As a recently radicalized baby-lefty I’ve been thinking about this a lot
“the idea of a “moment” of radicalization is liberalism and connotes that people need this singular moment of experience or persuasion whereby they enter the class conscious state.”
fair point, just goes to show that my perspective was influenced by my own experience, thanks for pointing it out because now I’m aware :D
So I guess the real question would be “What’s your personal history with leftism?”
it stopped being a game or a thing that happened far away with Charlottesville, for me. I kind of held onto my radlib-ness for another 6 months or so but started reading and thinking about politics much more after that. what was left of my worldview shattered when I read the Dispossessed and realized that quite literally the only thing still holding my liberalism together was capitalist realism. once that was gone, I dove head-first into communism and haven’t looked back.
Mad props to you for at least trying, man. I wish I could unionize my workplace but there is only 10 of us and all of them minus the 2 managers watch Fox News on the daily… and they aren’t even old. Shit’s sad. And don’t fret about labels, we’re all leftists in some sense. I think I’m an anarcho-communist.
I’m sure I’m not alone or unique in my response but the night that the 2016 election results were coming in, I had a thousand-yard stare pointed at the TV but I could not hear anything. My liberal brain at the time just broke and could not fathom how someone like Trump could rise to power. Being the nerd I am, this naturally resulted in me asking questions and researching answers. Eventually, I started listening to political podcasts to try and just get started with wrapping my head around what I should be paying attention to. Eventually, I came across the Chapo subreddit. Since I like dark humor, it was a good mix of laughing the pain away while still being somewhat informed. Then, I listened to ChapoTrapHouse for a while and slowly started learning about more leftist history and media criticism (BASED Citations Needed shout-out) through related podcasts. Now, I don’t listen to ChapoTrapHouse at all; mostly, and this is on rotation: Beau of the Fifth Column, Bad Empanada, Citations Needed, and the GameGrumps (I like feeling like a kid sometimes, leave me alone).
