this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2025
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I find it incredibly distressing that I can remember a time when people connected with each other, learned about each others values, principles and ideas for themselves and their nation, and they largely adapted to each other, they compromised, they changed views and tried to make things work.
The idea that now we've let the system become so vastly important to us that voting lines determine basic compatibility as humans talking to each other is just tragic. It's an artificial boundary that groups of people have deliberately built around us and we took it on and embraced it.
I would never endorse "giving a violent MAGA redneck a chance" or something, but the reality is more nuanced and there are thousands and thousands of median voters who have no idea what's going on in politics and figure a vote for trump was the same as a vote for bernie was the same as a vote for clinton and so on. It doesn't make them bad it makes them overworked, ignorant, tired or poorly educated.
We would do better at least talking to people more, particularly people we don't agree with so we can learn how to reach them and bring them up to a better place.
edit: a lot of you have never talked to another human in your life and base all your beliefs about the average median voter from youtube shorts that algorithms have fed you to make you angry and want to hate them. Welcome to being a cog.
The problem is with the fact that when the discussion about human rights, there is no middle ground. There is no compromise when it comes to human rights. Everyone deserves the same rights and protections, and if someone is trying to argue that people who have more melanin or aren't completely cis-het deserve fewer rights, there is no middle ground to be had.
Thankfully, I'm married and don't have to deal with this bullshit, but if I was dating these days, I would open with asking if they support my right to bodily autonomy and if their answer was anything besides "yes, absolutely", I'd get up and leave. Although, if I had to try to date these days, I'd probably just date women because I'm bi and men can be a coin toss on basic safety.
The median voter is a privileged dumbfuck who has no consistent set of values to begin with.
I could never trust or respect a second-term Trump voter. That says to me quite plainly that person doesn't have any values, principles, or ideas. At least none that would be compatible with mine.
Can't trust the principals of a second term, but you can't trust the basic reasoning of the first term.
He's never been that coy about what he wants to do.
I remember the first term rhetoric. 'Drain the swamp' was high on the list. After Bernie got the shaft, it was tempting to vote for Trump, especially with how Clinton was viewed as heavily entrenched in the capitalist status quo.
Then my wife said that she wouldn't ever vote for someone who came from a place of hate, and I very quickly changed my mind.
He meant drain the swamp into DC not out :)
Ohhh, I missed that part somehow.
If I'm on a date and she tells me that she voted for Donald Trump, I'm asking for the check and walking the fuck out of there. Certain behaviors are deal breakers.
I'm more than okay with talking but would not advocate for anyone to date a Trump voter. That speaks to a profound lack of judgement / humanity that will eventually rear its head in the relationship. If someone voted for Trump but is then reformed, sure that could be considered om a case by case basis but otherwise it's a hard stop for me and many people. Especially if any of the women in my life were dating a Trump supporter, I would be genuinely concerned for their safety.
Yeah but I don't want to be around fascist enablers so no, I won't be compromising.
I would wager that many of us were raised with some basic shared ethical values. Things like “if you break it, you repair, replace, or pay for it” or “if you make a mistake, learn from it and do better.”
Someone who repeatedly makes the same mistake without learning from it is a bad person. Voting for a Republican or conservative Democrat once could be called a mistake, but doing it repeatedly, denying the evidence of your eyes and ears and bank account — or worse, repeatedly participating in the widespread harm and oppression, and failing to fight against it after aiding them — makes you a bad person. Being tired, overworked, deceived, stupid, or any other excuse does not grant absolution. Actions have consequences, and therefore actions matter. Making a mess accidentally doesn’t make you a bad person, but failing to recognize a mistake and/or failing to correct it and/or doing it again does.
You see. That's what I thought but it's become apparent that ~35% of Americans didn't learn these basic values, or if they did - they have chosen to disregard them.
It is no longer a political issue.
We do not agree on a core values level anymore.
I love my dad, but he is a brainwashed, socially inept fool who does whatever the church tells him because they speak for god and they provide him friendship and respect. He thinks I'm lost and has no idea how to approach me. I feel the same about him.
Are there honestly examples where two people significantly disagreed politically and got along with each other? Life itself is hard enough, I want a teammate not an oppressor.
I'm pretty staunchly left leaning and am friends with a MAGA supporter. If anything, he isn't an outright bad person, he's just...really ignorant and holds some very warped and manipulated views of reality. He tends to just see headlines and not think critically about what information he accepts as fact, instead operating primarily on emotion (shocker). I feel like I've changed his mind on a few things, but I'll certainly never dig him entirely out of that trench, not that that's really my place or goal. These days we mostly just avoid talking politics, probably because he's sick of me debunking all the crap that comes out of his mouth lol.
This sounds like something right out of 1930s Germany.
You're not really wrong, but what else should I do? It's not like I let his bullshit slide and shrug it off and go "oh you!" I let him know when he's wrong and why he's wrong, and we can still remain friends. That's a win in my opinion.
Read They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer. Then lend it to your friend.
