What was your most lib moment before you were radicalized (or at all)?
What was your most lib moment before you were radicalized (or at all)?
I'll start
This is embarrassing but I cried when SHillary lost to Trump.
As a black person who went through a huge internalized racism arc, when I ventured into leftist spaces that said stuff like "Fuck white people.", I got enraged and responded with something along the lines of "As a black person, that's totally fucked up! This is the opposite of what MLK promoted!'.
I got laughed at and called a "bootlicker", all while thinking I was some cool, grandiose, and righteous figure in this context.
Boy, do times change or what!?
The libs inability to break the rules to stopbTrump turned me from a well meaning lib into a ancom.
Watching the rat fucking of Bernie in real time followed by the pandemic response turned me into an ML that wonders if the Soviets shouldn't have stopped at Berlin.
My most lib moment before all of this was agreeing with someone that Snowden was bad because he endangered America.
[reads title]
[thinks about the question for a minute, remembers something] oh... god...
[remembers something else] oh God
[something else] Oh God!
[something else] Oh GOD!
[something else] OH GOD
[something else] OH GOD
[retreats into corner sucking my thumb to prevent my soul from leaving my body] Nope! Nope! Don't wanna think about it! Dooon't waaaannaaa!!!
God this is embarrassing.
I was a high school senior in 2003. I was taking an English class at the local community college. I got into a long argument with a student in that English class.
They opposed the war in Iraq. I maintained that George W Bush could not possibly be lying about weapons of mass destruction because it would guarantee a loss in his reelection campaign in 2004. I agreed that the evidence presented for weapons of mass destruction was not convincing, but I maintained that no president could possibly lie to start a war of convenience and still win re-election. I believed wholeheartedly that there was evidence that had not been made public that would justify our aggression in Iraq. The idea of a president lying to start a war was so incredibly alien I refused to accept it. I refused to believe that our Democratic system would reward a president who lied like that with another term, especially after the shady way he was elected in 2000.
I learned my lesson eventually. By mid '04 I realized how stupid I had been. When Bush won reelection, what little faith I had in this nation and it's institutions, finally evaporated.
For like an entire semester after taking the intro microeconomics class at my university I definitely believed that abolishing the minimum wage would be good for everybody because something something the point on the curve I don't even remember, it was dumb as hell. I remember explaining this theory to a girl I liked and she swung her purse at me lmfao
I was super into Russia gate for a hot minute. The thing that finally busted me out of it was when someone finally pointed out to me: "If you think Russia can use platforms like Facebook to influence Elections to that extent....just what kind of influence do you think that Facebook and all these companies have themselves?" Once you start asking those questions it changes your perspective on things pretty quick.
Before Oct 7 it was really hard to find like, any info on the genocide in Gaza fron Google. I'd punch "Israel-Palestine conflict" in, and just get a bunch of fucking ADL links and shit about how it's Israel's birthright or whatever the hell. Bereft of other sources, being pre-Hexbear, I just mentally threw my hands up and 1:1 spouted the "It's so complicated! Thousands of years of history!" line. Their stupid propaganda working flawlessly, then.
Oh yeah also, for a year or so I was really into the "only two genders" shit, which was a combination of my browsing 4chan and my girlfriend at the time being really into Internet Aristocrat and Sargon of Akkad. To be fair I was like 16, damn am I glad I stopped that shit before adulthood.
I remember the night of the 2008 election, when Obama won, I was part of the collective sigh of relief across the nation. I remember thinking, "now things are finally going to change," and feeling genuinely hopeful.
To my credit, the country was psychotic under Bush, at least until 2006. And then the Great Recession happened, and it was worse.
I'm not American, but I thought Obama's inauguration would be the start of real change worldwide. PNAC was finally out of power in the White House. Intelligent people were about to take the reins on the global financial crisis. Racism was over, Americans elected a black president who spoke positively about LGBT+ people in his inauguration speech.
So much for all that. Eight more years of lip service but no real work on social safety nets, and the same MIC bullshit that's been going on since WW2.
