Asklemmy

I was going to follow up with a sick zinger but instead I'll just be normal, ha.

It is important to grow the left, to turn it from like 100-1000 people in a given city into 5-10%. I can agree with that motivation, as can the vast majority of socialists. Our aim is revolution, that doesn't happen from just a few reading groups, it has to become more.

The entire country already caters to the demo you mentioned. Everything is ready-made for them. Many orgs are dominated by them, such as the DSA. You should not write off straight white cis guys but they are consistently the hardest to reach because they are dismissive of others' experiences with oppression and have been more shielded from capitalism's worst in their country, but tend to feel very entitled to an opinion about it.

Centrism is the only described characteristic that is a chosen identity and it is a political tendency, if you can call it that. It's a person with no political development whatsoever, they just vaguely cobble together an incoherent mishmash of common liberal and reactionary ideas that they can't really defend but they call themselves an outsider as if that means something regarding someone whose political life can be summed up as, "sometimes votes".

So what would it mean to try to boost efforts to recruit straight white cis dude centrists? Because the first things that would come to mind for me are usually called tailism by socialists and has a long track record of failure in the US in particular, where the US had a gargantuan labor movement that was entirely scuttled by liberal cooption and playing straight white cis dudes off of marginalized groups. There were entire unions that were segregated or disallowed black membership, for example. Those were the easiest to coopt into the red scare and, once they were used to out and isolate socialists, were then easily undermined and shrunk when their anticommunist government came for labor a couple decades later, having no radical core remsining and no material leverage.