this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Was a history/politics nerd growing up and had a lot of mid-00s Democrat takes like "we could do so much better at all these good and wholesome regime changes but those idiot Republicans are fucking it up." Wrote at least one paper saying we should have done Iraq like we did a bunch of Latin American countries before WWII; just embarrassing stuff.
What broke me out was a combination of reading a lot more about the U.S. in the Cold War, souring on capitalism (largely due to the 2016 Bernie campaign), and eventually finding Blackshirts and Reds, which got me past the final "well what other options are there, can't be those evil commies" hurdle. Edit: Manufacturing Consent was a big one in there, too, and more lib-accessible than Parenti.
This is a great thread for thinking about how to move people left. We do way too much writing people off; put the lib or outright reactionary anecdotes from this thread in Hexbear now and we'd be calling all our former selves irredeemable fascists not worth anything more than a
Manufacturing consent same, also the Shock doctrice and Jakarta Method. Finding out how much of what I think I know is actually bs and finding out about the Chicago school of economics and neoliberalism. The George Monbiot Guardian article about neoliberalism and how it fit into my own lived exprerience from the 90s was a huge step towards understanding for me personally.
I'm optimistic that the pipeline of reading that's:
Is the fastest way of turning a lib into a leftist.