Many leftists started out as liberals, it makes sense they’d believe others could also change.

-signed, a vegan married to a butcher, so don’t listen to me lol (at least he’s a leftist)

My wife started out with tons of republican views, she just didn’t vote ever.

Through conversations about the state of things, pointing* out hypocrisy, and validating the feelings her religious family was telling her to suppress, I’m happy to say I’ve managed to marry a leftist. She didn’t even really have the liberal pit-stop many of us take.

I’ll take 100,000 leftists married/dating/whatever to 100,000 liberals over 200,000 conservatives any day of the week.

She didn’t even really have the liberal pit-stop many of us take.

Glad to hear I’m not the only one. Imagine my chagrin after years of rigorously checking the assumptions and programming of my conservative upbringing and converting to liberalism, when I found out that leftism and liberalism are actually different things, with a diversity of opinions and worldviews that I then needed to parse in order to determine where I stand…

This mentality where “If you weren’t born leftist and raised leftist and been leftist all your life and all your friends are leftist, then you’re fascist scum who needs to perish in the revolution” is doing incalculable harm to any genuine leftist movement.

I keep saying “We can’t keep alienating potential allies if we want to unite the working class” but they hit me with the “class traitors don’t matter / we don’t want to work with anyone who was formerly conservative [(as if anyone is to blame for their upbringing…)] / you’re just a fascist apologist who needs to die in the revolution too / only our flavor of leftism is true leftism and anyone who disagrees with us is fascist scum who needs to die in the revolution / if you don’t unquestioningly accept everything we tell you without any nuance then you’re an enemy of the proletariat and need to die in the revolution” They’re really making leftism as a whole look bad, and they don’t even realize it. I mean, how can you claim to represent the proletariat while simultaneously claiming that 60% or more of the proletariat need to be executed as class traitors? It’s like they’re trying to conform to the caricature that the right-wing depicts “radical leftist liberal communists” as. You’re not going to catch many flies with that vinegar. They’ll say things like “we don’t need help from fascist shitlibs” and other unironic and oxymoronic absurdities of that nature, but if you want a popular uprising then you’re going to need to convince a majority of the population that you’re all on the same team, otherwise you’re nothing but an authoritarian reactionary. It makes me really not want to take part in their supposed “revolution,” especially when you see what the bolsheviks did to the soviets and anarchists after they helped them win theirs…

I feel like the split between leftists and liberals really isn’t that big at all, assuming the people being talked about aren’t diehards behind people like Schumer or are scorched-earthers. There’s a vein of liberalism that builds towards the same exact goals that are leftist in nature.

I see progressive liberalism for instance being focused on working within what currently is built out to get to those goals of helping people reach self-actualization and living stable lives without having to be concerned about if you’ll be able to retire, have healthcare, have childcare, housing, food, disease, or other common concerns.