" When I finished Carlyle’s French Revolution in 1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment (and Taine and St. Simon): and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte–And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat. Carlyle teaches no such gospel so the change is in me–in my vision of the evidences.
People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did at all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they can lie so. It comes of practice, no doubt. They would not say that of Dickens’s or Scott’s books. Nothing remains the same. When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: there is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its correct dimensions: the house hasn’t altered; this is the first time it has been in focus."
-In a letter to William Dean Howells
I needed to hear this right now. I’m chipping away at a demsoc and they are way more dem than soc. I had thought they were close to a break through but then they said anti-immigration and racism are just human nature, and I’m like “wow how did I think this was a good person with a few bad ideas?”
I had to try hard to not go off about how racist that is and how they are so racist there is no hope for them. Instead I managed to just point out the latent racism calmly and incorporate it into how a history of how democratic socialism is a dead end and only worked when there was a USSR to play the capitalists off.
It’s indeed good that you did not do this. Some people just see enough examples of anti-immigration and racism sentiments growing in popularity that they just cynically conclude that that’s how it is, missing the parts where there are well-funded reactionary drivers of those anti-immigrant and racist sentiments, led by a capitalist system of exploitation which is designed to set people into classes.
If your response to every time someone espouses a right-wing viewpoint (whether they harbor it personally, or believe that “that’s just how it is”) is to go off on them then you will lose that person, because they’ll stop listening to you once you’re attacking them personally.
Well that worked well. Apparently pointing out that immigration is a result of racist colonialism is “mansplaning.” This is why demsocs are called “Social fascists” or why Stalin called them the “moderate wing of fascism.” Its like this person built their political identity in university 20 years ago and never questioned any of those ideas since then. They say they “studied marx” but they have no grasp of historical materialism. They talk about the “nordic model” like it happened in a vacuum and ignore that since the fall of the USSR the Nordic nations severely eroded every advantage they had over the rest of the capitalist nations.
Classic case of scratch a lib and watch a fascist bleed. But I’ve been friends with a few people that have flipped to full-on socialism from prior reactionary beliefs. It’s possible.