a bit of pretext to this blog. you might read this and think i’m a spineless coward. fair. instead of thinking this is how you should approach everyone, think of this as how to approach those you can tell are politically disengaged, maybe those already learning left but with some caveats, or those you can identify as single-issue voters. undeniably, there are those who cannot and should not appeal to. you are not going to want to approach those who profit off bigotry, those who knowingly post misinformation, or people who are too far gone (yes, they unfortunately exist). take this all with a pinch of salt, and feel free to pick and choose what you find helpful. enjoy, i guess.
the first thing i want to flag is, i get it. i, and many people reading this, aren't from usa. i don't actually care though. i am the strongest proponent that the changes we are seeing in the world are not, and will not be, isolated. i understand the need to say 'we don't live in america, it doesn't matter'. it's both an invitation to stop the conversation, stop thinking about it and ultimately, not have to reckon with the very real consequences that on some level we feel hopeless about.
next, and of more contention, the incessant use of ‘left’ and ‘right’. i too think this simplification of politics is incredibly reductive. shit man, even the four-way axis of left v right, authoritarian v libertarian is incredibly shallow. my reason for the constant usage is largely because i understand communicating these ideas without a shorthand or something easily identifiable or relatable would only complicate the message more. it is a necessary evil.
i have many friends who, for lack of a better term, aren't politically engaged. i don't mean they don't protest or they don't go out of their way to speak post infographics on instagram, but more that up until now, haven't had a reason to think or even care that much about political issues. many of these people probably fit into a centre-left category. they aren't racist, homophobic, sexist or transphobic, at least not in pure intention. the fact this is now considered 'left' is a bit hard to stomach. they've probably never interrogated the base assumptions and values they have, and the sometimes deeper implications of some of those things, but they wouldn't tolerate any of the more harmful ideologies. the best way to describe these people is, they don't actively care about anything going on, usually because they don't see a need to. we have all been this person at some point, but for most of us, we came to a point where we actively formed an opinion on an issue, usually because it presented in our life, and wether we knew it or not, it was a political statement.
for me, that happened very early on. i am disabled. i have what is known as cerebral palsy (ataxia diplegia for those particularly interested), and while it was something i accepted without question and never felt shame over, i was aware that i was treated differently. even as a five-year-old, i knew it was wrong, ironically because i also did not understand why it was happening. when i made friends with kids from a variety of cultural backgrounds and saw how some people also treated them as outsiders. when i hung around girls, i didn't like how a boy who liked one of them could decide 'we are getting married', and then hold a makeshift ceremony on the cricket pitch without any input from the 'bride' who was at the very least, uncomfortable. when i went into highschool and met openly queer people, i saw how segmented they were from the rest of the school. a lot of my beliefs was just the offshoot normalisation, but more than anything it was empathy with those who were otherised, that i saw people experience the same targeting i received, and i knew it was not okay. over time, i saw how these basic issues became politicised, how they didn't fit in a vacuum. i came to terms very quickly with how my beliefs in fairness were not shared universally, and how that affected people in very real capacities. i saw name calling and a general sense of ostracisation become a hatred, a denial of existence.
i had a stint where i was consuming anti-sjw content when i was around 15, peak gamergate. at the time, i didn't see how incompatible it was to my core beliefs until i saw how my algorithm started suggesting content from figures further, and more openly right leaning, then what i was exposing myself to. the connections became more apparent when i saw how people who were advocating for 'common sense' and swore up and down they weren’t racist, align themselves with those who, at the very least, you could tell were somewhat 'okay' with it. the more 'centrist' takes sounded more and more like the extreme ones, and before i knew it, the veil had seemingly dropped. sure, i still saw a lot of behaviours from the left i either didn't understand or sometimes thought were unreasonable (and shit, i still see a lot of that let's be fair), but the backlash and its talking points all seemed to be designed to be set up for pushing people further to the right. i saw it naked. i saw the alt-right pipeline. it also helped that around the same time i saw content from people whose values more closely aligned with my own. it also helped they were profoundly less annoying in delivery (except for hassan. fuck hassan. i fucking hate that abrasive cunt.)
i outline my experience to introduce a concept that i'm sure has come up in discussion countless times. this was my left-pipeline.
when we think of political pipelines, we tend to fixate on the alt-right pipeline. in case you haven't seen it, i highly recommend you watch 'how to radicalise a normie', by innuendo studios. but if you're new, the alt-right pipeline is the path one takes between political apathy to right-wing extremist. it looks different for everyone, but consider how someone who may partake in edgy humour may gradually shift into communities where the line between racial humour and genuinely harmful opinions on race is blurred, almost indistinguishable. one might start to tolerate certain opinions that up until now have been considered ironic, and soon you're finding yourself in more and more radical circles. eventually the pretext of humor is dropped. you might think this is just all a coincidence, but that's the trick you see. the alt-right pipeline is designed so the shift in politics feels so incremental, gradual and impersonal that every step further feels insubstantial. In psychology, we call this gradual escalation, sunk-cost fallacy or irrational escalation of commitment. this is intentional. and it is a form of grooming. it cannot be stated enough that this pipeline is all manufactured, and has knowing facilitators at every step of the way. it is designed to work best when the possibility of becoming a facist seems ridiculous and hyperbolic.
