I used to be one of those oldschool conservatives. I’m much more progressive now, but what I do think helps, is the following.
Fascists won’t listen to progressives. So what will pull them out of that black hole, is having them listen to more ‘boring’ people, but without the opportunity to overtalk them. Let fascists listen to normal views and don’t let fascists take over the discussion. Never yield to their beliefs once, and have a red line. Youtube videos with comments disabled, PDFs by anonymous authors, and so on, that can help.
The common man’s best ally is reaching out to the milquetoasts, and having the fascists listen to them and you while also not listening to them. Use their own tactics against them.
I used to know one. Whenever they still wanted to discuss their batshit crazy views, I told them I declined discussing that stuff with them, and wouldn’t interact with them unless if they could shut up about that.
It usually worked (though not 100%), so I consider that a general-ish success.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 6 days ago
To be fair, the entire Republican party seems to be all about blurring that line right now. I think the big challenge is Trump awakened something in folks who haven’t been politically active in a very long time, and because they haven’t been politically active, they aren’t coming into politics with a clear ideology or set of policies they want to see passed other than “I like trump!” Which is probably a big part of why we just have a bunch of attempts at turning his presidency into a dictatorship and state-sponsored racism as the only clear policy trump actually cares about, and any policies that are directly enriching large businesses are just a case of those with deep pockets cozying up to folks in power with loose morals.
But let’s be real, the Republican party hasn’t been about conservatism for quite a while. They’ve definitely been coasting off of pure brand recognition with occasional injections of christofascism and state sponsored violence against minorities to help maintain their old jim crow roots. They’ve successfully cultivated a culture of being Republican, so they can do what they want policy-wise and still reliably win around a third of the elections in the country without resorting to voter suppression, and they can reliably win about half of the elections in the country with voter suppression
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Yeah I wanna slightly amend that - I think their ideology is certainly “I like trump” but I think the reasons behind that are they see him as a big strong leader who validates and legitimises their prejudices - and will allow them to act on those prejudices. Suddenly the hate they felt for their immigrant neighbours, or their fear of gay people, whatever - suddenly they have a leader saying that’s okay and he’s now supporting their discrimination with military deployment in US cities.
This is how fascism happens - it’s not always forced on a population, a lot of times a lot of people want it.
And the oldskool republican party was essentially a corporate mouthpiece.
Scary fuckin times, mate. The snowball is rolling down the hill and it’s growing and it’s accelerating.