I'm writing this with the full spirit of rules 3 and 5 and with the intent of encouraging productive, respectful dialogue on how we respond to people who have witnessed the explosive rise of fascism even just over this year alone have changed their mind about Trump.
There's an extremely nice post of someone who changed their mind about Trump, and some of the comments exposed a major flaw in common leftist messaging that deserves its own callout.
In that post, OP proclaimed that their reason for voting for Trump was mostly the economy, and government censorship. The response they received from some comments was along the lines of "Trump said he'd do all of this" and "you knew it was going to happen and you still voted for him."
OP's two biggest issues are the economy and government censorship.
Expensive eggs and groceries are a legitimate issue and inflation, whether or not it can be attributed to Biden, is a legitimate issue when wages don't keep up with inflation.
The repercussions rural white voters felt under the last administration are continued declines in employment within sectors directly pertinent to their local economies, i.e.
- coal jobs down to 23k in 2023 versus 56k in 2010, with 9 of those years being Democrat administrations creating/leading insufficient green energy reskilling initiatives to offset the economic harm being done to the working class
- 140,000 farms lost between 2019 and 2024 while publicly owned agriculture companies have thrived
- While Biden initially create many, many manufacturing-sector jobs from 2021-2023, there was a sudden decline of almost 100k manufacturing jobs in 2024, an election year
Knowing that the Democrats led the then-current administration, and knowing how ineffective their messaging was combined with Biden's selfishness to continue running until June/July giving Harris extremely little time to build an effective messaging campaign, the Republicans have had the field of play to create the economic populist narrative that the Democrats simply have refused to over the past decade.
- All these job losses? Blame it on jobs outsourced to countries in Asia, and on migrants who are taking blue collar jobs for less money while talking about how unsafe they all are, megaphoning any crimes that migrants commit (or falsely claim they commit). What's the solution to these things?
- Tariffs to encourage domestic manufacturing and reverse the losses in 2024 particularly in the manufacturing sector, and a
- massive deportation campaign to recover job losses in the agriculture sector while making the country safer by ending this "crisis."
The ineffective messaging campaign by the Democrats combined with the grasp Republicans have on the religious lobby de facto allowed the Right to create messaging campaign upon messaging campaign that the Left wants to censor everyone and take their speech away, something Trump and others i.e. Tucker Carlson proclaim to champion the rights of. Trump even signed executive orders during his first administration to protect 1A activity on college campuses.
With the Democrats selling out queer people and selling out on concessions about the "border crisis" and playing right into the messaging campaign of the Republicans who have had the upper hand on their brand of messaging for decades now, is it really surprising there's a perception that free speech would thrive under Trump?
Now consider all of this within the context of this question: is the average voter going to be undergoing this sort of extensive analysis and conduct this thorough of a level of research when they vote whilst having the skill set to know how to avoid disinformation? You can argue they should, but in the spirit of Joe Lycett, "should" doth butter no parsnips. A lot of things should be the case, but they aren't the case, and we work within the frame that we're in.
Now, do you think the solution to this problem is to dogpile on people who are simply being doxastically open and have reconsidered their positions and are legitimately regretful that they made the wrong choice, or is it to continue to dogpile on them and alienate them from a working-class movement we want to build?
We have to stop this sociomoral "gotcha told ya so" rhetoric when someone realizes they were wrong. You can be angry. Contextualize your anger, realize the echo chambers that have been systematically built and executed that have far-reaching effects beyond just their chambers, and put that energy toward who are the most responsible for the fascist crisis we're living in.
Create community with people. That's how you prevent support for fascists from recurring in the future.
This is how we win.
Originally Posted By u/SunnySydeRamsay At 2025-09-16 02:02:11 PM | Source
