Yeah, people need to remember that most of the maga base are from the working class. They’re not all southern gentry descendants of slave owners living comfortably on their family’s generational wealth while using their social privilege to actively make life worse for everyone else. Those are just the leaders of the movement, but they wouldn’t get very far without the support of roughly half of the working class.
The entire reason those working class people were able to be radicalized in the first place were a combination of the following: ignorance and shitty education; economic hardship and marginalization; distrust of the government and the elites; misplaced fear and rage that was actively stoked by those in power and directed towards political targets to create a sense of “us vs. them”; and overall just years of destitution and discontentment that the corrupt fascists took advantage of to radicalize these people.
Most of those things are deeply working-class issues that many of us face; it’s just the conclusions that they were resultantly radicalized towards that were misguided. Many of them are in the cult too deep and will never let go of it, never admit they were wrong. The rest have the potential, though, if they’re shown the way forward, and a few million less of them and a few million more of us might ultimately make all the difference.
This whole notion of “chase away anyone who remotely resembles a conservative without even asking what their beliefs and opinions really are, what they struggle with and what’s important to them, etc.” has always been a losing strategy. Yet people have attacked me as if I’m defending conservatives whenever I point out that many of these people might actually fall on our side of the fence if we stop pushing them onto the other.
Yeah, people need to remember that most of the maga base are from the working class. They’re not all southern gentry descendants of slave owners living comfortably on their family’s generational wealth while using their social privilege to actively make life worse for everyone else. Those are just the leaders of the movement, but they wouldn’t get very far without the support of roughly half of the working class.
The entire reason those working class people were able to be radicalized in the first place were a combination of the following: ignorance and shitty education; economic hardship and marginalization; distrust of the government and the elites; misplaced fear and rage that was actively stoked by those in power and directed towards political targets to create a sense of “us vs. them”; and overall just years of destitution and discontentment that the corrupt fascists took advantage of to radicalize these people.
Most of those things are deeply working-class issues that many of us face; it’s just the conclusions that they were resultantly radicalized towards that were misguided. Many of them are in the cult too deep and will never let go of it, never admit they were wrong. The rest have the potential, though, if they’re shown the way forward, and a few million less of them and a few million more of us might ultimately make all the difference.
This whole notion of “chase away anyone who remotely resembles a conservative without even asking what their beliefs and opinions really are, what they struggle with and what’s important to them, etc.” has always been a losing strategy. Yet people have attacked me as if I’m defending conservatives whenever I point out that many of these people might actually fall on our side of the fence if we stop pushing them onto the other.