would like some data! too bad we can’t do polls on lemmy.
i’m curious about this since i’m wondering how many people required a gradual approach towards radicalization (first a liberal, then a soc dem etc, then marxist) vs a clean break (liberal straight to marxism, for example).
i assume most people here are ML now, but i guess i don’t know that with a lot of certainty either, so that could be interesting data as well.
for reference: i went from baby liberal, to uneducated and unlabeled idealist anarchist who was basically a socdem, then straight to ML.
edit: thanks for all the responses!!! interesting to hear everyone’s political journey. i will probably wait until this leaves the front page and then do some simple data analysis to publish here in the near future: how many participants vs daily/weekly users, how many stages people went through, etc etc
Oops, this was a lot longer than I thought it was going to be!
From a kid all the way up to 2022 I would probably say I was either apolitical or Republican. However, even then I never supported Trump. I didn’t think he had the experience being a politician as all I knew at the time was that he was a businessman and was known for firing people. Then I became more and more politically active and started the evaluating where I stood on issues. Then two things happened over the next two years: one, I left a cult that pretty much my entire extended family had been involved with for 150 years and became an atheist and two, I became an environmentalist. I had always wanted to stop pollution, but I had always until that point denied climate change. But now I was convinced that we are causing it. Then I started challenging my ideology and became pro-lgbt. I probably considered myself a democrat for a brief period, but then I started looking into third parties and I found myself mostly aligning with the Green party (the biggest point of disagreement was nuclear energy), but I didn’t vote for Stein because I was playing the game of “if you vote for third party, you’re effectively giving your vote to Trump”.
This part bothers me to this day, because despite how recent it was, I cannot for the life of me remember what gave me the final push to socialism. Maybe it was an interest in China as they are developing their space technology (I wanted to go to the space industry). Maybe it was having a bad experience with a landlord at the time and finding a Paul Murphy clip about how no value comes from landlords. Maybe it was finding r/antiwork. Maybe it was the election results. Maybe it was all of those or something else. But I distinctly remember that on January 1 2025, I declared myself a socialist. As for my current label, I call myself an eco-socialist. Maybe once I read enough theory it will change, who knows?
Holy shit I forgot about r/anti-work, that was what introduced me to the nordic model in highschool. They were effectively my first experience of discontent with capitalism and I don’t think I would have been nearly as open to real socialist ideas when I encountered them had it not been for that experience.