A number of years ago, I took selfies with a number of Democratic Party politicians. Not even Bernie or anything, more moderate types. Stood in line over an hour for one of them.
The most embarrassing part was that I was, at that point, already radicalized. I opposed these people, I'd already read a fair amount of theory (from Anarchism and Other Essays to Blackshirts and Reds), and I was already moderately involved in organizing. Quite embarrassing, and there is no chance I'll release those photos on the internet, but honestly I probably won't delete them either.
I emailed my dad links and quotes from the impeachment hearings and mullor shit and deadass was like "let's see donny wriggle his way outta this!"
Fuckin shoot me
I thought that I had been a liberal but never really a passionate anti-communist, that I had always been kind of okay with communism, but then I randomly found a Facebook exchange I’d had with a communist in college back in 2009 where I asserted that Cuba was doomed to imminent collapse. It was embarrassing. I had unconsciously blocked that one out basically. The reality is that to be a liberal is to be an anti-communist.
I started a liberal club in high school lol and nobody came.
When Trump won in 2016 I burned out my car battery because my phone was plugged into it and I was constantly refreshing the results, willing them to change. I was overseas teaching so this was in the afternoon.
I ran in local elections as a Democrat several times. I lost the first few times because I was a Bernie Democrat but after I actually won and ended up at the table and saw who I was sharing that table with (a bunch of fucking Nazis) I resigned. By then the pandemic had started.
There are probably many many many more embarrassing liberal incidents from my life.
Enlisted in the national guard, partly because I thought they still did good things, but mostly because I was broke, in massive debt from student loans, and no one else wanted to hire me. Eventually disabused myself of the notion that the national guard had any good in them and radicalized maybe halfway through that enlistment. Never went into combat (signal corps, went on one deployment and spent most of it doing next to nothing in an air conditioned building outside of any combat zone) but tbh I'm not going to try to justify being in the military. My enlistment ended, I didn't reenlist, and now I'm trying to get involved in leftist causes and do something that actually helps.
Joined the military when I was kicked out of the house, all of the adults in my life told me it would be the best thing for me and set me up for life. So I bought into that stuff and was really excited about continuing my family legacy and becoming a man in my families eyes.
Well, I no longer talk to any of the adults in my life and I’m a non-binary trans communist. Biggest fucking regret and mistake of my life, but also I don’t know that I would have radicalized without seeing the belly of the beast and being a cog in the us navy, but I would like to give myself more grace than that.
casual racism against the roma, asians, africans, middle-easterners and slavs
i once said and i quote: "The only reason communism worked in China is because the people there are kinda like ants."
i was thankfully never really against feminism or women's rights and that helped me from falling into full blown chuddom, i bounced off the fascist pipeline once they started crying about "teh wimmenz"
Voted for a candidate with a biggest net worth because he has the biggest net worth
Like 23 years ago, I took a shot of something alcoholic at a party, coughed, and said something like "sorry I'm weak like a girl". There were three presumably more left people than me right there, and they tried to patiently correct my language. I got all
defensive about it. Um, sorry those three people at the party.I thought Bernie would fix all the ills of this rotten empire, thought Europe was a model for the future.
Thinking that the NATO bombing/invasion of Libya and subsequent brutal execution of Colonel Gaddafi was a good thing. I specifically remember being impressed reading some article about how "rebels" on the ground were using Twitter to tell NATO where to drop bombs.
Fortunately about two years later I started seeing articles about the civil war, slave camps, ect and had a real hold a minute moment realizing the situation had gotten much worse rather than any better. By that point I was already interested in socialism/communism as a concept but I would definitely credit that specific moment in history for leading me down the path of Marxism-Leninism
i was never lib. im essentially a very cool anime protagonist
I didn't cry when Killary lost but I did go for a walk that night and just look at all the houses and wonder if there had been absolute nazis in these houses the entire time. It was pretty disappointing. By 2016 I was a socialist and didn't see Bernie as a socialist but would have been very happy to vote for him. I thought the 2016 election as a total waste of an election and thought Hillary would win by default and I voted for her because of course Donald Trump's not going to be president, like I assumed most people would.
