The first group of people we have to win over are the left-Liberals and the social democrats. These are people who are most open to sharing our values and who might be open to receiving the news that the system is rotten to its fundamentals.
Let's not kid ourselves; neo-liberalism has been a disaster even for the middle-class. The middle-class is shrinking. We have a lot more toys these days, but at the cost of environmental devastation, a continually deteriorating standard of living in the Global South, and we only afforded these new toys (digital entertainment, air travel, bigger houses, etc.) through increased debt.
It was neo-liberalism that has created the recent food crisis internationally. The elites have been in the policy drivers' seat for decades. Any political meddling (subsidies for corporate agriculture) has been among elites and has been accepted by most practical policy-makers. (The strong do what the will and the weak accept what they must.)
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"The first group of people we have to win over are the left-Liberals and the social democrats. "
But are those categories adequate for thinking about potential allies and what we need to do to get them?
What about people with a radical vision for social transformation that would not identify as "left-Liberal" or "social democrat", like some radical indigenous groups? And is a middle-class, left-Liberal, small business owner really a more natural ally than a racialized Muslim man who understands himself as conservative but whose family and community are being terrorized by CSIS, or than a desperately poor white woman whose life has not given her a chance to formulate an identity in terms of "social democrat" or "left-Liberal" but who knows in her bones that something needs desperately to change?
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your point, but I don't think we do ourselves any favours when we assume the social landscape that we are trying to transform to be flatter than it really is, and issues of possible alliance and possible conflict to be more straightforward than they really are.
Well, the reason I think we should go after the two fairly mainstream groups that I mentioned was because the harassed Muslim man might be tempted to appeal to the Liberal Party, or the NDP, ... with the mixed results that you can anticipate.
As well, 80 percent of this country is white, and I think close to that amount are Christian of some sort.
30 percent of those people are braindead fuckfaces who support the Cons.
But there's another 30 percent that imagine (against all the evidence) that the Liberal Party will protect civil liberties against the neo-cons nutbars.
All told, a significant portion of people who should and could be our allies fritter away their resources on a party complicit with our oppression, or on the other party that hasn't yet grasped the monstrosity of the system they deal with.
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