GenZedong

American Liberals are above all else defined by a smugness that is backed by a total and complete naiveness of the word without the inability to understand that Socialists/Communists still exist in the world outside of the US and China. American Liberals believe there is only one opposition to their views, the uneducated unwashed masses who is backward in character and without any virtue.

American Liberalism is largely a belief of credentialism that simultaneously somehow proves their moral virtue.

In the US there are no real politics. Average people have near zero power to affect any change in their country. So the concept of engaging in politics has shifted to solely a cultural identity.

Now even though they cannot effect their material conditions positively in this system, the people still driven to adopt these cultural identities still get something that matters to them out of their participation. One group gets to punish those they hate/satisfy their anger and hatred of libs (this is the republicans the more opening fascist party). The other group - the liberals - who tend to be more affluent, college educated, etc. vote for the democratic party to feel morally superior/assuage guilt for being affluent/college educated in the most unequal nation on earth.

Interrogating an American liberal on their positions regarding politics is to them an assualt on the foundation of their superior moral character - which is soley defined by "voting blue no matter who." To call into question the lesser evil of the democratic party is to say that they are not a good person.

In short, the US is not okay. We are never sending our best. Death to America of course

You haven't done anything wrong. American hardcore liberals are genuinely the worst kind of person, perhaps even worse than the typical fascists due to their hysterical, performative, deranged faux-progressive fascism and holier-than-thou attitude, all of which combines to create a monstrosity that is incapable of relating to other human beings in a decent manner the second they are met with anything but subservient agreement.

If it helps, their antics will probably ensure that they get a place by the wall regardless of what comes next, whether it be socialism or barbarism, if they keep it up.

Cold-war propaganda that is fundamentally integrated into mainstream American culture that associates anything left of bombing the middle-east and lukewarm, meaningless platitudes is going to destroy the very fabric of the nation.

Speaking as someone from the US my whole life who became communist only in recent years, my general sense is people like me are raised to think that: 1) the world revolves around the US and everything else is secondary to it (not true). 2) the US is a people's democracy (it isn't). 3) democrats are the more moderate/progressive party (they aren't, if they ever were truly - maybe going back to the FDR coalition, they were a bit).

But if you believe all 3 of these, and you strongly believe that Trump is a threat to a people's democracy, then you might have a strong reaction to the idea of not supporting the alternative. To be clear, I'm not saying their behavior is reasonable at all. But I can kind of see how they arrive at it, with headspaces I've been in at times in the past, and the propaganda people tend to believe in the US.

Tbh, they sound like they are deep in western chauvinism, coming to your Eastern European country and yelling at you about their elections. As if you are supposed to be involved in it too somehow (this is where point 1 comes in). You did nothing wrong. Blue maga, aka: "vote blue no matter who", the special brand of USian liberal who has adopted a stance of voting for a half-eaten ham sandwich over voting for Donald Trump, is not well-grounded in reality. In effect, I think whether they realize it consciously or not as what it is in substance, they are panicked about the neoliberal order crumbling and being replaced with naked fascism (e.g. no decorum to cover it up), but they lack the framework with which to see the neoliberal order as already being fascistic, so to them this is the absolute worst case scenario for their country and life. Meanwhile, people who see beneath the curtain are going like, "Is it really the worst thing if liberals start to see the US for what it is, rather than continuing to believe in the pomp and ceremony?" Migrant kids in cages went from being an issue liberals cared about under Trump to being a nothing under Biden.

People in this state of mind are effectively duped by the liberal decorum and really believe it's better for that reason.

American politics are purely based on identity that this point. To the liberal mind, there are only two teams, and you're on the other team unless you give your undying loyalty to your team.

I have so many coworkers who think me criticizing the sitting president or his heir to throne makes me a republican. Any possible grievance I have will be countered with "but trump will be worse?! Check mate."

Every single person I know who spent a semester abroad is even more insufferable. They will talk about this trip to europe the rest of their life, inserting it into every conversation to give them a false sense of being well traveled.

Liberals are insecure. They reflexively start name-dropping news agencies, universities, dudes with British accents, or whatever they can so you affirm their beliefs and not a single one outside of their bubble. Also someone studying abroad typically has means so they were likely coddled their entire life (I am guessing here).

I ran into one recently that kept name dropping associated press and Reuters with regards to denouncing Palestinian resistance and their so called "violence" essentially justifying the genocide and saying such and such paper stated Iran tricked the resistance into Oct 7th. Dumb shit like that.

The worse revenge you can do to a liberal is ignore them. They hate the same smugness they treat you with.

They act like the entire world is USA, thinks like them and has the exact same mindset and point of view as them, that's why you'll see bullshit about 4th July or elections from a country on the other side of the planet every single time even if you're from Transnistria, Zimbabwe or Nauru. And they get extremely offended when you insult their war criminals, cops in this case, genocidal maniacs or slave owners(depending on whom you're talking about) since they're their national heroes and have a cult of personality but literally. Same thing with their shitty ass-wiper flag. This mentality is exclusive to them.

I will add something I haven't seen here that may help.

First off, you're in the right.

It's possible that the wording and tone you used were different than this person usually deals with. Eastern Europeans in my experience are much more direct, in a way that can come off as aggressive- to Americans. Many if not most Americans are not used to this, they're much more passive-aggressive, are used to changing up their word choice and tone with different audiences and subject matters, often trying to avoid confrontation. So saying your thoughts clearly to them may have actually seemed like you were attacking their beliefs. Challenging someone's thought processes, especially around politics, is something Americans often don't deal with outside of confrontation. You're not supposed to think about that, you feel right or wrong. Interrogating what you believe to attempt to come up with a better political view is never spoken of here in the mainstream, that's a very foreign concept I usually only see in leftists, go figure. Of course there are still many Americans that aren't like this, but I thought I'd offer this up as a possibility.

