Everyone has the capacity to appreciate socialist ideas, but you can’t call them socialist when introducing them. Americans have nearly a century of built-up feelings about communism, so you have to appeal to their ego when presenting these ideas. And when I say everyone, I really do mean everyone. Here are some of the best entry points to get regular folks interested in left-wing ideas.
Fundamentally, it all comes down to your approach. Leftists struggle to articulate their ideas to regular people, which is where all those stereotypes about theory-wielding college communists come from. Don’t use theory and the Communist Manifesto thinking it will appeal to today’s audience. If you want regular people to understand socialism, you have to talk to them in a way they can understand.
Present ideas so they can come to their own conclusions. Give folks credit: even if they’ve been brainwashed or conditioned to hate leftism, most people are capable. If they view your ideas as reasonable, they’re more likely to take root if they believe they came up with on their own versus being spoon-fed.
A Livable Wage & Labor Rights
One of the most common arguments against increasing the minimum wage is that service employees (ex. fast food, retail) shouldn’t make a comparable wage to white collar workers. After all, aren’t these jobs meant to be entry-level, best suited for teenagers wanting pocket money?
There are a lot of fallacies with this argument – like in order for a white collar worker to go to McDonald’s on their lunch break, you can’t have high schoolers working and get fed. The retail and food service industry relies on 82% of adults ages 20 and older, and they’re necessary to keep the industry afloat. Even in the most rural regions in the United States, the minimum wage is not sustainable unless you’re working multiple jobs.
That being said, the most successful argument I’ve made regarding the minimum wage is by appealing to the white collar worker’s ego:
“Look, I’m not saying a fast food worker should make the same amount as you. It’s not the service employees’ fault that your boss is underpaying your work. That fast food worker should be paid more – but so should you. Your supervisor is the one holding your wage back on purpose.”
In reality, I believe service employees deserve better wages because the work isn’t easy. They’re tough jobs with high stress. As much as folks bellyache that fast food employees shouldn’t be paid better, they aren’t jumping at the chance for an “easier” job. But calling them a hypocrite won’t win them over.
Another argument you will likely get back is that companies require low wages in order to operate, and raising the minimum wage to be livable would only cause inflation to increase. That doesn’t have to be the case. If a company is only able to operate through unsustainable wages, they aren’t a successful business. That’s the point of capitalism – but corporations like Walmart and Dollar General come into rural areas and demolish local businesses and job diversity to create a surplus of underpaying minimum wage jobs.
Corporations don’t have to raise the price of products due to higher wages. They jump at every opportunity to increase prices because they maximize profits for their CEOs and shareholders. Corporations are fully able of shrinking their profits by just a fraction of a percent and pay their employees a decent wage, but they’ve bullied you into believing they can’t afford to.
The Big Bad Socialist Evil: Universal Healthcare
The public murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson brought this topic back into the spotlight. Depending on your age, you likely have strong opinions – younger folks are less sympathetic to Brian’s murder and more likely to look up to Luigi Mangione; older individuals find the issue more complicated since they’ll agree the American healthcare industry is out of control, but they don’t want to approve of Luigi or Brian’s murder.
Most Americans are aware of how unfair the inflated costs of healthcare and medicine in the United States are. The industry has been warped by insurance companies that force their way as the middlemen of healthcare. If you don’t have insurance coverage, you can easily pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for breaking a leg or needing surgery. You might still pay thousands for those same services even if you have insurance.
The industry thrives on the expectation that people will pay any price to keep themselves or those they love alive. A mother and father will go into debt because they need to pay for their young daughter’s cancer treatments. A young professional has to borrow money for treatment or never work again, falling deeper into poverty while still in pain. In the US, the healthcare insurance industry has put very visible price tags on life.
As long as you refrain from using phrases like “universal healthcare,” most Americans are supportive of the idea – they’re just scared of the term because it’s “socialist.” The US is the only first-world country that uses healthcare insurance. Brazil, China, South Korea, Canada, Algeria, Saudi Arabia – 69% of the world’s population has coverage from some program like universal healthcare. But US healthcare is hyper-focused on making a profit, not promoting good health – and that’s hard to take pride in. Our government spends billions each year on unnecessary things, but your grandmother has to worry about whether she can afford her diabetes medication. Your sister has to think about how expensive it is to give birth and raise a baby. Do you have money to throw away if you got into an accident and broke a leg? It doesn’t have to be that way because it’s not like that in any other developed country.
