It's shockingly easy to reach people of different political ideology if you view them as humans. Don't interact with the people who have punisher tattoos and roll coal, but that's not everyone right of center. Most conservatives are just ill-informed working people with no emotional intelligence or no capacity to care about larger problems than their next utility bill and resent progressive messaging because they're struggling so hard.

You can break through with class consciousness, almost every conservative I've talked to, and turned, started with educating them where their tax money goes, so get educated yourself how the tax code works, what the federal budget actually looks like, what your state's work laws are and such, and teach them why they can't afford food AND electricity some months.

You also need to be social and hospitable, do not have the intention of changing people, have the intention of teaching ONE thing and stick to it. This is what Bernie did for decades.

Edit: I will reemphasize for anyone reading down this far, PLEASE STOP TRYING TO CHANGE EVERYTHING. You're not going to get Bubba and Sheila down in the trailer by the scrapyard to suddenly start promoting trans rights and advocating for a free Tibet. Just let it go, our focus on micro-problems and social issues that don't impact the majority of people has been a deliberate sabotage of progressive movements to make people turn away. If we can turn people against Republican politics the rest falls in place and we get a better tomorrow, maybe not today but eventually and we have to start planting trees and stop expecting to have all our desires satisfied in our lifetimes.

Oh God yes Jubilee and that surrounded bs. Though the recent one with Jordan Peterson was somewhat cathartic. Yeah they get some of the most toxic ones.

Yep the majority of them are more like my brother-in-law or my SO. She at least realized back in February the mistake she made. Though I can understand it. As a military daughter who spent her life going from Base to Base as her father moved them around the world. Republican bullshit is sort of ingrained in her family. And she doesn't actually engage with a lot of the news personally. Instead it gets filtered to her through family.

Brother-in-law came from a privileged bougie family. They own a number of stores in the area. All the fancy tchotchkies as a child. Summers and other regular holidays throughout the year at the lake. Started out from 3rd and thought he made a home run. With a very similar story. Hereditary republicanism. No critical thinking. For One Shining Moment talking about how Democrats and Republicans both suck. On which we could agree. Only to inevitably return back to the Republican talking points. That situation is a whole other shit sandwich unfortunately though.

Yes, Unity cannot be enforced. Unity can only coexist with consent. And those that would violate consent to enforce Unity actually despise both.

You knew it was going there because the Democratic party refuses to listen to reason and continues to drift further and further rightto the point that we just had two candidates promoting genocide, attacking immigrants, attacking the poor, and palling around with Dick Cheney. It's funny that you'd rather attack the critics than dare speak out against the actual perpetrators of this abhorrent behavior. Attack the victim not the victimizer.

Democratic sycophants are becoming almost indistinguishable from their MAGA counterparts these days. You guys are all using the exact same language.

Get.Yourshit.Together. If you can’t bring yourself to vote for the DNC, and you can’t get anything else going, you’re wasting your own time and sinking the rest of us.

And what will you be doing in the meantime other than attacking those who actually want things to improve?

If you are focused on organization and outreach. Maybe it’s worth considering finding a new instance that would would help in fostering that.

I'm not trying to be glib, I don't think any instances are good for that, I use other platforms with more reach for that sort of thing.

I come here because I can see what other anarchists and Marxists are saying about the news and shoot the shit with them. Plus I can access the largest trans instances from here, I don't really have any ambitions beyond that.

Or Marxism and Marxist-leninist.

Say what you will about Democrats. Outside of the elected ones. Most of them don't have a strong ideology. Just actually wanting things to improve. But I'm sure of how to go about it. And when you approach them like that. Are plenty likely to be sympathetic and allies.

Just as a tangent, Jubilee and ALL the related content-farmers on Youtube, Tiktok and other social media platforms are radically skewing our own perceptions as well as that of the right. They are the enemy of our better tomorrow.

We're all getting lost down ideological, algorithmic bubble-worlds but the worlds look so different it's hard for us to identify that we're also being manipulated.

This is another area you can find common-ground with the right, and a way to get them to start realizing they're being played and cucked by corporate elites. (Use that language.)

