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I’ve managed to radicalize multiple of my blue collar, truck loving, baby Jesus spouting, coworkers. It’s a process, but so was my on radicalization, just a different one due to our different material conditions.

Obviously, you can’t change everyone’s minds, but in my experience, there’s not much mind changing that has to be done in a lot of cases, just education on the root causes of the things they already know and notice.

When one party is telling you that this is the best time in our history, while your wages have gone down for 30 years straight, and the other party is the only one addressing their issues, but is doing so through inflammatory rhetoric and outright lies, it’s easy to see why someone would lean towards one over the other, and why they’d come to believe one sides lies over the other side. The trick is that most rural atomized people recognize most of the same problems in our society, the same way the rest of us do, they’ve just had people telling them lies about why those things are happening.

If you want a mass movement, you have to meet the people where they are. If you want to feel superior, then dunking on rednecks is the way to go. That doesn’t mean accepting bigotry, but recognizing that everyone is at a different stage in their political development, and that it takes a custom catered approach towards each individual in order to best effect said development.

A big problem i see liberals having when trying to change the minds of both leftists and conservatives, is an inability to even consider any aspect of another’s perspective, and a belief in one’s own perceptions as objective reality. In doing so, they will argue against their perception of others beliefs, rather than actually discussing and finding what those beliefs are, or where those beliefs come from.

It’s almost like no one remembers that redneck meant socialist union organizer before it was corrupted to truck loving suburban hillbilly wannabe. The working class is ripe for radicalization, but you have to treat them like full people first, not caricatures.

I grew up around and still live with these people. Let me tell ya how they think: They don’t. They don’t even really know what a liberal is.

To them a liberal is something other than them. And the ingroup they’ve spent their whole lives trying to fit into says that’s bad, so they are against liberals and everything they do and say and want. But so is everyone they know, so they’ll oppose liberals even louder and more extreme, in a bid to get noticed by their peers at work, church, family, and party.

And of course they’re right, liberals are shit. But they don’t know why, because again they Do. Not. Know. What. A. Liberal. Is.

And if they ever figure it out and outgrow the childish mentality of opposing without understanding, they will be outcast from their friends, family, and community. And that is the fear that keeps them lockstep in line, voting for the apocalypse.

I’m an anarcho-communist in one of the most secure blue states there is, but thanks for proving my point I made in another comment that liberals argue against their perceptions of peoples beliefs rather than their actual beliefs.

This is very clearly talking about the working class rural south who are not the same people driving $100k trucks, or if they are they're deeply in debt to keep up what they see as necessary appearances - which is again a result of capitalist advertising and only works to keep these people poorer in the long run even if they have a nice expensive new toy temporarily.

I know the meme is that rural southerners all drive massive new trucks, but the majority of the rural south is extremely economically depressed and is 100% not going to respond well to liberal policies that do in fact come from urban areas with completely different material conditions. Even if the majority of people in both rural and urban/suburban settings do share a status of oppression from the capitalist class, their relationship to this oppression and the actual solutions to it often don't look the same - something that the democratic party will never compensate for.

On the bright side many of these rural southerners see themselves as libertarians to a large degree. Even if their ideas of liberty have been poisoned by the modern right wing, I've found they will often respond well to (historically conscious) libertarian socialist ideas when presented individually and outside of their predisposed ideas of left-right politics.

Not to mention that in many southern states voter turnout is extremely low, and the reality is that even though our politicians are mostly garbage right wingers - the people here are simply being trapped by their economic situation and the policies enacted by the few only further entrench their inability to escape poverty.

At the end of the day the working class rural south is primarily suffering from a lack of class conscious education and economic policies brought on by their ignorance.

Of course there's also a history of racism here that has historically been exploited by the right wing to further entrench itself, but again the further down the economic totem pole you go the more you find that white and black folks in the rural south suffer from this in much the same way, and they often know it.

Plenty of educated people and academic leftys live in the country, they just lay a bit low to avoid problems with the types of people you're describing. And I hate to break it to you, but talking like that will only make things worse for you. Nobody wants to move away from their city conveniences, especially when they think the country is like a scene from The Hills Have Eyes thanks to people who don't know what they're talking about spreading negativity like you just did.

Country people led our (US) labor movement in the 1890s-1930s in conjunction with immigrant industrial workers in the big cities and longshoremen and others on the coasts. While there has definitely been a turning away from the left for the working classes in many places, the mere existence of historical working class socialist movements show that it is not an inevitable outcome, and with the proper analysis and action, can be reversed.

There's nothing wrong with explaining a concept simply, it anything being able to explain it simply shows true understanding.

The problem I see is a lot of rural folk don't want you to explain it simply, they're too prejudiced and dead set in they're ways.

They may ask you to explain it simply but they do so to see you stumble so they can mock you.

Successful social movements requires messaging that can reach the lowest common denominator.

It's a shame that the people who currently wear that name with pride wouldn't be considered rednecks at the origin of the term.

Not everyone left of centre is a ML. Liberals are not left wing.

You're perhaps not wrong about the choice of community, especially after the hexbear fiasco. OP isn't an ML though, they're an anarchist.