#ex republican

[calvinists-and-hobbesians]

possibly my favorite genre of images

this is who i am. or who i'm trying to be. or who i'm supposed to be. maybe all 3

[roseyourewearingablackdress]

I feel like I never fully understand the “screaming liberals” I grew up laughing at until yesterday. They don’t scream because they’re stupid or they don’t have any actual arguments. They scream because what the fuck else can you do.

[alexthepleb]

Advice for Ex-Conservatives

I was raised in a hardline GOP/Southern Baptist household. During my later teens, I deconstructed the beliefs I was taught, and I've spent my adult life as a bleeding-heart socialist.

I want to tell you the truth: you never stop learning.

I want to tell you the truth: you never stop deconstructing.

I was on Twitter back then. I followed every left-of-center person I could find. I was soaking up ideas like a sponge. I took every tweet as gospel, which turned out to be VERY unsustainable.

You see, progressives disagree with each other. A lot. About pretty much everything.

It's not possible to reconcile every idea. You can't please everybody. That's the biggest mistake I made when I was fresh out of the conservative bubble. It took me by surprise how much people who agreed on 95% of issues could turn on each other with such incredible venom. It's something you will have to accept.

You can't just sponge up everyone else's ideas. You have to take everything you read with a grain of salt. It's really okay to apply the same critical thinking you applied to your reactionary political and/or religious beliefs and apply that to what other progressives say. Test everything. Question everything. It really is okay.

On the other hand, you also want to avoid being an argumentative dick. People you agree with most of the time will sometimes express ideas you don't agree with.

If the ideas are genuinely odious (some form of bigotry) then just block them and move on. It's VERY rare to change somebody's mind online. For your own mental health, it's best not to engage unless you are doing so for the sake of others.

Yet what if the idea isn't absolutely odious? What if it's just a reasonable disagreement? In most cases, I'd still recommend not engaging. Instead, study what the other person is saying. See if it makes sense, or if you can at least learn from their perspective.

You can actually learn something from a bad idea. And you don't have to be 100% in alignment with someone to treat them with respect or learn from them.

In conclusion, my new ex-fundies and ex-reactionaries, remember two things. One, it's okay to think critically about the ideas other leftists have. None of us agree on everything! Two, it's better to block than to be an argumentative asshole. And, you can often learn something from folks you disagree with!

Let's make a kinder world!

[roseyourewearingablackdress]

Thinking a lot lately about the weird loneliness and alienation that comes from being an artist who was raised conservative (and no longer is)

The strange impostor syndrome of constantly being afraid you’re doing something wrong or not doing enough even if you seemingly have all the correct opinions, and feeling like you’ll never truly belong with either family or your peers, feeling like you have to play catch up every day before you can even begin to make a difference because you feel like everyone else is already fully formed while you’re basically having to rebuild your whole worldview from the ground up. The way you feel like you can’t joke and cheer about politics the way all your classmates do because it is so utterly Not Fun and Not Funny both in terms of what’s actually happening and the pain you feel because of the growing ideological rift between you and the people who raised you. The nagging fear that even though I know I’m on the right side of history there’s still a part of me that, as messed up as it sounds, is afraid I’m gonna wake up one day and realize that somehow my parents were right about everything and I’m gonna feel so stupid, and then I feel like a bad person for having that fear because of course they’re not right, how could they be? And I’m really fucking jealous of the people who don’t have to deal with that, I really kind of resent people who just get to be Certain

[the-potus-is-a-russian-asset]

Confessions of a Republican Exile — The Atlantic

Ideas A longtime conservative, alienated by Trumpism, tries to come to terms with life on the moderate edge of the Democratic Party. October

This article and the quote from it directly below pretty much my feelings on what has happened to the Republican party.

“Today the Republican relationship to truth and knowledge has gone to hell. MAGA is a fever swamp of lies, conspiracy theories, and scorn for expertise”

[ladydisdain5]

I want to say something to ex-MAGAs, and it'll probably be uncomfortable, but you need to hear it:

If you don't vote because you won't vote MAGA but you can't bring yourself to vote liberal, you are still part of the problem. You might say you're not helping MAGA, but you're also not stopping them. To put it another way I've seen before: if someone is pulling a tablecloth so all the drinks are falling off and spilling, you have three choices. You can help them yank it off faster. You can do nothing, and watch as the drinks still fall and spill. Or you can go pull on the opposite end of the tablecloth to keep it from moving. The first two both have blame in the outcome.