> People are often religiously affiliated for the exact same reason they are
> politically affiliated: they grew up that way. Thus, my son, who expresses
> pretty liberal views also thinks he's a republican.
>
> "I'm a republican right mom? That's because daddy and my brothers are."
> The
> last time that happened, I stood there and said, "You just got done
> bitching about the way corporations rip everyone off and screw people
over.
> You're a republican? What?" He grinned. Mind, I refused to shove my
> politics down my son's throat when he grew up. I figured he had enough to
> deal with in this world, he didn't need that albatross. *shrug*
>
> He can listen to me all day long and agree with me, but he thinks he's
> supposed to be a republican because the men in his family are a certain
> way. And once in that milieu he falls for the bullshit hook, line, and
> sinker. Not entirely, of course, because he comes to me to get a reality
> check on some stuff. But the fact is, he lives in a certain milieu, the
> conservatives have a loud voice, and it influences him, how he thinks, and
> how he acts in the world.
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I grew up'in a certain milieu' of conservative rural Republican voters. My school teachers were much of a muchness. The two Democrat families in the town of 100 were treated as eccentrics of questionable moral character. One was Catholic, the other failed to attend the only church in town, Congregationalist. By the time I got to high school, the biggest difference I could articulate between Democrats and Republicans (related to me by my "Time" magazine reading mother) was that Democrats were more inclined to support public ownership of utilities whereas, Republicans favoured private ownership of utilities. In such a milieu, socialism was considered the equivalent of volunteering for low paid wage-slavery sans civil rights.
The point is that I didn't become a socialist for a decade after i.e until I found out what socialism was via Detroit based socialists who instructed me in Marx's critique of political-economy via "Value, Price and Profit" etc. and related how social ownership of the collective product of labour would negate wage-slavery everywhere in the world. Once I grasped Marx's critique, I was finally able to gain political focus on what differentiated Republicans from Democrats, conservatives from liberals, right from left and how those forces played into the class struggle for small (c) communism.
Hi-ho, Mike B) *********************************************************************** Wobbly Times http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/