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My thoughts are that this stems directly from their view of the world. To them America and the West are a dystopian nightmare.
White Guilt, and present militarism
In Liberal circles, white people, and particularly white Americans, are racist, militaristic, and colonial. They also perceive that none of it is changing even a little bit. We support Israel which is racist and genocidal, we hold down minorities, and enrich ourselves at the expense of the non-whites of the world. And they see it as nobody aside from them actually caring.
Environment
Liberals believe that Earth will be literally uninhabitable within their lifetime. The air will be choked with pollution, the rivers poisoned, global warming creating deserts and rain forests and making things too hot. Nobody wants to do enough to fix it, and quite often want to go in the other direction. They see that nobody aside from them cares.
Capitalism
The rich run the world for the rich and everyone else suffers. Poverty is common, and all the things that should be free are instead not free. College costs too much. Health care costs too much. And again, none of this is noticed by anyone else, so nothing will change.
Trump
You might not notice, but we elected Literally Hitler in November. He’s going to build work camps. He’s going to round people up and either imprison them or deport them. The Handmaid’s Tale is going to happen. Again, nobody notices or cares and worse, half the country likes it. Which proves that white people are evil.
All of this is a profoundly negative world view. Dystopian even. Everything is terrible, and at best going to stay terrible forever, and very likely to get worse. If this is how you really see the world, obviously that’s going to give you anxiety and depression, especially if you’re hanging around others who share this view, and have few or no outside interests.
I agree that liberals and the left fit into parts of what you describe above but there is also a part of the establishment left that is somewhat different.
We could consider the left to also include the:
Pro war left.
Pro Israel left.
Pro rich woke left. Indeed, rich people who want cheap labor might be more sympathetic to multiculturalism.
Pro technology under their control left.
Pro intelligence services/FBI left.
and a left that sees the current west and finds plenty to like in the status quo and desires to push things even further.
Kamala Harris actually gained voters from Biden with voters that had incomes above 100,000. This could include some of the above categories of voters.
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Are they really anti militarism? They have fanatically cheered on WWIII in Ukraine with maximalist war aims and a black and white view of the war. Obama, Clinton and Biden have been long term enthusiasts of pretty much every neocolonial project. I would say their worldview is a crusader mentality in which the world can be divided up into believers and heathens and the believers have a duty to crusade against the believers. Their worldview seems to be that there will be heaven on Earth once the entire planet has been converted. Since the heathens are fighting against heaven on Earth they are fundamentally evil and have no legitimacy.
Spending 2 trillion on a crusade for feminism in Afghanistan was hardly western civilization, it was a crusade for an ideology deeply opposed to western values. The left was opposed to militarism when they saw the Soviet union as a better representative of woke than the US. Today Russia is an Orthodox christian fascist state stopping the values of Netflix from being the global religion.
The left-liberals in the West are surely not pacifist, but those in charge like Biden have not "fanatically cheered on WWIII" and have, if anything, been criticized a fair bit recently for taking a long time to do things like allowing long-range missile strikes and other similar decisions by the actual war fanatics.
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Letting Russia conquer Ukraine unopposed is pro-war, not anti-war.
NATO expansionism into every last corner of the map is pro-war. Russia wanted to negotiate over and over again. Zelensky's election platform wasn't that different than the Minsk agreements.
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War is peace.
TIL being anti-war means you must instantly roll over for anyone.
In Us American writings about the Pacific War, the term "pro peace faction" is used to denote a clique of Japanese leaders who supported, after less than four years of war with the USA, terms of surrender much harsher than ones offered by Putin to Ukraine.
This term is also used as a label of the collaborationist faction (Wang Jingwe's regime) of Chinese during the Second Sino-Chinese War.
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3 years is instantly? But I'll expand on my unnecessarily snarky comment.
Let's say you are anti-murder. Surely, a nice thing to be. But now you see someone about to blow up a bomb in a market so you shoot them dead. Are you still anti-murder? Probably yes, because you saved many people from being murdered at the cost of one.
Since you are a good utilitarian you decide, like Dexter, to start murdering serial killers. You kill 10 people who you are pretty sure would have killed more than 10 others. Are you still anti-murder? Probably... Except remember that time that Dexter killed an innocent person to keep from getting caught. You do it too. Are you you still anti-murder? After all, your expected value is still positive. At least, I think... What if you kill 5 people to save 6? What if you kill a guy who has a 20% chance of being a terrorist?
The point I'm trying to make is that politicians always try to justify the current war as an exception to the general principle of "no war". And these politicians are almost always wrong. Their complicated strategic calculations fall apart the instant they come into contact with reality. Simple heuristics are best. Military conflict begets more military conflict, and wars almost always cost more than people think (Hofstadler: this is true even when you take this into account).
When you're doing utilitarian calculations that involve the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, make sure your calculations are correct, and give yourself a wide latitude for the chance they might not be. While the initial defense of Ukraine was a good thing, continuing to spend the lives of innocent Ukrainian and Russian men in this conflict is not. And escalation is practically a crime against humanity.
If you want to wear the mantle of peace, you need to have a strong pro-peace bias, even if that means you aren't always a pacificist. And there is no way you could possibly characterize the actions of the U.S. blob in that light.
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How about demanding a negotiated settlement instead of keeping the meat grinder going? Is that pro or anti?
Would Putin accept any settlement short of "I get some of what I want now, and come back for the rest later."?
If he wanted war why did he push for negotiations for 8 years after the coup? Even in 2022 the goal wasn't to take Ukraine, it was to get Ukraine to accept a peace agreament that was almost the same as Zelensky's election platform.
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There are still a substantial number of anti-war leftists. In any case those liberals who are pro-Ukraine see it more about funding the brave independent freedom fighters, the rebels, against the evil fascist Russian Empire that wants to occupy their land and destroy their culture. They map it onto the standard post/anti-colonialist framework in which they supported the natives against the French in Algeria, the natives against the Portuguese in Angola, the natives against the Dutch in Indonesia and so on, and in which they support them against the French in New Caledonia, against the whites in Hawaii etc. That the Ukrainian natives are huwhite doesn’t change that (even if the Russian army is more diverse) because Russia is fascist and evil blah blah blah.
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