*sigh*
the fact of the matter is, as much as we on the left understand this tactic, we have continually failed miserably to do anything substantial. the left is really good at identifying the endpoints of this journey: nazism, facism, white supremacy, eugenics, and can often enough pick the starting points: the signalling of 'common sense', anti-woke conversations, a resistance to diverse representation in media. the problem comes that we are very bad at spotting the middle, sorting the facilitators from those being facilitated and distinguishing exactly where someone is on their journey, which manifests as a failure to act accordingly. worse yet, we often tend to see someone further along then they are, usually because our sense of scale is warped due to only seeing the inevitable results of where that road ends. we tend to either speak bluntly, tell people behaviour is outright unacceptable, which skips over the groundwork and base assumptions as to why that is, making criticism seem hostile, or we gesture to the end of the pipeline, something the right has specifically designed to seem alarmist. outside resistance only acts as a doubling of faith.
i was having a conversation with a friend around wording in a formal document that mentioned queer members of a club. they were concerned about how to word it in such a way that addressed both transgender and non-binary individuals, which queer could ostensibly do, if there was a more formal variant to use. naturally, i suggested gender-diverse, to which they countered that the term would only technically address non-binary individuals, because a good deal of trans people still inhabit the gender binary, they’ve just gone from a 1 to a 0. after this, a discussion ensued of finding the correct terminology, which if i remember consisted of ‘transgender and gender diverse’, as the output. as good as that conversation was, the thought hit me that this conversation was only possible because this friend and i both had that understanding of gender, the separation of sex, an understanding of what non-binary means, and the definitions of ‘queer’, ‘transgender’ and ‘genderqueer’. if i was in any other position, or only understood non-binary people as ‘the third gender’, i would’ve bounced off of the conversation just like that.
a similar thing happened later that week, where my mum and i were talking about gender affirming care being added to medicare, and the topic of non-binary people came up. my mum, a nurse, started to talk about how being non-binary was influenced by a genetic factor, something about a certain protein shifting from the ear to the pinky finger prenatal. i had no idea what she was talking about. i tried to refute it, and tried to defend non-binary existence. it wasn’t until about 5 minutes in, that i started to hastily recite the talk of gender being separate to sex, but at that point, it was too late. i entered the conversation emotionally charged and confrontational, it set up the rest of the chat. my mum for context would probably fit into a subsection of ‘moderates’ that have noticeably progressed since early adulthood, but have found it hard to keep up, and believe that they have already made enough concessions to solidify themselves as allies to the many social causes; that too much has been asked of them when we present the idea that the world is still changing.
ihis anxiety that the world is changing too fast is probably the biggest factor in a lot of roughly progressive gen x and boomers shifting to the right. back in 2016, when conservatism was beginning to pick up steam online, the political divide we were living in reached a point of criticality. saying you were going to vote for trump was a death sentence. concede any reasonable point he may have made (a single-hand count) and people would dogpile onto you, hastily applying the labels of racist, sexist, homophobic, the list goes on for agreeing with a man, who make no mistake, is all those things. the alt-right at the time had compiled a list of arguments or issues one could discuss to incite reactions and drive wedges, which the left handily fell for every single fucking time. bringing up transgender people in sports, long used as a dog whistle to rally transphobic sentiment, and suddenly having questions around trans women competing in powerlifting labelled you as transphobic. mention how a black person gunned down by the police was in fact pointing a gun at the officers that shot him, you’re now a racist. the way this works is usually, as a conservative, you bring up a topic that has, or at least seems to have a level of nuance. make your case, usually one that is oppositional to the left’s stance, some people not informed to the nuance at play or unaware that you’re not bringing it up to ‘’ask questions’ actually ‘ask questions’, watch as the people who are either more informed on your actual stance, or more likely, more defensive and stupidly reactive call foul, a wedge is created. yes, a person of colour holding a gun towards police is going to usually be shot. you could make the argument that colour is a relevant factor (and I would absolutely agree), but those looking at the pure facts of the incident are going to say ‘of course he got shot, he was pointing a gun’, and suddenly they’re called racist for not having the same base assumptions and understandings on race and the many privileges it affords a white person. this person knew no better, chances are. and now they have been called a racist. and people take offense to that. this is one of the key tactics of courting regular people into conservative circles. you alienate them from the outside, and make them feel like you’re both working on ‘common sense’. make no mistake. I seriously believe this was one of the biggest factors in trump’s first presidency.
i understand the anxiety that appealing to the majority, the straight, cis, white demographic is demeaning. i just simply come from the perspective that the support of a majority is statistically and socially invaluable. aside from pure numbers, it’s been observed that authoritarians require the belief that oppression is acceptable in order to act upon it. it only makes sense that someone like that would want to live in a fantasy in which they are ‘authorised’ to oppress. ironic, huh. this is why those drunk white people you see on the tram at 3 in the afternoon always finish their racist tirade with ‘i’m just saying what we’re all thinking’. it’s a thought terminating cliche that allows one to believe that society at large agrees with them, that their behaviour is acceptable, without having to actually read the room to check if that’s on jah or cap. more systematically, this is ‘the silent majority’ or ‘silent australia’. nothing takes the wind out of the sales faster for an authoritarian than to be confronted with the idea that their worldview is not acceptable in the eyes of society. you don’t need to change the mind of everyone, just enough people that those who are most concerned with staying the majority, have to switch sides (or at least pretend to) to be that majority.
things to remember when engaging in conversation:
this post is in two parts. the second is already up, but please. take a breather. look at some dogs. it’s a hike, but so far, i’m glad you’re with me on this adventure. please let me know what you think!