askchapo

a combination of catholic social teaching and a close family member dying as a result of capitalism and the us government when i was a child primed me for being on the left despite the fact that i also come from a pretty privileged and republican background, but i didn't really get there until bernie 2016, when i was around 18-19. the catholic thing might sound odd but i remember being taught at sunday school as a young kid that we have to love every single person on earth because that was what jesus meant when he said that we have to love our neighbors like we love ourselves. up until bernie i was basically an enlightened centrist really because i wasn't able to see outside the dem-rep binary and i just thought "both of these parties suck so obviously the truth is in the middle of the two of them " . bernie's run taught me that socialism wasn't just "janitors get paid the exact same as brain surgeons" which is pretty much verbatim what i was taught in middle and high school. i started reading some leftist theory and it didn't take long after watching bernie getting ratfucked for me to get more radical