This isn't the "what radicalized you" line of questioning. I always read those as the last straw. I'm more interested in your first steps.
I know everyone's journey is different.
Mine was realizing that despite being a complete asshole, I give a fuck about everyone.
I think you're right about both. I think for me it was after Obama's first year and I realized he was going to do nothing about the environment or climate change. I had just got a degree in a green job sector because supposedly that was a growth industry.
A complicated mix of
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my parents being lefties (more so my dad, my mum is/was a socdem at best)
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my great grandparents being part of the communist resistance during WWII
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going to school with people who were rather right wing, and them being shitheads to me when I started listening to punk
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My grandpa was talking shit about "communists" and I asked my mom what that word meant. She said it's people who think everyone should be equal. That sounded pretty cool to me so I asked what was wrong with that lol. Then I got the standard bullshit about "everyone making the same despite hard work", "failed every time", "human nature", etc. which I believed, but there was always a little part of my brain that thought it was a cool idea.
Another thing was seeing old abandoned buildings with the doors and windows bricked up and cemented over. I asked why they did that and someone told me it was to keep the "homeless people and junkies" out. I thought that was messed up and didn't understand why it was considered normal.
It's crazy how we raise children to value sharing, selflessness, respect and helping others, and then expect them to forget all that because it's "against human nature"
Obama didn't close Guantanamo Bay or end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His campaign had been my introduction to politics, and his first term taught me that I definitely wasn't a Democrat.
I guess I've always been left-of-center besides that. Being racist or anti-gay just didn't make any sense to me even though I was surrounded by people who were both (military community).
First step away from the status quo was the Snowden NSA leaks, which led me to two things: anti-war and other criticisms of the US from Wikileaks, Intercept, etc.; and to free software (FOSS) where i picked up other leftist ideas. Took me a while to consider myself any kind of socialist though, I thought I was a centrist libertarian(?) for a while.
I was a bougie 10-year-old who conned my parents into a trip to Egypt because I was obsessed with pyramids and pharoahs and shit. We ended up also going to Israel via the Sinai desert (still with bombed-out tanks) and Gaza and then to Jordan (Petra is fucking cool as shit).
It was 1993 and even in Australia the Gulf War had been plastered all over TV and every kid knew about Stormin Norman and Saddam Insane and saw precision bomb footage and had the fucking trading cards and knew it was all about goodies and baddies, but that was all over now. So imagine our surprise when we're in the deserts of Western Jordan and see American jets fly overhead. Back in a shopping centre in Amman, a bunch of guys who thought we were Americans accosted us, more upset than angry, wanting to know why we were still bombing the shit out of Iraq when the war was over. Good fucking question, guys. I obviously didn't understand the nuances or anything, but I think it planted the seed that not everybody loved America and for good reasons, and that the official narratives were kinda bullshit.
Fast forward through a cringey teenage iamverysmart libertarian phase to apolitical drinking and girls phase to September 11 2001, when I was kinda surprised to find that my first thought was "yeah, they had that shit coming"
My entire life is an epistemological crisis. And when I think about that I understand why conservativism is so appealing. You get told a bunch of just so stories about how the world is and as long as you never question them then there is no friction
Ignorance is bliss. Maybe an icepick through the nose wouldn't be so bad. I wouldn't mind not paying attention to politics every day and being so angry all the damn time.
Gradually got radicalized leftwards by following ever more communist people on twitter
In preschool I was told that sharing is caring and I internalized it
Even back when my politics were more right wing, I always had sympathy for homeless people and was disgusted whenever I heard others talking about them as if they were like trash, or even the ones who saw them as human but considered their situation to be a result of their own moral failing (the “lazy freeloader” line of thinking). I didn’t have the political and historical literacy to properly identify the root cause of their problems, and at the time attributed it to big government overburdening job creators with taxes, or having the bad luck of getting addicted to drugs.
Raised in a union family. Was pretty much always a Communist but Occupy made me up my praxis.
A bunch of lib shit that was less lib than other lib shit.