Like a lot of people, my most lib moment was thinking Obama would be a reformer. The wars were super unpopular and the economy was dead in 2009. If republicans weren't so obstructionist, they probably would have taken one of Obama's many offers to cut social security. So I guess we're lucky they hated him so much.
I was born radicalised. I'm so red they celebrate international workers day in honour of my birth.
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
I thought the reason people in poor countries were poor was because they didn't have social democracy. Once I thought more about why there are poor people in the first place, I very quickly became a communist
I have so many: Thinking that Obama becoming the US president will make the world better (I'm not an American).
Thinking that with merits/education I can move out from poverty.
Thinking that cops are there for our collective safety and can be trusted.
Thinking the welfare state exists for the betterment of peoples lives.
Thinking my singular vote changes things, being all emotional about getting to vote in a democracy and it having an impact.
Thinking Nordic social democracy could regulate capitalism.
Seeing the winter war valid in my country. Agreeing that we weren't nazis, but a secret third thing somehow. Considering joining the army.
Thinking that communism is an utopia.
Thinking that the society I live in would opt for solidarity in an emergency (covid). Trusting that people would not get left behind, things would be run with people first and not profit. Oh lol...
What has broken me over time is climate change and how it is not addressed, imperialism & colonialism, covid, neurodiversity and my lived experience in this system as a poor audhd woman who never did fit in or whose ideas of material social justice were always framed as childish or utopistic. I am thankful I got curious to find out why that is.
Supporting the Libyan revolt. In my defence, I knew Socialists in Libya who supported it. All gone now...
A month or so before election night 2016 I told a coworker (who was 60+ years old) (I was mid 20's): "however bad you think Hillary is, Dolan Turmp is so much worse" (this was after Bernie got fucked out of the nomination, I was a bernie guy). She just laughed. I guess having decades of experience gave her some insight that i couldn't comprehend.
Before the end of 2013, I actually did think Obama was going to be "decent". There was really no mention of any of his complicity in a list of war crimes that might even make the piss-drenched Ronald Reagan blush.
Then I moved back to South Africa due to circumstance right before the new year, where in the span of an hour after getting out of the airport, suddenly I was hit with the realization that "Obomba really is a slavemaster Zionist capitalist war criminal piece of shit, huh".
I did still have some lib takes (which eventually wore off some years later) like the criticisms levied against EFF and concerns over what they actually meant with regard to their alleged "anti-white" rhetoric. Despite this, I still voted for them in 2014 and 2019, in the latter part coming to terms that I tend to be in pretty close agreement with their positions (like severing relations and sanctioning Shitrael, supplying Hamas with South African weaponsystems, decommodification of land, nationalization of the mining and banking sectors), to name a few.
Also because people were coping at me for voting the EFF in 2014 and suggested that I voted the DA to replace the ANC. I basically responded with "well DA loves Obama and Israel so
"Marie Sukers should be arrested. Also Death to AmeriKKKa
This is embarrassing but I cried when SHillary lost to Trump
That remains one of the funniest nights of my life, I literally woke myself up laughing the next morning.
Once upon a time my lib ass somehow thought racism and sexism were both basically solved in the US. I got into an argument with someone against affirmative action and reparations.
My friends and I went to a surprisingly based public high school that taught about the coup against Allende and US imperialism in the Phillippines post-WWII. Also our Spanish teacher was an out-and-out PSL connected Communist, you could basically write "Che cool, US bad" on your tests to get extra credit.
We used to make fun of the Spanish teacher and also argued a few times with one of the humanities teachers about how "biased against the US" our curriculum was and how it was a little over the top. He just said "appreciate it while you have it, because once you graduate you're never going to see this perspective again". Right he was, and now thankfully my core group are all some flavor of communist/anarchist.
But a lot of peripheral friends from those days have gone on to be weird execs at places like UBER or even cops. Really even that curriculum wasn't able to inoculate any but a few of us in the end.