You have done more then to help our nation and our world than 99.90% of all the replies I've gotten to this comment and ones like it. It's exactly what my prescription is.
If you can just interact and not be afraid to call out and debunk things, you are WINNING. It doesn't matter how they react, you have to do this. We seem to all be seeking some kind of instant gratification from these kinds of interactions, but that's not how any of this works. If you've made someone hesitate to spout off bullshit for fear of being called out, you have scored a massive interpersonal victory.
See, that's the false dichotomy that's been built into a reality, that average, normal people should have political disagreements to the degree that they can't get along.
I don't know how many times I can stress this, but I'm not saying "have sex with your oppressor" that some are translating my comment to mean, I suppose because everyone's brains have melted, but it's something we all need to know, that this isn't natural. This CAN be turned around if we worked on it, from an individual level as well as a social level if we got more involved.
Identity politics have reached such an extreme that people really are what they vote, and the politics reflect that.
Politics used to be more of “we both want the country to go the same way, we just disagree on how to get there.”
Now one side is “fuck democracy, ostracize the lgbtq people, bring on the brownshirts, fuck science and the climate, too!” With pretty broad support for many of those motives.
It’s not that the system has become important, it’s that the participants have debased the system to the lowest hanging fruit on the asshole tree.
When fascism (oppression) rises, the only things in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead armadillos. You can either be on one side or the other, staying in the middle you'll just end up dead.
I don’t think that was up for debate.
Absolutely right. I remember because I lived in those times, the amplification of news and hype to further political/economic agendas has just been steadily turning the crank up on the perceived importance of team politics.
I am VERY far from a centrist, but the left is equally guilty of falling into this atomized perspective, watching algorithmically fed segments and stories amplifying the worst voices on the right, cranking up the rhetoric and hate and making issues that once would have fizzled out flare up into larger fights. We can't put this toothpaste back in, but we can mitigate the problem from getting even worse.
There are a lot of very well-paid people who have studied how to do this and if we, as individuals, think we can outsmart teams of people who do this to eat and live, we're more vulnerable than we even know.
Doubt everything you read, particularly if it makes you scared or angry.
Read more of what the other side is reading so you understand better what their picture of the world looks like. Even if it's a stupid, poorly educated picture, you HAVE to understand it so you can turn people.
Try to turn people. Even if it means just fact-checking idiots online and in RL. Learn enough about one topic that you feel confident fighting for it. Stop expecting immediate gratification, you only expect it because of the "X OWNS AND SLAMS Y" clips.
Stop spending your energy online arguing with other leftists. Spend that energy actually going into right-wing facebook pages, twitter groups and so on. Speak up when you're out at lunch with people and someone says a dumb or ignorant take. Bring back social consequence for being a shitlord.
Stop spending money. Stop pouring money into vices like weed and alcohol, or at least cut way back so you get healthier and stronger mentally. Stop having to have the latest games and gadgets. Stop ordering fast food, doordash and other luxuries. Starve the liches and oligarchs.
Get a fucking gun. Even if you're against guns, you should probably have one right now.
Fact-checking deadass doesn't work anymore, unfortunately. A lot of these people are anti-science and anti-equality.
And if not that, then they just care so much about being a "good Christian" that they are willing to look the other way and ignore evidence.
Broadly, as a society and culture? Absolutely. Debate is dead, facts are relative, and walls are built-in to the human condition.
But as individuals, it's a different game. And this is where a lot of people are going to curl their lips in disgust at the idea but it's also a part of learning to be more social, learning to be better at engagement and getting people to listen to you, so it's objectively a good exercise whether you succeed or not, but people are all just people, and even if their ideology is revolting against the idea, they fundamentally want to connect and be accepted, and if you can make people like you enough that they listen to you, they WILL want to earn your acceptance, even if they don't cognitively agree with you.
I've done this a lot. I've changed people's beliefs on vaccines, on abortion, and a host of other "walled off" topics that we can't change on a large scale. This is where I am deliberately trying to antagonize users on Lemmy; the idea that we need to socialize outside of our comfort zone and return to face-to-face socializing and conversation. We CAN turn this around if more of us would get off the internet and do what I've done for years now, which is listen to people so you can then learn how to be heard in return... every person is different, with a different set of emotional locks and keys, and if you can be smarter you can learn where these keys are.
So far nobody has presented me a better idea. We've been trying to butt heads, scold, and scream and shame for decades and we've lost almost all our ground.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you aren't a member of one of the demographics that the fascists are trying to oppress. Debating abortion rights as a woman of reproductive age is literally arguing for my right to live in the event that I accidentally get pregnant because a pregnancy would quite literally kill me. Arguing for LGBTQ+ rights is arguing for the rights of my sibling to exist or for my best friend to marry her soon-to-be wife. I have the privilege of being white, but for BIPOC, arguing for racial equality and justice is literally trying to convince bigots that they are actually humans with equal rights.
These discussions become significantly more taxing and distressing when you're going in rhetorical circles with someone who is telling you to your face that they think you are less worthy of rights and that your life doesn't matter to them.
