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There was never a left leaning figure for me. I saw all the right leaning people and knew "I never want to be like those creatures".
I don't subscribe to hero/figure culture because it makes you blind to their faults and prevents you from bettering yourself.
The Waltons' weaponized incompetence gave me my first grape of wrath moment, complete with security guarding the dumpsters. Had to watch roughly $250k to $500k (sale value) of still edible product, but outside sellable temp range, all get thrown into dumpsters. All because they didn't have any alerts set up on their C02 refrigeration system. Control breaker tripped, compressors stopped running, high pressure reliefs dumped the refrigerant charge, store was completely unaware for 8 hours, supply houses don't have refrigeration grade C02 laying around, took 3 days to restart.
All that food waste should have been avoided with a simple deadman panic alarm, and a backup refrigerant charge on hand, but Walmart didn't want to spend the money on either. Instead they spent it on moving fixtures around, making a corridor through the middle of the store with caution tape, and just wasting everything.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
My parents are MAGAts and "spare the rod..." type people. I like to say Star Trek raised me. My "parents" just kept me alive.
My parents, kindergarten/elementary school teachers, and the basic principles of fairness, sharing, and honesty many of us were taught as children. To me, those aren’t “progressive” or “left leaning”. They should be the norm.
For example, corporations will fight tooth and nail opposing environmental regulations that keep the population healthy and the planet capable of supporting human life. When a person or group rejects widely accepted, peer reviewed science, that’s a HUGE red flag. Also, some religious organizations will go to great lengths to impose their own beliefs on as many people as possible. I don’t care what other people believe (because it’s not my business), but when they try to force it down everyone’s throat, I am obliged to oppose it.
Often, the most vocal defenders of “freedom” support laws restricting our rights, or what living conditions we must endure. No.
I can't remember a time where I had political opinions that weren't left-leaning. It's weird to be rightwing when you're working class, or at least that's how it was when I was young.
"Rich people have to be rich so they can create businesses that employ poor people and make them middle class," is an incredibly pernicious lie. My dad worked for a union just whole life and I still started my political journey as a conservative.
If conservatism wasn't just so plainly wrong about everything my entire life, I might still believe that. But like, other than winning the Cold War, I'm not sure conservatives have ever been right about anything in my lifetime. And even that was done using questionable methods that make the world less safe 35 years later.
See, that kind of thing never quite took hold in my country until Facebook became the dominant social media. Even when the center-left betrayed the working class in a major way in the early 00s, I didn't get the impression that there was a big shift to the right. Even now, I think that rightwing working class members mostly just ignore how openly pro-billionaire our rightwing parties are and blame all their issues on working class foreigners, LGBT+, environmental regulations etc.
So.... same as America. Except Democrats betrayed working class Americans earlier than the 00's.
That's completely different from what you described in your previous comment, i.e. a working class member who is explicitly pro-billionaire.
Got you. Yes, you are right there is a subtle difference there I had failed to parse. Sorry.
Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan showed me how inhumane government could be. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos demonstrated the genuine evil in predatory capitalism.
George Carlin highlighted and explained the problems. Bernie Sanders provided further insight and, most importantly, actual solutions.
The good guys in every cartoon
For me the most influential was Matt Bruenig. He's extremely knowledgeable about Nordic model socialism as well as the building of a good welfare state.
Specifically, his explanations about how the way people frame welfare program is incorrect as it's not a vehicle of Socialism itself. As a TL;DR, people incorrectly assume it's about vertical redistribution (high income to low income), where the correct way to frame it is horizontal redistribution (e.g. a single lawyer that only has to take care of themselves and a lawyer who has 3 kids, a disabled sibling, and two elderly parents that they have to take care of should be able to live similar lifestyles).
He's also a labor lawyer and knows basically everything there is to know about the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), so it's helped reframe a lot of modern issues for me into a labor mindset.
