Edit: It’s funny how many people are interpreting this as about unity or working together. I interpreted it as about dreaming big and working long term to make the dream dream happen.

I mean, look at abortion. I was born only a few years before Roe v Wade. For most of my lifetime, people were saying Roe v Wade was settled law. I remember people saying it was impossible to make abortion illegal, that there was no reason to worry about it, that the politicians fighting to make abortion illegal and the protesters in front of clinics were just the dying embers of a dead branch of conservatism, and so on and so forth. The conventional wisdom for decades was that the Supreme Court precedent set by Roe v Wade was unassailable and conservatives should just give up and fight the culture war on other battlegrounds.

But you know what conservatives did? They didn’t discourage each other. They didn’t tell each other it was a useless fight. They didn’t tell each other it was a waste of time. They fought for literal generations. They knew the only way to make abortion illegal again was to make the Supreme Court overturn their own precedent. So they fought for fifty fucking years to take over the Supreme Court.

Only a handful of the first anti-abortion crusaders lived to see their victory. Generations of people fought against abortion, lived and died, with victory seeming as far away as ever. But in the end they didn’t give up. They sacrificed. They voted. They donated. They protested. They beat their heads against a brick wall until the brick wall broke. And they fucking won.

Compare that commitment to the people hanging out on this instance who think not eating beef on Fridays for the sake of the environment is too much work.

  • FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    They’re also simply more united; they have a certain ‘team spirit’ that I find lacking in the left. (I’m generally quite left myself). Not just in the US, but also here in the Netherlands.

    Voters on the right will say: “I don’t support policy X and Y, but since my candidate is the only one talking about Z, that’s who I’m voting for”

    Meanwhile on the left, voters tend to want their candidate to exactly match them on not only X, Y and Z, but other issues as well.

    Basically, plenty of left voters hold out for a perfect candidate, when voters on the right will generally support their main guy regardless. This leads to people being effectively self-disenfranchised from the political process.