Do debates with right-wingers change their minds?
A response to Grace Blakely
I agree with
that debating the right does not change the right’s mind. For many left-wingers, there is little benefit in them engaging people who think 1) socialists are stupid and 2) their right-wing values are deeply ingrained in their identity and personality.I’ve built my brand (grotesque but honest word) on being a lefty talking to the right, but I do it for a mixture of personal reasons, compulsion and curiosity. It is also a manifestation of my combative personality which is inexorably attracted to stirring shit up.
I am not deluded into thinking that I can change right-wingers’ minds with my presence. I get back pats for being a left-winger who debates right-wingers because ‘if you didn’t challenge them, they would just be talking to an echo chamber’. I support having eloquent lefties engage in right-wing spaces to scoop up confused politically homeless spillover, but I do the things I do for my own benefit, more than the benefit of the cause. I am not referring to financial benefits, for there is not much to be gained from participating in these debates. I would also not care about making money if it weren’t for the fact that I don’t want to depend on wealthy donors or rich husbands, and I view my career as a vocation rather than a business opportunity. Being financially insecure in politics and media is a dangerous and vulnerable position.
Not only do people not become socialists by watching me debate on right-wing channels, they most definitely convince themselves that their favourite channel is a fair arbiter of truth. But there is no such thing as a fair debate. Framing is always biased.
However, there is a benefit that goes unnoticed. As Grace says, people won’t change their political beliefs because these are closely linked to their identity. Suppose your identity is that you are an ambitious person who can play the capitalist game and come out swinging. In that case, you won’t ever see yourself as a socialist - someone who in your head is a loser with a chip on their shoulder who couldn’t do any better, or a spoiled armchair intellectual out of touch with the working class.
By appearing on these shows, you show people that ‘people like us, think like this’. You are saying ‘hello, I am here! I do not think all people who watch your favourite pint-chugging, flag-waving, uncle complain about immigrants are a basket of diplorables- thought I do think you have been misled, let me tell you why.’ I think Aaron Bastani does this well, and he has led many people to listen to Novara Media- a highly underrated left-wing gateway drug. Gary Stevenson, much hated across the political class, is another one. I rub my hands in glee every time a mildly apolitical City working friend tells me they fall into a YouTube rabbit hole of his videos.
Most people with sound mental health have little appetite for public brawls. I’m an exception because growing up Greek, I marinated in high-tension conversation, and years of high-school bullying trained me to stay put in a hostile room.
Still, I keep Xitter off my phone. Every minute I’d waste scrolling through hundreds of “immigrants telling us what to think about our own politics” replies is a minute stolen from higher-value feedback activities like writing here or talking to real people face-to-face.
For your own benefit, consider making friends with people regardless of their political views. I despair at the straw man left-winger that right-wingers rail against, and at the mirror image they invent in return.
I keep friendly terms with anarchists, communists, socialists, social democrats, liberals, libertarians, conservatives, and even ethnonationalists. How close I let any of them get depends on the values they show in the way they treat real people. Knowing that fully human beings- people with hopes and dreams, who cry at movies, jump at sudden bangs, tip the waiter, hold the door, do the right thing when no one is watching -can still embrace politics I find unpalatable leaves me both less fearful of humanity and more convinced of my own politics of solidarity.
This is also part of Grace’s prescription. Meet people where they are and show them how they can reconnect with politics to ask for what is meaningful to them. On a personal level, you may find activism annoying, and there are times when I think it has been counterproductive to its cause because social media and atomisation have facilitated activism that is more symbolic, less professionalised, and less demanding of concrete change (e.g. Occupy Wall Street, Palestinian solidarity campaigning is also a massive failure). Yet, I find inspiration in someone like Greta Thunberg. People call her spoiled or delusional, but the same people bundle all lefties together as ‘keyboard warriors’ who talk about war from the safety of their Brooklyn/Hackney flatshare. This women took a ship to a fucking warzone to feed starving children. What would her cowardly critics do to save a life?
I would not do any of what Greta does, but the online right-wing intellectual ecosystem is exposing its own hypocrisy when they can’t bring themselves to recognise the amount of personal agency, grit and fearlessness that her actions represent. She could be having a super lovely life writing books, collecting awards, and being dressed in couture to take selfies with Millie Bobby Brown on the red carpet. But these actions wouldn’t change anything. Change requires organising and pressure.
Grace says:
“Politicians will only move when they’re pushed. If you want them to act in the interests of the majority, then the majority has to be better organised than the wealthy minority. So, how do we convince people to organise?”
I agree. Every time the government tries to close tax loopholes or raise taxes on the non-productive rich, we are being held hostage by fabulously funded PR campaigns scaremongering about capital flight.
For Grace, organising means different things than what it means to me. We are now in different parties and disagree on some issues. But we agree on one thing. People are not helpless in the face of a dysfunctional system that doesn’t serve them. Humans build our golden cage; humans will dismantle it.
Onwards and upwards, comrades.