I believed in all the free market bullshit, thought that the problems in my country are because we are not as developed a society as the west and that we need to do more things like them, believed that austerity measures were a necessary evil because "le economy" naturally requires harder times when it's not going well.
The real problems are a combination of many things, some of which are heavy imperialist exploitation of my country, uneven growth of capitalism, monopolies taking over local production, and the usual good old capitalism that is true for every capitalist regime.
Thinking Arabs "invaded" Israel and that as foretold in the Bible, they should be "kicked out" of the "stolen" land to be "given back" to the Jewish people.
I couldn't sleep the night they were counting votes for the 2016 election lol. I didn't cry but it was still kind of the same.
I think my most lib-brained moment was that deep down inside I feel like I got involved with the local boomer democrats club because I was still holding on to notions of reformation. I had a stupid fucking "I can change him" moment but for a whole ass group of old fuckers that just wanna be angry about Donald and ride on Biden's every geriatric dick thrust. They don't want to change shit.
I'm not sure how to categorize my radicalization though, at that time I was already considering myself a socialist and have for a few years. That was before I did a deep dive into theory tho. So I guess it just wasn't solidified yet.
That racism was largely solved in the us and there was just a small fringe who are outwardly racist who needed to be dealt with. Fortunately even many libs these days know that's not true.
I got into the 2020 primaries like a football game
My most lib moment was agreeing with a Gommulism bad video on YouTube like 8-9 years ago or something
I used to be an enlightened centrist but that was like back in 2012
In my freshman year of college I wrote a whole paper about how you shouldn't punch nazis for my writing class
I was very pro-Bernie in 2016 but also against the whole Bernie or Bust idea. Lesser evil-ism in general made sense to me, and the man himself endorsing Hillary on basically those grounds was enough for me to be vocally against Busters or people against voting in general. In my defense, I was a minor and couldn't even vote at the time. By the time I could vote in 2020, my beliefs had shifted enough that I voted for Bernie in the primary but not for Biden in the general. I sure as shit won't now, and not for state-level Dems either like I did in 2020.
I honestly am still not against lesser-evil thinking as much as most people on this site are, but for very different reasons than liberals. That kind of thinking really warmed me up to anti-imperialism. Once I got enough historical background on the death toll of America and colonialism and about how texts like the Black Book exaggerate and fabricate deaths under communism, comparison compelled me to realize that if I believed the lesser evil should be supported, then the DPRK, Iran, Syria, etc. (all the places I thought of as scary dictatorships before, essentially) are the morally superior side in geopolitics. On the basis of morbidity alone is enough to believe so, if nothing else
For that logic to work though, you need to believe people are of equal dignity no matter what part of the world they're from. That every dead body is equal to every other dead body. So, I have also come to realize that the failure of other supposedly pro-"lesser evil" libs to be staunch anti-imperialists comes down to either racism or using the "lesser evil" argument as a rhetorical trick instead of an actual belief. Or worse yet, both!
One shouldn't even need to be convinced of socialism or even social democracy to really follow this logic to its ultimate conclusions and support anti-colonial resistance, but apparently that's too fucking much to ask.
On that basis, I commend Hamas. I think Olof Palme would've understood that. I wish the non-communist """left""" today would have enough of a soul to follow the example of types like him.
I believed Obama's campaign promises and thought his election was going to deliver major structural changes to the financial sector and empire, reducing their grip on state and delivering it to citizens.
I thought the wars would end and Guantanamo would close. I thought we would get universal healthcare and it would finally let me become self employed.
in grade school the entire lunchroom at my school would chant 'Bush Bush Bush' like little hitler youth members during the bush v kerry election, and as an uninformed child raised by self-described 'democratic socialists' i would naturally respond by screaming kerry's name, even though i know next to nothing about the candidate then or now.
I was conservative as a kid but so are a lot of people whose material circumstances contradict those views.
I still have a dvd of Indecision 2000. I'm not even american.
Thinking that unrestricted free trade was good and would help non-western countries develop their economies in the early 00s, which is pretty liberal. But then I actually studied an ounce of economics.
