I hope this is relevant for this community, because I don’t know where else to post this. I’m honestly scared to post it anywhere else.
I live in Eastern Europe. I’m a university student, and recently, we got an American exchange student. They’re a very outspoken liberal.
A few days ago, we took them out with a few mates out for beers (they’re under 21, so they didn’t drink, even though you can here if you’re at least 18) to break the ice and make them feel comfortable. We got talking and because I’ve never been to the US, I asked them what I thought was an innocuous question. For some context, I’ve been a communist for a very long time, and joined the communist party the day I turned 18.
I basically asked them: Why would I vote for Harris? How would that improve the situation in the US and abroad? I’m not too familiar with her, but her politics don’t seem too appealing, especially her support for Israel and her incarceration background.
That made them launch into a screaming rant about how I’m a conservative for doubting her abilities and deserve to be jailed for wanting to infringe on the rights of women. There were a few more insults targeted at me for asking that question, I didn’t really understand them. The entire time, I was not even saying anything, I was honestly too shocked to react, but they just kept screaming until they got up and stormed out in a rage after calling me a Trump supporter, misogynist, and a fascist. My mates were equally confused. We tried to figure it out, but everyone is equally stumped.
I’ve been thinking about that entire situation for a couple days, and I’m so confused about their reaction. They even refuse to speak to me now.
What have I done wrong? Can someone please explain? ☹️ I really don’t understand what happened. We have liberals here of course, but even the worst ones never behave like this.
Indeed. I fr think that the past 25 years of seeing chaotic imagery in the middle east on CNN has desensitized the vast majority of North Americans to violence that is outsourced. As someone whose childhood perfectly overlapped with that period, it applied for me as much as it disgusts me now to admit it. Not an original thought of mine, but the US learned a very valuable lesson after Vietnam which is that as long as conscription is off the table and that type of interventionism happens via an abstraction layer of Proxies, the American public has a vastly higher tolerance for imperialism.
The Kamla stans demonstrate this by accepting(!) that some kind of genocide is going to happen and that Trump Is Worse in the reality where he wins. The version that Kamahalah practices is then implicitly more "under control" and better but it's still a genocide. They are aware of this. They patently accept the reality that genocide must happen for their government and status quo to operate. If they didn't do this math before endorsing the program then in their own words, caveat emptor.