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I’ve had a lot of luck directly recruiting libertarians, they’re actually the group I’ve had the most success with.
They’re on the upper end of the pipeline to fascism, which makes them among the easiest to turn away.
You can usually get them to entertain the difference between private property and personal property, and if you spend a couple months paying attention to that then suddenly you’re a socialist.
This is a good entry point. Two other ones I’ve had luck with are:
- The sub is focused on capitalism far more run-of-the-mill conservative subs (and certainly more than white nationalist groups), so critiquing the places where capitalism fails most egregiously fits in pretty naturally. You don’t have to be the “but the real problem, of course, is capitalism” guy all the time because they’re discussing it so fucking much already.
- They spend a lot of time re-litigating whether we need public schools or public courts (lol) and there are just overwhelmingly good arguments for all of that stuff and more. You get lots of space to put those arguments out there, so anyone dipping their toes in and thinking “my public school wasn’t great; maybe we should just privatize all of this” can get connected with why that’s a horrible idea.
Besides derailing fascist pipelines, there’s also the benefit of sharpening your own critiques of capitalism (and your own alternative solutions).
Plus Libertarians have already somewhat revolted against the neoliberal world order (even if they basically agree with all of the basic principles), so they’re more open to structural critiques than liberals are.
They’re on the upper end of the pipeline to fascism, which makes them among the easiest to turn away.
Disagree actually. I’ve had a lot more success with libertarians than I have had with liberals. (I’ve also had more luck with chuds than liberals.)
Though I’ve spent no time on /r/libertarian. Most of the libertarians I talk to are on Hacker News.
I suppose I don’t see liberals as being on any sort of pipeline to fascism in the first place. The liberals I know are largely in agreement with leftists on the danger of America’s proto-fascist elements (e.g., militarized police and mass incarceration); they just want shitty, half-assed reformist solutions and are reflexively (but not militantly) pro-capitalist. If they object to a policy like Medicare for All, it’s for some complex macroeconomic budgeting reason they don’t really understand, not because they genuinely despise people at the bottom rungs of society. I don’t see them as a few nudges away from supporting an ethnostate.
I do see many libertarians as a few nudges away from supporting an ethnostate; that’s why I view them on a pipeline to fascism. Many of them do genuinely despise anyone at the bottom rungs of society, and at best they’re oblivious to all the racial coding that’s built into that. If left in a seamless container of like-minded thinkers, they’re the type who would easily conclude that anyone who’s poor should just be left to die, and from there it’s only a short hop to “and if they get in my way at all I have the right to kill them.”
As shitty as liberals are they generally have a level of fundamental human decency that libertarians either don’t have (these folks are unreachable) or need to be reminded of.
