I was curious how common it is to be, say, a leftist in a very conservative area.
My county, family, and school are all very conservative. It makes it a bit intimidating to engage in any political discussion. I also rarely get to hear leftist opinion anywhere in person, which means i need to devote a lot of time to considering and thinking about arguments that are probably already solved.
Are you, or have you been, in a similar situation?
Bloody completely. I’m in Utah, and not the progressive pocket of SLC, but ultra conservative Utah County. It is completely maddening.
Though there is a decently sized neighborhood in my city that is like the Berkeley of this area. I want to go to there, but it’s expensive.
Most of the people I interact with have different viewpoints, and I consider it a positive. The danger is never examining your beliefs and just accept them, even when new facts come up or the environment changes.
It’s very mixed where I am, no matter what axis you spin it on. Say what you will about Florida but on our block there’s a Muslim family, a hardcore right wing old couple, five ‘interracial’ families (as they used to be called), an old old lady house, a house full of hipsters, three sets of transplants from up north.
At work mostly seems to be at least anti-trump, my boss is an Elon Musk fanboy though.
I think it’s not good to wall yourself off. Unless you are in physical danger from your opposition (wall away in that case) it’s much better to set a good example and explain your ideas when asked or inspired to.
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We just moved cross country out of a loud Trump 2016 and 2020 area to a firmly blue state.
I will admit I see a lot fewer Trump flags/hats/shirts than I did a couple of years ago. I don’t care though, I’m not going to be surrounded by closeted MAGAts. Just because they are too embarrassed to fly the flag now doesn’t mean they won’t in the future.
I’m 45 now. I grew up in a generally conservative community as well. Now I work in TV news and there are strong stereotypes about journalists. But people mostly think that about national journalists who generally live in major metropolitan areas. I work in local news, and I’ve lived in Georgia, Alaska, North Carolina, and Florida. I’ve heard co-workers bad mouth all of the presidents, and posit that at least 3 of them (from 2 political parties) intended to enact martial law to stay president.
Having similarly political minded people around you can be soothing to a degree. Like you said, you’ll be thinking about things that others have figured out for themselves a long time ago. But some of those things are personal decisions anyway. Even given an answer you’ll have to think about how you feel about trade-offs.
What’s good is when you find someone of similar temperament and kindness. Even when you disagree, there doesn’t have to be anger and resentment because you’ll both feel that effort was made to do things the right way, even when you come to different answers about the best course.
Good luck with that.
I’m in Tennessee and probably the only socialist for hundreds of miles. Completely surrounded by maga “christians”. Needless to say, I don’t have a lot of close friends or family. Almost everyone I know thinks tRump should be king for life. god’s chosen, and all that nonsense.
In a map shown somewhere on lemmy this week I’m square in the middle of red where 80+ percent voted for trump. I’m surrounded by trumps chumps.
Anarchist surrounded by capitalists and the state…
Utah… FML
Disclaimer: am Canadian, will be discussing using that lens.
On a daily basis, most people I interact with are about where I am. I probably have different reasons for believing and voting how I do, but if an election were to be called tomorrow, all my friends and most of my co-workers would be voting in roughly the same direction as me.
My family is a mixed bag. On the one hand, my father has never voted for anyone further left than the old Progressive Conservatives, and has even voted for the Christian Heritage Party on occasion. My mother also normally votes conservative, though she has confessed to be that she finds American-style conservatism in general and Pierre Poilievre in particular to be too odious to stomach and so I think she may have been spoiling her ballots recently. I don’t know how my one sister votes, but her husband is a also an outspoken conservative, being a card-carrying member of the CPC.
On the other hand, my other sister has never voted for anyone further right than the NDP, and her husband is apathetic - he thinks all politicians are the same and doesn’t bother voting.
Holidays are generally fine, as political opinions are generally off-limits, though inevitably at some point my father and brother-in-law (the CPC one) have an extended grouse session about the state of the country and how much they hate the Liberals.
For a while in my 20’s, I lived with my mom. It was always something walking through the living room and hearing the quartering or Greg gutfeld or some other moron pissing in her ear about how I’m a domestic terrorist because I’m a leftist.
Also I live in Kansas, so it’s not like leaving the house was much better
If we consider how religion is often part of political views (with conservatives almost always being christian chuds), imagine being someone who’s fond of red candles, someone who as a cisman-presenting person enjoys letting their nails grow while painted with black and red polish, someone who sincerely worships the Mesopotamic Goddess of underworld and uses Her seal as a pendant necklace, someone who sees owls as literally sacred and literal manifestations of the Goddess, all this while having to exist in a mostly-christian country called Brasil (worse, having to biologically exist in a house rented by a bolsonarista, with nowhere else to go other than the public gravedigs of the cemetery, a place I’ve been seriously considering more and more as the days pass).
Imagine being possibly the only one holding this kind of belief in a range of 500km, with everyone around you parroting phrases such as “fica com deus” (a farewell phrase that literally translates to “stay with god”) and “deus abençoe” (“god bless you”).
Imagine attending therapists and mental health “professionals” who are visibly annoyed by your positive and ecstatic recounting of your spiritual experiences before the presence of Lilith during 3AM, to the extent of a psychiatrist diagnosing you as a “schizotypal” due to a perceived “atypical beliefs” and “magical thinking”; to the extent that even mental health care becomes part of the social bullying you face.
Imagine being unable to find employment because you don’t want to let go of the one you’ve become fond of as yourself (how’s compromising one’s own values in order to be “allowed” among society, any different from suicide, when both situations involve letting go of the one who you’ve been?), because the “job market” requires you to be assimilated into yet another physical manifestation of an Agent Smith (don’t even dare attending a job interview while having long painted fingernails because “your body looks like a male so your nails must be trimmed and you likely need to start repenting and going to church because you’re indemoniated”).
Yeah, this is me and this is my existence. And I’ve grown increasingly tired of existing in this shithole of a world.
Currently? I am center-left in Western Europe. Political views where I live generally lean left but are quite diverse, so it’s hard to find people who are directly opposing… I do have a colleague who is a classic liberal (free market, deregulation and all that), but we are quite chill about it & that’s pretty much it
I did spend 3-4 years living in majority Hispanic/Vietnamese neighborhoods in Houston though, and I’d be considered much more left-leaning relative to the US population. So I was a left-leaning person, in fairly right-leaning neighborhoods, in a left-leaning city, in a right-leaning state… having any discussions about politics was certainly an experience, I just tried to not talk about it for the most part lol
I am an anarchist in rural GA, so… completely surrounded.
