The friend who radicalized me is now begging me to vote for Harris

The person who first told me to read Mao, which got me into Marxism-Leninism in general, has become totally incoherent during the pandemic. The difference between us is that I have experience participating in organizations and seeing them fail the marginalized up close, and I experienced some of the same relief Hồ Chí Minh described as I took in Marxism Leninism, but my friend's individualist tendencies have not exposed them enough to the fatal downsides of meandering eclecticism. They are now an antivaxxer who sees all public health as draconian, no AES are good enough for them, just sort of stuck at the Chomsky and Foucault despair dead end.

Met a kid online when I was a teenager who was the first communist I ever knew.
Then he went to college and was literally brainwashed by liberal propaganda.

The trotskyist who helped a lot to radicalize me (I later became an ML thanks to hexbear) got a good job with the teamsters and is now just a standard liberal as far as I can tell.

‘nothing will fundamentally shake the imperial machine so might as well pick

I hate to be the first person in history to point this out, but your friend's vote doesn't determine who sits in the imperial throne. Your friend's vote is a superficial indicator of personal support for a given aspiring war criminal. The imperial president is appointed by an unelected council of elders chosen by from the two wings of the US bourgeois party.

The friend who radicalized me is now a fascist-adjacent EU liberal.

It's depressing as fuck and I honestly don't know why, but at some point it's like he just decided to become a bad person. He was a communist when he was like 14, got me into it, then when he was like 17 he became a piece of shit. Insanely misogynistic, would only talk to women he wanted to have sex with, and just incredibly rude to people he didn't know, even when they were nice people.

Now he's moved to the Netherlands to study EU politics or something, and all I know about him comes from his Instagram posts. He posts ableist shit all the time, he's in love with the EU and he just posted a Ukrainian fascist badge which he owns.

I remember sitting in a park with him when we had just finished school, telling him that I was going to join an ML org. He snorted and called them larpers, to which I pointed out that he didn't do any political activity at all, and I'd rather larpers than nothing. He thought because he read Lacan and smoked weed and was cynical that he was above politics.

It's so depressing. He used to be genuinely empathetic. He was a feminist when every boy his age was sexist, he would always tell people of the evil shit the US does, he genuinely got angry at capitalism. Now he's just a sack of shit

I want to get through to him but I am getting stuck.

Why do you care about how they vote? It literally doesn't matter.

Find it pretty funny how electoralist brainworms have infected even socialist Americans to the point that they'd think convincing someone not to vote is a useful course of action.

Just laugh and ignore him honestly. Or go vote to better maintain a friendship. Or lie about it. Again it simply doesn't matter.

Heh, that’s nothing. My mentor, one of the best Marxist theorists in the country I grew up in, is now a reactionary who spouts right wing conspiracy theories lol. He got me into Marxism some 25 years ago and was one of the most progressive activists back in the days. Also we’re not from a Western country.

I honestly think that failures after failures of left wing movements globally since the 1990s have broken the brains of many who used to be at the forefront of left wing activism. It also coincided with the period of neoliberalism being spread to the Global South in the form of overseas educated professionals returning and joining social democratic/democratic socialist parties en masse and brought Western liberal ideologies into traditional workers parties.

I sense that many here are probably quite new to the whole socialism/communism thing. It’s sometimes discouraging to think that in another 10-20 years, probably half of your comrades would be fighting you on the other side of the struggle.

Voting doesnt matter, you can vote if itll save your friendship but its not going to do anything else and they should know that

Sounds like your friend is enraptured by cpusa

This kind of shit terrifies me to the core because what if I become like that

Americans are all spineless imperial dogs

I think the other people telling you to cut him off or calling him a fascist are going a little far. "Might as well" isn't exactly a Kamala canvasser, lots of people get alienated in America. The obvious question to ask would be "is the difference big enough to bother voting," and question why his politics have changed.

Ultimately he's your friend and you know him better than anyone on a reddit spinoff forum, and its your call whether to convince him to vote differently or if this should affect your friendship.

i also refuse to not vote my conscience but i figured this time its not like doing this abstract process to pick if id prefer -100 points vs -200 points is gonna matter that much if i genuinely believe itll even be slightly better under kamala i might as well

Not calling your buddy Ben Shapiro, but that's a Shapiro-esque sentence. Throw out as much shit as you can is as short a time as possible so that any response would basically have to be novel length.

• He says he will not vote for his conscience, yet he votes for someone he clearly views as bad.
• He says the process is not abstract, then makes abstractions.
• He says he believes things will be slightly better under Kamala (not incorrect, it's his belief. It is the belief that is wrong here. Things will not be better under Kamala)
  a. going into the third point requires a lot of work, and I can imagine you've already talked a lot about that particular topic, so that's also just shitty of him to disregard whatever you've said like that.
• Unrelated to the sentence, but if he is defeatist then he should view Trump as the better of the two candidates, considering the fact that he is currently experiencing the system under Kamala-lite (if he believes what she says, she is basically campaigning on being a more right-wing Joe Biden)

I personally would focus on how voting for better domestic policies will do nothing but make things worse. The extermination machine will not stop in Gaza, it will come home. There will be no better domestic policies. I would focus on the massive resistance towards all the things the dems are doing, that Trump couldn't do because he was either incompetent or because the general populace exerted enough pressure to stop it.
Trump pardoned a sheriff and even that was a massive scandal (as it should be, but let's not pretend people would have given a shit under Biden.)