Gender-Affirming Care, Abortions, & Other “Scary Stuff”
At their core, these are some of the hardest topics to talk about. Compared to other ideas, these topics have the most religious weight to them because Republican politicians ally with religious evangelicals to push specific agendas. Ultimately, if someone is convinced based purely on religion, you will not be able to convince them. There is no magical argument or reason you apply to open their worldview quickly. For these folks, the only way to get them to become open-minded is to open their horizons.
Unfortunately, “opening their horizons” isn’t a quick fix. More than any other component, knowing someone directly affected by these policies changes conservative mindsets – even when religion is involved. Folks are quick to demonize illegal immigrants until they meet someone who entered legally, had their passport and papers stolen by an employer, and is being trafficked for farm work. They hate abortion until it’s their middle schooler who was sexually assaulted and is being forced to carry a fetus that might kill them during childbirth. They’ll despise transgender people until they meet a real person and realize they’re just as much of a human as they are.
Again, there is no winning argument here. The Republican Party stated that empathy is their enemy – and as exhausting as it is, it’s the best medicine for these issues. These are issues people argue based out of blind loyalty to religion and emotion, not logic or reason.
Green Energy
Environmental protections are a weird one – over the years, the GOP has taken a strong stance that global warming isn’t real. Most folks, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, do understand that something is fundamentally wrong, even if they struggle with climate change. Natural disasters are becoming more frequent and more dangerous. Where I live, there used to be at least a foot of snow by early December – but now, the grass is still green until mid-February. This isn’t normal.
Conservatives are well aware that their arguments lack factual evidence. They rely on moral panic to sway votes. When discussing the need for sustainable energy or greater environmental protection, refrain from using fact-based or logical arguments unless you’re certain they’re open-minded enough to base their opinion in reality. No amount of facts will change someone’s mind if their opinion is based on faith alone. Those folks aren’t hopeless, but they need time to come to their own conclusions.
Emphasize the importance of ensuring a better world for future generations. This idea is even in the Bible – humans are meant to be protectors of God’s creation, after all. They might not have to deal with all of the immediate consequences of climate change, but they can see it in motion. They can see how climate change will further spiral, that their inaction will create an inhospitable world, their future grandchild won’t be able to survive in.
On the other hand, I also recommend not letting environmental-based conspiracy theories fly. When someone argues that windmills kill hundreds of birds each year, cut them off and state the facts. If they argue that climate change is part of the natural cycle of Earth warming up and cooling off, don’t give them space. Yes, the Earth does have a sort of cycle, but the number of ecological changes you have seen in your lifetime alone is not natural.
Rehabilitation, Homelessness, and Social Services
Americans feel entitled to not see poverty in their communities. They get uncomfortable, anxious, and even afraid when they see homeless individuals – but they don’t help them.
Traditionally, religion should actually help here. In fact, it’s why JD Vance and the Pope don’t get along – American Christians are distinctly non-Christian when it comes to Jesus’s teachings about compassion and empathy. The Christian answer to homelessness and poverty should never be to imprison people for the crime of simply being homeless. Christians ought to favor greater funding for homeless shelters and social services to lift people out of poverty rather than larger police budgets or prisons.
Unlike other cultures, Americans don’t have a great sense of duty towards helping the poor. We’ve been hard-wired to perceive wealth as the result of one’s hard work, as well as view poverty as the result of one’s moral failing. If the mythical American Dream is possible, then only lazy folks are unable to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve it, right? Because of this, it’s hard to persuade people into sensitive topics like defunding the police or the value of rehabilitation over punitive punishment.
If there’s a common theme with all of these topics, it’s that you have to find a middle ground to work from. Fundamentally, Americans aren’t inherently adverse to these concepts if you’re able to separate their pre-existing conceptions.
Wouldn’t it be nice if your community were able to utilize other services than the police? If there’s a large amount of theft in your neighborhood, wouldn’t services like food banks and employment opportunities have just as much of a positive impact as constantly patrolling police officers? If there are overdoses and substance abuse, wouldn’t it make sense to put more money into rehab and overdose prevention over policing them? If there’s a significant homeless population, isn’t it more logical to fund homeless shelters, public housing, and jobs rather than putting individuals in jail?
Police officers have as little as three months of training before being certified and put into the field; they aren’t necessarily required to have a lengthy education, and they aren’t well-trained on substance abuse, homelessness, suicide, or other crises. And greater police budgets haven’t equated to better police officers – the money goes towards larger guns, armored vehicles, and everything that doesn’t actually help your community.