He has a lot of stuff posted on The People's Policy Project as well as his personal website Matt Bruenig Dot Com. He also does a Podcast with his wife, Liz who is a great writer with the Atlantic and another lefty, where they end up talking about a lot of this stuff. The podcast feed also has in it a Socialism Series where Matt goes through the "canon" of socialist thought like Charles Fourier, Karl Marx, John Francis Bray, etc.
Roger waters and Pink Floyd probably had a significant impact on my political beliefs.
It's really hard to zero in on anything in particular that shaped my worldview. It's not like it was ever a straight line. It's especially hard to name something everyone would know because most of my political leanings have come from fucking around and finding out—saying ignorant shit that hurt people, and getting to know people who were contradictions to all my assumptions.
Mel Brooks, I suppose. And 80's action-hero movies, for all they were full of toxic machismo, had a message of taking personal responsibility to save the world for the common folk. Bad guys were always rich and powerful. The ending of Lethal Weapon 2 ("diplomatic immunity, haha" bang "...has just been revoked") is so spot on. Fuck privilege and power. Of course these same influences make me extremely leery of communism because it was always the Soviets/commies who were the bad guys.
That media informed my morality, and my morals intersecting with lived experience informed my politics. I don't consider myself a member of any party in particular and used to call myself a right-leaning independent, but now I'm at a point where I think Democrats are pro-corporate ass-rimmers so I don't know—make of all that what you will.
I can't say there was any one person, book or thing which made me veer left, but it was a long process of my experiences and examining my self, my beliefs and the world around me. I started off pretty far right politically. I was raised in a Lutheran home, with parents who were mostly conservative. Like most children, my religion and politics started off following that of my parents and in my early adulthood I was enamored with libertarianism. One thing I do have to credit my parents with is a willingness to question my beliefs. When I would raise opinions, they would take the time to discuss and dissect those opinions. My father especially, was great at calmly and carefully pulling apart an argument and I sought to emulate that. My parents really instilled in me a willingness to ask questions. I also have an independent streak a mile wide, which has been both helpful and a source of several issues in my life. I think it also helped that my parents never enforced religion and accepted the Christian Bible as more allegory than history.
My move away from religion started first, and that one does have a catalyst from pretty early in my life. During elementary school I attended the "Gifted And Talented Education" (GATE) program. The GATE program was supposed to be an accelerated learning program for children who were good at math, reading and solving puzzles (this was well before the STEM buzzword). During those classes, we did a bit where we studied religion as a subject and one of the projects was for us to pair off and come up with a creation myth. My partner and I came up with a myth around a great wizard creating the earth in a crystal ball. It was nonsensical, as one might expect of 9 year old kids; but, it kicked off the spark of me thinking, "hey wait, if I can just make this stuff up, how do I know that other religions didn't just make stuff up?"
Later as a teenager, I attended Luther's Catechism (completed the whole thing and went through Confirmation, too). And that was actually detrimental to my belief in the whole thing. The more I learned about the Christian Bible the less it seemed to make any logical sense. The questions I would ask seemed to cause the pastor to fall back on "faith" as an answer far too often. And that was something I was coming to identify as a fancy way of saying, "it's bullshit, but I won't admit it". By early adulthood, I rejected Christianity and shifted to Deism. It would take a few more years for me to give up the security blanket of religion altogether. The world is a pretty terrifying place if you don't have that convenient lie of some all-powerful being watching out for you. My parents were pretty accepting about my shift to atheism and it made for some interesting conversations about it.
My political shift leftward is even fuzzier. As I said, I started off conservative due to being raised that way. When it came to Christian morality as politics, a lot of it just wasn't a conscious thing. It's amazing how much of it was "out of sight, out of mind". The caricature of right-wing families sitting around the dinner table, talking about the evils of the left is just that, a caricature. We discussed mundane things, like school or work. Also, even before I gave up Christianity, I felt that George Carlin was pretty spot on about the Ten Commandments. I viewed the separation of Church and State as very important. Any reasonably reading of European history should leave one with an understanding of just how fucked things get when religion gets control of the state. Not that state control of religion has worked out any better. Let people believe as they wish, so long as they keep it to themselves.