edit: on the bright side you get to give your friend the experience every leftist dreams of: Living in a world were they are considered reactionairy

the whole "everyone who is doing lesser evilism is basically a hitler follower" thing is starting to genuinely piss me off. no these people specifically, like in OP, are not saying "might as well" because they're trying to justify their preference for domestic vs foreign lives. they're saying it because they are still used to a US with absolutely no organized left or worker's power. they don't see themselves as sacrificing anything because they think the left is completely incapable of doing anything in the US and that there is no leftist cause to sacrifice. this isn't the position of a hitlerite, it's the position of a leftist who genuinely thinks no positive systemic change is or is currently possible. i understand getting annoyed at online proselytizing blue MAGA types but implicitly lumping actual comrades who still have misplaced faith in lesser evilism in with them is not a salient analysis of material reality, the leftists voting for KKKopmala because they think collective bargaining is entirely out of reach and every person they know keeps yelling at them to do so are not at all comparable to Blueman Bloodmouth salivating over palestinian death counts

edit: of course it's still extremely bad to be defeatist to the point of being complicit with a genocidal regime, but i do genuinely think the animating force in this case is defeatism rather than pure seflishness, so they're far more redeemable than most types. Of course it's up to OP whether it's worth the time for them to do that

the reason you can't provide a counter argument is that his position is completely incoherent. Not saying that just cause I disagree either. You posted 1 sentence that has 4 or 5 different thoughts that are irrelevant or contradictory to each other. Maybe the reason he likes kamala is they are on the same wave length in terms of cognitive context?

But seriously I don't know if logic is the name of the game here. If you are going to try to reciprocate the gift of communism and pull him out of the pit, I wonder if checking for emotional salience might help. I would ask who or what has changed his mind? There could be a relationship: with a person, group, identity, even a parasocial relationship or other indirect influence, that has contributed to this. Or has his relationship to his context changed? Has he discovered a new/latent class allegiance? One of the various trains of thought mentioned is "this time its not like doing this abstract process". What the heck has changed to make it concrete/direct now? Nothing has changed in the system to make it more tangible. If something's different, it's him.

I'm also curious about the variation between the post title and the body. The latter is his weak ass attempt to justify his own behavior which is one thing. But why does he want you to do the same so badly? Surely he knows "might as well" isn't a compelling argument for anything. I won't leave my house for "might as well". Might be downplaying his own commitment to avoid cringe. Or maybe he really cares what you think and wants you to endorse his behavior. Or he has adopted a new theory of change that involves each person getting one other person to vote. In any case, if you can draw that out, it would be clarifying for you both.

I personally don't see the fascism inherent in this small amount of information that others are pointing to. I have heard some almost-compelling arguments made on the issue of abortion alone. I can imagine if I was a different person, with different experiences, and less stubborn, I could be swayed if it came from the right source. We are all influenced by those around us. Some people are really easily influenced.

To inquire in the opposite direction, I might ask him what would convince him to change his mind. Perhaps leading in the direction of a viable political organization to join and act with. Evidence of class power. Instead of focusing on his current trajectory, imagine a different one. A few minutes of world building to get out of your heads.. Imagine a left that wasn't in utter disarray, would you still be making the same argument? If not, why? Because there would be hope! What would it look like? Now is that what the democratic party looks like? Is that what it feels like?

At the end of the day, there are some lessons that can only really be understood and internalized through struggle. You can learn in 30 minutes of experience things you can't learn in 30 years of reading and discussion. Has he done anything communist or was it more of a talking thing? If not, he should.

Voting in American elections is just signaling your fealty to the regime.

Of course I'm still voting so whatever. I like filling bubbles okay.

Liberals don't understand that nothing will be better under Harris

... ... ...

↘️ Please help Aya in Gaza ❤️ 🇵🇸

https://gofund.me/1222af19

This reminds me of when I read a post somewhere about someone who met up with the person who convinced them to go vegan at a cafe after not seeing them for years. The person who convinced them to go vegan ordered a latte with dairy in it and revealed that they're an ex-vegan now. OP was so confused and disappointed.

I may be butchering some of the details, but it was something like that.

Like most Americans, I live in a state where my vote won't matter and I'm keeping my conscience clean. This one is just a bridge way too far for me. I think I would probably reconsider if Rashida Tlaib endorsed Kamala, but I don't think she will or should.

voting is not politics, reading is not politics, make fun of him. If your state loses by 1 vote, tell him he should have gone with a better argument (like 10k donation to rcs)

P.s. (in the realm of absurdist arguments) there is a higher chance that some hot palestinian lady or mma fighter will make trumpo bomb tel aviv, than that kamala will not listen to some bloodless mormon sicko. That's ignoring euros wouldn't go that far along with trumpo. Domestically she would do jack shit cause of the senate anyway

I hope I am shot in the head immediately if I ever debase myself like this. your friend is dead inside already

Permanently Deleted

Radicalize them

It really doesn't matter who he votes or doesn't vote for. Everybody is anxious for reasons good and bad. Just let him do what he wants. He'll probably feel dumb about it later. I won't vote for her, and I'll tell people why, but I don't tell them not to either.

He is on the whole defeatist 'nothing will fundamentally shake the imperial machine so might as well pick the wardog with better domestic policies' tip.

I'd throw that right back as the reason you aren't voting lmao!

What are you trying to accomplish?

He has capitulated to this shithole society and is a knowing supporter of the genocide. It's one thing to be politically ignorant about what's going on in Gaza, but he has no excuse. He knows that the IOF is beheading Palestinian children with bombs and he is still going to support the party who gave the IOF the bombs anyways. This is betrayal. All that doomer nonsense is just that: nonsense. If he was a true doomer, he wouldn't bother voting. He would just be like my dad who last voted in the 2000 election and completely checked out from politics since then (his politics suck, so that's a good thing). George Carlin in his later years when he mocked people who wasted their time voting saying that he got more to show for it by beating his meat could be said to be a doomer. Your friend is just a polite supporter of genocide.

Just lie about who or if you voted dawg

listen to your friend