Never dabbled in the post Bush era American libbery tho, which seems to be most of this thread.
I texted for Bernie in 2020. I'm not even American. The funniest thing is that when I told an American friend about it she was shocked and brought up "foreign interference in elections"
So I guess I was one of those foreign agents they warned you about
No lie. I did too. I watched countless hours or Rachel Maddow. And used phrases like the radical left to distance myself from commies.
thought andrew yang was kinda cool, threw a couple bucks his way (like he was a street entertainer or something, not real support)
Voting for the lesser evil when I was like 18
I was a cop for Halloween when I was six back in the early 90s. Easily most regrettable decision.
correctly predicting the joe biden presidency in like 2015
I used to be confused why punk songs in the 90s would criticize the President. It was Clinton! He's good, right!? He's not bad like Bush or Reagan!
I was a naive little liberal in those Bush years.
I liked and supported Bernie Sanders as a non American back in 2016.
I also voted for the DA once back when Mmusi Maimane was their leader.
Being a radlib anarchist for like 20 years.
9/11. I was in gradeschool but yeah. For about a year or two I made excuses for the war on terror. I still think about it sometimes.
I cried and had a panic attack when Bernie lost in 2020 lmao
Hmm. Well I was an anarchist for many many years before reading Marx & Lenin proper. I think my worst thing was believing all the tripe about Stalin from any western source, completely uncritically until I actually decided to examine that on my own. I used to be real bad about “going with the flow” of whatever appeared decent politically, usually some flavor of mainstream liberalism; I’m glad I grew out of that.
Does reading Stirner to impress an old girlfriend count? She considered herself an egoist…my half-serious opinion of that these days is that I think Engels made him up as a joke lol.
Rooted for and voted for a libertarian party in one election because they were against the government reading my emails. Which is fine, I still don't want the government doing that - not that I really sent any emails back then - but I checked years later and turns out they also had some opinions about let's say children and photography that I had not yet learned to associate with the word libertarian.
As a downwardly economically mobile white guy in my teens, I actually flirted with being a reactionary for a hot minute
But I guess the most "liberal" thing I did was Begin to think that the anti-sjw folks weren't doing a very good job and making us all look bad. I thought that surely I, generic white guy #567,890 could do better! So I started reading feminist and leftist philosophy to better take down those damn commies in the market place of ideas!....
Jokes on me, reading theory made me realize leftists were literally right and the only way reactionaries stay that way is by willfully misrepresenting the left and building a fantasy mythology to replace the real world lmao. Debate bro'd myself into becoming a Communist, which is pretty funny.
High school libertarianism.
after the 2016 election i read both hillary and comey's (god, there's a name i haven't thought of in a while) autobiographies to keep my lib brain occupied while waiting on the mueller report
Going to Chicago to protest the war in Iraq.
I hoped and changed. I thought Obama would mean something. I did volunteer work for the campaign. I didn't even bother to vote for him term two. So that shows you burnt I was. As am elder millennial I can't properly explain how bad we had Bush derangement syndrome at the time.
"New atheism"
My fucking senior quote in high school was "don't hurt people and don't take their stuff", in reference to this libertarian book. Fortunately, I took those ideas to leftism, because I think the third part of that sentence should be "don't turn yourself into the stuff's stuff"
Probably me uncritically absorbing gulag archipelago and leading in anti-communist/pro-america discussions to get laid while getting my political science and international studies degrees.
Fun times but I cringe at the absolute horny libshit I said in empty classrooms
I was once really exited about the mueller report 🤦
Donated to Jill Stein. I don’t even live close to the US
Bringing up Chinese debt trap diplomacy in geography class. I was really proud of it as well.
Permanently Deleted
I was recovering in a hospital bed while CNN talked about how Biden would need to means-test the covid stimulus checks. I was a SocDem since I was a kid, but it really took that as the final wakeup call when pushing 30.
When police came to my block and dismantled an elected council that started questioning the amount we all pay as utility bills
because it would be "legitimizing" the DPRK.