Fair enough. I can do that as well. Just without all the domain baggage. And if it is something that bothers you. It's something to look at. Something I saw you actually cop to elsewhere on the topic.

Absolutely. None of us are immune to propaganda or our own biases.

And what will you be doing in the meantime other than attacking those who actually want things to improve?

What like accusing them of being soulless wholly-owned corporate shitlibs who are token opposition with their money-stained fingers on the scales, gladly supporting genocide, being the same as literal nazi fascists, and kicking down all the good-hearted people who want things to improve?

I mean . . . I could. But that just wouldn’t be very productive would it.

LOL as someone with significant autoimmune issues this rings to true.

I mean while it is annoying getting called a red fascist out of pure tribal reaction, I'm also pretty stubborn when it comes to peer pressure

Heh I think that describes most of us on the fediverse and why we are the way we are.

The idea that all "leftists" should just work together is stupid.

Leninism, Anarcho-primitivism and Social democracy (for example) are not different approaches to "leftism" that ultimately want the same things; they are completely separate ideologies that naturally come into conflict. The people who follow them disagree with each other because they want and value completely different things. If they were to put aside their differences there would be nothing left.

That doesn't mean arguing on the internet about ideology is meaningful, or that there can't be common goals or enemies, just that you should give up the idea that all "leftists" are somehow natural allies, because it doesn't make any sense.

If not death, or being institutionalised.

But you can also get institutionalised or killed under capitalism too if you say the wrong things (China, Russia, the Gulf States).

While you might not be killed in the US, but you can be harassed via lawsuits or deported to a foreign internment camp if you say the wrong things.

I believe you are missing the forest for the trees.
First, I acknowledge your examples are separate ideologies.

That concept also applies to the right... social conservatives, right-libertarians, and neoliberal ideologies are equally separate. However, those practitioners have no qualms about banding together to suppress dissent (or until such time they are the only voices).

Where the left leaning practitioners are unable to do so, they will be forever tyrannized by the banded majority.

To put it more succinctly, the enemy of my enemy is my friend (when freedom is on the line).

"I support genocide"

Anti-tankies Nazis

It took centuries before any liberal or democratic project managed to produce a society that wasn't far more brutal than the USSR. Yet you don't see people going around saying "the French Revolution permanently damaged the Democratic brand!"

So, utopianism.

Fair enough, though I do think this can still help with any broader approach to changing their overall mentality.

A moment of consensus on its own might not be enough to sway someone, but if they hear someone try and contradict what they had recently agreed on, it can then make them feel more cognitive dissonance, and potentially make them at the bare minimum just stop and think for a second.

If someone else is later trying to sway them in some way, it's going to be easier when that person says something, and they can think "I remember saying something similar" rather than "this is the opposite of what I already believe."

Plus, there's also just the sort of "exposure therapy" factor to it, as well. A lot of people are radicalized to believe that the "opposing side" is pure, limitless evil, and that they hate you and want you dead, so just interacting with them can be enough to help slowly deradicalize them.

For example, this Pew Research article states, regarding the likelihood of people to support trans people's existence:

"Though Republicans who know a trans person are more likely than Republicans who don’t to say gender can be different from sex assigned at birth, more than eight-in-ten in both groups (83% and 88%, respectively) say gender is determined by sex at birth. Meanwhile, there are large differences between Democrats who do and do not know a transgender person. A majority of Democrats who do know a trans person (72%) say someone can be a man or a woman even if that differs from their sex assigned at birth, while those who don’t know anyone who is transgender are about evenly split (48% say gender is determined by sex assigned at birth while 51% say it can be different)."

But of course, that isn't just limited to acceptance of people by gender. It also applies to race, social and economic status, recipients and non-recipients of welfare programs, people working in different industries, etc.

Again, not saying it's at all some magic universal way to change someone's mind, or that on its own it's necessarily a factor that can override their overarching condition, (hell, that quote from before shows that it had a much smaller impact on republicans than democrats even given the same exposure) but the more and more this happens, the stronger and stronger an effect it has overall, and I'd say that alone makes it worth doing.