Please, correct me if I'm wrong here, but this is something I see a lot from leftist cis-men and white leftists is the failure to recognize the toll these conversations take on those who are the direct targets of that bigotry.
I really try not to talk about myself or the identities of others I engage with because that turns any conversation about plans, approaches and movement into identity debates and oppression olympics and I don't need to wear the things I've faced on my sleeve, but I will say that I've been pretty far from privileged and have good reason for this fight. That shouldn't be the point of this. If you don't want to engage with others, that's fine. I am not holding a gun to every person and saying that no matter who what your background is you need to go out to a trailer park and find someone with truck nuts and drag them out and debate them. Just don't do that, you don't need to speak for everyone else about it either, simply don't do the thing that's too hard for you, and that's valid.
There are plenty of opportunities for each of us to push back on something that matters to us, it doesn't have to be direct and confrontational like I do, but more likely than not, there will be some opportunity in your life to speak up somehow so don't ignore those opportunities. If you think you can't, you need to focus on yourself and getting healthier, and again, that's fine, stay out of it but also again, there are plenty of marginalized and afraid people who have experienced trauma who are out there getting fucking tear gassed and tased and I have walked beside them and they are stronger than me. I'm not saying that's the standard to live up to, but that people, including yourself, are stronger than we think.
Maybe you’re idealizing the past? I was watching a Seinfeld episode from like 97 that was about Elaine liking a guy but she has to find out if he’s an anti abortion conservative before she goes further. So even in those days there was enough of a divide that people were talking about it. Go back to the 60s same thing, you weren’t gonna have left hippies dating right wing yuppies. It’s important to find a partner who is not in support of whatever the fuck conservatives think they’re doing nowadays, especially for a woman who may feel vulnerable and doesn’t wanna fall into a pit with a guy who doesn’t share her values and sees her as less than himself
Seinfeld was a TV show and exaggeration of reality, and the protagonists were giant pieces of shit, as evident by the series finale.
But yes, it was joking about a growing trend. A trend that has existed on some level since the dawn of time, but my point is that it's been accelerated and amplified to a degree that hasn't existed in the past. I know, I am from the past.
no it makes them bad.
the only people that could’ve stomached voting for trump are racists or bigots… xenophobes….
….
if they weren’t one of those, there’s no way they’d be so ignorant as to not have heard him say some nazi, racist shit….
i could forgive someone for being naive for just about any other election, but not that.
If so, this magical median voter is so poorly informed that they are not worth your time.
Again I would not want to date a person that ignorant, and especially someone who would think a vote for Bernie was the same as Trump. Lastly we have always chose people over their stances.
Any women here who are pro choice went out of your way to date a abortion hating man?
It is worse now, literally women rather be trap in the woods with a bear then most men. Maybe it is time to look at ourselves in the mirror and figure out if we are the problem.
In general, when it comes to dating, it seems everyone really just wants the idea in their head and nothing else. I'm just glad I'm a person who doesn't need someone else to feel whole.
Having an idea in your head what you want your relationship or partner to be like is called "having values" and it's an ever-changing, nebulous idea that shifts until you find someone who wants sort of the same thing, and then you work on compromising that idea together.
Yes it's more challenging if you use things like social media and dating apps to try to connect with people because those platforms discourage that process of finding alignment together and make relationships feel more like amazon shopping, where what you see is what you get.
I haven’t experienced this at all. I don’t doubt your experience and you’re not the only one saying this, but I wonder why our experiences are so different? I never really did the online dating thing though.
That’s because people are being kidnapped and murdered by the state now. Blame the side doing the kidnapping and murdering, and maybe fight back so we can go back to a time where political disagreement is not life or death.
God, I do so love reading liberal apologia. Fascism is at your door and all you can do is cry about how people aren't doing enough to understand them.
Nice performance, really gripping. I expect at least an emmy nomination.
But I am saying, that even if your fantasy rebel leader takes control and leads a magical revolution that somehow topples the military and installs a socialist leader whom everyone somehow loves, you still have to live next to the people who empowered the current system, so no matter WHAT happens, you will need to understand them or we end up in the same cycle over and over.
Someone with several more braincells might ask why we should understand them, and that answer is naturally, so we can change them. Are YOU the one so stuck down the liberal/lefty pipeline of super-inclusivity that you think they're fucking entitled to being the way they are? Don't you think you should be empowered to guide and bring up your population's weakest link? Do you think they're going to just lower their heads and shrug if we all succeed? Don't be a moron.
Or is it far more important to you that you get internet updoots? Don't bother answering.
Tell me, how does one go about changing a fascist?
The main problem is that, even more so than the past, people's politics is their identity.
It's their family, their church life, their friends, and possibly even their neighbors if they live in a particularly conservative area. The same is true for liberals.
Trying to change them is quite literally like trying to change how they were raised, who they associate with, etc. In some cases, they may even be ostracized for "changing sides" if people found out.
It's just not feasible.