On Economics, Communism was a dirty word and the distinction between Communism and Socialism wasn't really something we paid attention to. My father being an Economics major, this has baffled me in later years. But, he's dead now and has been unresponsive to questions about it. I'm likely still further to the right on economics than much of Lemmy. My view on Communism is that it's unworkable in practice and will tend to devolve into authoritarianism. Also, that a centralized command economy is unable to effectively manage an economy at scale. While this isn't much changed from anti-Communism bent of my parents, it's now more based on my own views rather than learned views.
Where I have diverged is on my views on Socialism, taxation and wealth redistribution. Picking apart the knot of "Socialism == Communism" which I learned from a young age took a lot of work. To me, this is the most effective bit of propaganda the Right has ever rolled out. Communism, as put into practice, does not have a lot of good examples in history. If one is stuck in the mindset of "Socialism == Communism", then this translates into Socialism having the same problem. Once you disconnect them though, it becomes much easier to recognize how many of the good things about our society (the US in my case) really are Socialism in action. And also that Socialism does not require the central command economy which Communism tends towards. It's also easy to look at other liberal societies and recognize the advantages that certain social programs provide over their free market equivalents. Breaking through that bit of propaganda, that "Socialism == Communism", likely did more to move me to the left than anything else.
One last thing I'll mention, which is kinda a long answer to the original question, "who is an influential person or thing that shaped your progressive / left leaning views?" is watching the US's foreign military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. I was in my mid 20's when the World Trade Center was destroyed. I was driving to work when the radio show hosts announced the first airplane hitting. The radio show was a morning comedy trio type show and the announcement was really out of character for them. Once I got to work, the whole office was in the conference room watching the TV. We watched the towers fall live. This has an effect on you which is hard to describe. It's also a good subject lesson in why terror as a political tactic is a bad plan. While there is certainly a fear response, that fear gives way to anger. And the US as a society when fucking nuts with anger. The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was an incredibly easy sell to the American people. And had Dubya been willing to focus on just that and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, I think the first decade of the 21st century would have played out very differently. But, he wasn't content to hunt Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And certainly not willing to hold the Saudi's dictator to account for providing material support to the terrorists in the attack, Dubya decided to try his hand at nation building in the middle east. A lesson we should have learned from the UK/French fuck ups in the region and the US's time in Vietnam.
I had a close friend in the US Army at the time. And I watched him be ground up emotionally over a 20 year career. Most of which was spent in Afghanistan and Iraq. I also recognized in him traits I had seen in my father, who had been in the Vietnam war. It made me realize how sadistically evil the GOP was. It's willingness to send young men and women off on pointless foreign military adventures, all for oil and money. The constant drip-drip-drip of jingoism and greed just soured me on them entirely. Not that the DNC was all that much better, but it was a matter of degree. While some voices in the DNC called for an end to the wars, the GOP was busy purging any unbelievers. The more I saw behind the mask, the more I recognized the evil behind it at the GOP. I also remember voting for Obama specifically because I wanted to see an end to the wars in the middle east. Despite 8 years to get that done, he instead just piled more lives and money into nation building and death.
So, here I am now. I consider myself a liberal in much the same mold as Teddy Roosevelt, sans the sexism/racism which was prevalent in his day. I'd be glad to see the return of anti-trust laws, the re-expansion of social programs we lost in the mid 20th century. Seriously, we need the Public Works Administration back up and running. It'd be really nice to have it running before the AI bubble bursts. But, that ain't happening under Trump. And once that bubble does burst, we're going to need a robust social safety net to prevent mass unrest as we face another "once in a lifetime" financial crisis. I'm not hopeful about the next decade. Though, I do think the US system will pull though. We've been through some really rough stuff before and I believe we still have people willing to put things back together in the aftermath of the Poo Flinger in Chief.
George Carlin, Carl Sagan, Fred Rogers, Alan Watts. These people showed the true nature of reality to me like no teacher or book ever did. These are my Gods.
My mom.
Oddly enough, Slate Star Codex
I haven't re-read them for a while but I remember these two were part of changing from libertarian to left-something