You can’t; they’re bent. Boot 'em out.
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That is one way of making them accept it.
If I may go off on a tangent, in the UK it took Tony Blair about ten years from becoming an MP to becoming leader of the Labour party. On the other hand, it took the Liberal Democrats 20 years to become a strong third party, before Nick Clegg fucked it up. It also took the Green Party 20 years to recover from the damage David Icke did to them and get just one MP.
If there is going to be change any time soon in the US, it needs to come from a new generation of Democrats, and they will need pressure on them to not become yet more neo-liberals.
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It probably sounds that way partly because my early interest in communism also intersected with interest in Buddhism. So I grew up being very cautious about how people approach attachment - which informed much of how I perceived norms of education and socialization, sexual and family ethics, friendship and employment. Most of what I came up with has frankly been a terrible fit for living in the U.S. - in hindsight I wonder if I should have just moved to somewhere in Asia.
How I see it is that feelings of personal attachment are partly a result of selfishness. Everybody has relationships, but most of the ones people actually pursue are attachments, and that attachment is self-centered, more static. The deepest love is freed of desire, because there is no “object” of desire, there is nothing to truly be acquired. People interact and can be free of expectations, reciprocities don’t necessarily come from where or who one expects. Where this becomes a problem is in cultures where attachment is somehow considered more open, rather than less. In a culture which encourages (or demands) selfishness, attachment might be something others need to know that you care about them.
For me, society is my friend, and the revolution is my lover. You can have individuals as friends or lovers, but only when you don’t desire them, which probably seems awfully paradoxical! All of this, in combination with a bit of existentialism and autism can be rather isolating, but I see that as more of a social problem than a personal one.
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This is what I find most frustrating about politics in the US. Too many people think “freedom” means “government doesn’t tell me what to do” and don’t think about freedom from being poisoned by pollution, freedom from bigots and violence, freedom from poverty and debt, freedom to spend time on one’s own family and pursuits, etc.
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It actually just occurred to me that the Nolan Chart is pretty much the Overton Window for the US. I just created this from the other chart I made
Look, Bernie/the Green Party are extremists! just like Hitler and Stalin on the bottom and Pinochet on the right. Why don’t you believe in something “more reasonable”, like those “centrists”?
If I didn’t know differently, I would have said that the point of the Nolan Chart was to get people to vote for middle ground Democrats or Republicans.
Please note that I am not saying you should vote for the Green Party. See my comment above.
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Libertarian-Capitalists are fond of saying “your right to swing your fist ends at my nose”. They would agree that the second freedom would be covered by that quote, the hard part seems to be getting them to agree that the first is also covered by it.
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