PS I am taking the book-deal-red-carpet-selfies-in-Dior option as soon as it is offered to me, by the way. You’ve been warned, don’t cry sellout later, we only live once !!1!!1
“Do debates with right-wingers change their minds?”
Debates don’t usually change the minds of the right-wingers, but they very frequently change the minds of open-minded progressives and liberals who engage with the steel-man versions of their enemies ideas. After all, that's what happened to me.
The problem for Stella is that the vast majority of media and higher education in the West tilts to the left, culturally. So if you have gotten a degree at an institution of higher learning then you have been exposed to left-wing ideas. Moreover, if you have worked in Silicone Valley or the Academy you have likely had to write essays declaring your loyalty to the left wing values of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” as I have many times.
By contrast, most left wingers have zero exposure to right-wing culture, and encounter it only in a parody form. When they are exposed to the challenges the right makes to left-wing values many balk and almost none are able to answer the strong form of the objection. As such, for many, a calm and collected discourse space, either online or off, tends to be where left-wing illusions go to die.
Case in point, I have been seriously involved in political discourse for ten years, and I have invited many leftist peoples onto my channel to debate hot-button issues, and so have many other right-wingers. And for this last decade, looking at my own channel or one of the others, there really have been no serious refutations or arguments against key right-wing positions such as the following:
Outside of a few very homogeneous and small communities, Democracy does not work
Human groups are NOT interchangeable, biologically or culturally and in fact exhibit large statistical differences when it comes to behavior and competence
Mass migration has massive deleterious effects on native populations’ political, cultural, and economic well-being
Diversity destroys social cohesion
Common religion, common history, and common morality are essential to trust, undergirding everything that functions in society.
Permissiveness around pornography and drugs has been a disaster for human health
Some people need to have their agency overruled by more moral and agentic people
The Sexual Revolution and the LGBTQ+ movement has been a disaster for sex relations and family formation
Global Warming Disaster is overstated and otherwise manageable as outlined by people like Bjorn Lomberg and Richard Lindzen.
I could go on, and Stella is welcome on my show if she wants to debate these points. But once more, I am skeptical that I am going to hear any new defeaters for these positions after 10 years of doing this.
More likely Stella’s objection is that these are all “Cultural Issues” not the important “Economic Issues” that matter.
Well, first off, these aren’t JUST cultural issues. Mass immigration, family formation, and racial ‘equity” have sweeping economic implications beyond just setting the top marginal tax rate. And hey, maybe I would agree with Stella on some points. I hate corporations. I want to tax rich people. I think Banks practicing usury are evil. I am skeptical of globalism. And I am certainly not a fan of what Global Trade has done.
Nevertheless, I am a right-winger because those previous points about politics, anthropology, and morality matter. They set our moral frame for addressing all other issues. Moreover, as the government gets more socialist, these cultural priorities help determine the question "Who, Whom?" which is the critical issue once the government starts picking the winners and the losers. And I am guessing that Stella understands this too, which is why I doubt she would be considered a leftist in good standing if she agreed with my previous 9 points.
One more thing, Stella somehow thinks it's strange that right-wingers don't recognize the heroism and grit of Gretta Thunberg. I genuinely LOLed when I read this, because its transparent to anyone not drinking the leftist Kool-Aid that Thunberg is 100 percent fake, performing the leftist progressive version of Kayfabe. Not only does Thunberg not participate in any conversation with her critics (she just lectures them) -her activism for the "Omni-Cause" (as documented by Mary Harrington) is completely performative,. Gretta has been supposedly arrested for ilegally challenging the government's position on hot political issues, and then she is out the next day going on political talk shows. Stella might be unaware of this historically, but this is not what happens to people who are authentically trying to overthrow the government or interfere with its war machine. If a government thinks you are really trying to fuck with it and its military, it comes down HARD, though I can see why a modern leftist wouldn't understand this.
Case in point, as I mentioned my friends and I have been doing this for ten years. All of us have been Doxed and threatened professionally for our involvement with these "far right" ideas. The government sends spies to our conferences to expose and ruin people, as they did recently to my friend Morgorth. Numerous people in our group have been fired, kicked off their platforms, and even kicked out of their banks. And it gets worse. My acquaintance Laura Towler's husband Sam has been put in jail by the British government for 2 years for his roll in... printing stickers. I can't wire money to my family in Canada without a huge delay because they think I might be transferring it to organizations aligned to the Trucker protests against the liberal party. Lastly, several years ago, a former podcast host that I worked with "Coach Red Pill" decided to courageously do reporting in Ukraine and got arrested. Afterwards what do you think happened, Stella? Did he go on a media tour? No of course not, he died in custody under mysterious circumstances. And it's not surprising, that's what happens when you fuck with governments, they try to kill you and ruin your life, you don't get fake arrested and then go on Steven Colbert the next day.
There is no equivalent response to modern leftist radicalism, and that's how I know that the left hasn't been real in the West for at least 30 years.
> This women took a ship to a fucking warzone to feed starving children.
This person sailed on a sailboat in the Mediterranean as a publicity stunt to raise awareness, and was not at any point in more danger than other recreational sailors.