How would you approach persuading a far extreme liberal toward center? What would you set as a realistic goal for a productive discourse? Would it be better attempt to do so in person rather than online?
deprogram an extreme liberal
Read Das Kapital to them
towards center
They’re already in the “center”
“Deprogramming” makes sense in the sense for the far right because there is a lot of misinformation and fake news and outrage bait and all that kind of stuff. Getting people out of those trappings is good because it allows them to see how things really are, rather than what people want them to think.
That isn’t really a problem with the left. I mean, I’m sure you could find some extreme subreddit somewhere where people want to bring out the guillotine to kill all capitalists or cut everyone’s genitals off in the name of gender equality… But ultimately they’re much rarer than the equivalent alt right spaces.
Extreme conservatives are very common and an existential threat to many groups. Extreme liberals are a mild curiosity that need to go out and touch grass.
That should hopefully explain the votes, saying that you need to deprogram “extreme liberals” brings up questions about what you actually mean by “extreme liberal” given that it really isn’t that big an issue in society.
… Or maybe all this is just my biases.
It’s just your biases.
That isn’t really a problem with the left
Of course it is. Since the terms left and right were invented (during the French revolution), left-wing extremism has been as much a problem as the right-wing variety. The ideology of equality and fraternity is a story of bloody revolutions, purges, famines, even genocides. Depending on definitions, the body count of left-wingery is arguably even higher than that of fascism.
Of course, what Americans call an “extreme liberal” (i.e. a woke progressive rather than a liberal) is not typically a murderous Stalinist. But the habit of fetishizing abstract ideas, and seeing everything in terms of group power struggles, and the obsession with ideological purity - I hardly need to cite examples, at least from abroad we can see that these things are alive and well in America and having bad outcomes.
Not as bad as the opposite extreme though, on that I will agree.
Do you Stalin think was an extreme liberal?
Of course not. An extreme liberal would be a neoliberal or ultraliberal, so basically the opposite of Stalin.
This is just America’s weird misuse of the word liberal to mean “progressive” or “socialist” or something.
Neoliberals aren’t liberal though, similar to how neoconservatives aren’t conservative; neoliberalism is an explicitly postliberal ideology that rejects the tenets of Enlightenment liberalism.
Arguably true. But personally I prefer it when words mean something over time. The fundamental concept in liberalism, since the beginning, is a concern for individual rights. That was the revolutionary idea. Looked at this way, the word ultraliberal means exactly what it looks like: an obsession with individual rights taken too far.
The neoliberal etymology is murkier because it’s really an economic term.
In any case the vernacular American usage is of liberal to mean “left-wing” is just wrong, or at least unhelpful. I wish you guys would drop it and find a more appropriate word! Progressive being the obvious candidate.
You can be woke, progressive, and liberal. You’re talking nonsense.
Your tone here is not assisting constructive debate.
Interesting to contrast the votes on this with the other thread about conservatives.
No problem with extremists as long as they’re our extremists.
Far left extremism - ending homelessness by taking money from the rich
Far right extremism - invading a capitol building to block vote counts
Far right extremism - ending homelessness by throwing them in jail and forcing them to work for the rich at below minimum wage
I’m not a huge fan of liberals either but anyone with a brain can see that modern conservatives are anti-intellectual hate cult retards who think that truth is dictated by consensus and proclamation, and they deserve to be as unpopular and ridiculed as they are because they had decades to prove that their punitive ideological approach works and they failed horribly.
Did we fail the test because we’re wrong, or was the answer sheet wrong? Maybe we say conservatives are bad not because of some hidden bias but because conservatives are bad.
