The problem with having reasonable and respectful discourse with people you disagree with, is that you first have to find people willing to have reasonable and respectful discourse. In real life I’ve met plenty. On Twitter, there are none. They’re mostly just in getting a rise out of libs and lefties. We’ve already been finding that disengaging with them and moving to a platform they don’t have influence over has made them a lot more impotent.
They said that in 2016 too after rigging things against populist grassroots candidates in favour of establishment Democrats and learned nothing.
I think going from the relatively peaceful period of the 90s in the west to living through the Bush administration, 9/11, racist fear mongering and alarmism over terrorism, mass erosion of rights and privacy, jingoism and wars in the Middle East under false pretenses, the Bush adminstration’s connections with the military-industrial complex getting exposed, seeing stuff like Fox News, Glenn Beck, and Bill O’Reilly start to mindrot the boomer generation into unrecognizable husks of their former selves, the 2008 market crash due the effects of all the failed conservative economic policies and deregulation that occured the past few decades — coloured Gen Xers’ and Millennials’ perspectives in a way that I imagine would be difficult for Gen Z to grasp.
They have no point of reference to see how badly things changed under the Republican party because they already grew up in the shit, and due to Republican obstructionism they may think that it’s Democrats faults because Obama and Biden were in the White House, but much of the fixing actually needs to happen in the house. But even that may not be enough because of the partisan Supreme Court.
And honestly, in a case of a lot of cis Gen Z boys who’ve been sucked into some shoddy conservative ideas, I feel like we failed them if guys like Andrew Tate, Trump, and other such garbage heaps of human beings were the ones getting through to them.
Not holding my breath until all appeals get denied