck you.~~
Sorry, maybe that was too uncivil. Let me rephrase.
Conservatives are the neighborhood kid that keeps showing up to the park when the rest of us kids are playing soccer. We let the conservative play because we are trying to be inclusive, but this is the third time you've kicked the ball over the fence, and every time we go get it, you swear you'll play right, but then do it again. We don't want you on the playground any more. You aren't welcome to play. We don't care if you felt like you were lied to. You've been told how to behave, and you have chosen not to, time and time again. The rest of us aren't looking to take your hand in friendship and welcome you back. You've run out of second chances. Now, we just want you to sit at home and try not to mess anything else up. No one wants to be your friend.