Because most Americans have been fooled into thinking that all possible scenarios in politics are found by the two parties, as right as humanly possible are the Republicans and left as humanly possible are the Democrats with “moderates”* in between…

So any attack on Kamala means that you are literally MAGA.

• “American moderates” tend to know absolutely nothing whatsoever about politics. These people don’t even watch the news or follow politics at all but usually vote because they’re bored or some misplaced feeling of civic duty.

The contradictions are sharp enough now that simply acknowledging the terrible things the dems do/have done the past 4 years can provoke a full-blown chimp out. Trump Would Do Worse makes up the vast majority of everything I hear from them whenever they pester those like us who can no longer stomach the rat race. I think the reason they're so aggro this cycle is because deep down they know that they don't really have a leg to stand on beyond bluanon crap. They can't accept the fact that you simply can't claim to be anti-cop and anti-genocide and then not only vote for them, not only stump for them, but also bleat when we refuse to. It stresses them out to address that contradiction and call it out for what it is, self-interested fascist apologia. This is what happens when your only perception of what fascism is comes from Spielberg movies and other holocaust oppression porn.

If I were you I would probably either ignore them or corner them if you're already stuck in a conversation and ask point blank if non-American lives are worth sacrificing to them to get what they want: Trump crying on election day so they can gloat and over-post about it for the next 4 years and go back to being blind, deaf, and dumb to geopolitics (whilst pissing and moaning ineffectually about SCOTUS and congress every day).

All true believer liberals are, ever notice that the biggest political party in america is 'undecided'?

The deranged nature of american liberalism isnt lost on them either.

Ya, that's just how Americans are, this coming from an American. All the looting of other nations goes to your head. She has probably never been asked that hard of a question before. To be honest she is probably just super alienated from reality.

wait is this for real? they sound like a CIA bot. they are brainwashed. the US has the best propaganda in the world and definitely the largest propaganda budget.

You could post this in c/askchapo or lemmygrads question comm, for future reference. As others have said, here is fine too.

This reads to me like there was some context left out (I assume be accident), possibly communication difficulties that you weren't aware of. I really need to think there were other things said or maybe wording that implied something you didn't mean, or something like that, because it's a very unnatural reaction. Perhaps there is context you weren't even there for, and this person's breakdown was motivated by events that you have no knowledge of. College kids are still mostly kids, at least in America.

If what you relayed is the full and accurate picture, the person you are talking to is hopelessly unstable and you did nothing wrong. In the future, to avoid stepping on landmines, it would probably be good to start with some less challenging questions to see how they respond before you give them a prompt as heavy as what you gave. A lot of people aren't ready to be given such a challenge so abruptly, and might feel like they've been ambushed or "put on the spot".

Settler-colonies I would say fundamentally operate on a completely different Overton window from normal countries. I'd say you can blame this exchange student's thin skin on them being close to institutional power; you can blame the "seeing anyone who doesn't support their form of fascism for being the other type of fascist in their country" on their spending most of their life completely isolated from actually having to face the contradictions of settler society; and you can blame the general tribalism of national politics in the USA at least partially on settlers needing to absolve themselves of guilt by demonizing the "other side" that supports 95% of the same things.

I've started to informally distinguish between three types of US citizen abroad: my own type are "Americans", we are polar opposites to "Seppos", and between us Americans and those Seppos is an unstable middle ground that I call "Usonians".

From my own typology, I might label the exchange student you met as a "Seppo" just from this description — them refusing to speak to you means that they are likely wholly disinterested in, and will in all likelihood actively try to avoid through kicking and screaming if necessary, coming to terms with the contradictions surrounding your country's relationship to the USA, and what this relationship says about the USA itself. If they intend on returning to the USA after they are done with their studies, they must actively not build roots in the local community in which they now reside, and making them confront their own relationship to imperialism and settler-colonialism quite simply interferes with this.

The outburst you witnessed is in other words what I consider a "repair strategy" through which the settler-colony prevents "settler hemorrhage".

However, I could always be mistaken and they might really be typologically more like a Usonian — that despite that outburst you witnessed, they could actually one day become informed and genuinely empathetic, in which case they could become an American. But I have an image of what the typical US-born exchange student is like, and with the class background I'm imagining, I wouldn't bet on winning them over to our side.

Edit: Fixed the pronouns

In addition to the other responses, we don't have much nuance in our political conversations. Partially because we hear the same thing repeatedly but also because other views don't break into our bubble that often. It ends up framing everything much more like a script to be followed. If you're challenging the "left-wing" candidate, you must be doing so from the stance of someone who supports the right-wing candidate. That's the script. And very often, those roles come with baggage (eg, 'trump supporter', 'misogynist', etc.). So because you have put yourself in one of those roles/boxes, the script in their mind is being followed, and you've taken on that baggage.

You can see this in our media discussions as well. Who likes what movies, franchises, why, etc. Many people are unaware that they are acting this prescriptively, so we often talk past each other and rarely act in as good of faith as we think we are engaging in. Neo-liberalism is built on flexible word choices, slogans, and terms without meaning. This results in a lot of reverse terminology, empty words, and a clinging of identity and labels around more solid terms. The latter has the effect of simplifying people and positions into boxes that result in script-like behavior due to regurgitating known responses and interactions with people in that label over there. The implication that you might not fit that label demands an immediate and intense examination of the subject matter in a few seconds or risk not appearing smart/moral/etc. So not only is that a threat to their image, but it's a lot of internal pressure in a short time—hince the response you got from them was very reflexive and combative.

When you believe you're working to save the world, you come to think that anyone who opposes you is a fool and react thusly.