I hope this is relevant for this community, because I don’t know where else to post this. I’m honestly scared to post it anywhere else.
I live in Eastern Europe. I’m a university student, and recently, we got an American exchange student. They’re a very outspoken liberal.
A few days ago, we took them out with a few mates out for beers (they’re under 21, so they didn’t drink, even though you can here if you’re at least 18) to break the ice and make them feel comfortable. We got talking and because I’ve never been to the US, I asked them what I thought was an innocuous question. For some context, I’ve been a communist for a very long time, and joined the communist party the day I turned 18.
I basically asked them: Why would I vote for Harris? How would that improve the situation in the US and abroad? I’m not too familiar with her, but her politics don’t seem too appealing, especially her support for Israel and her incarceration background.
That made them launch into a screaming rant about how I’m a conservative for doubting her abilities and deserve to be jailed for wanting to infringe on the rights of women. There were a few more insults targeted at me for asking that question, I didn’t really understand them. The entire time, I was not even saying anything, I was honestly too shocked to react, but they just kept screaming until they got up and stormed out in a rage after calling me a Trump supporter, misogynist, and a fascist. My mates were equally confused. We tried to figure it out, but everyone is equally stumped.
I’ve been thinking about that entire situation for a couple days, and I’m so confused about their reaction. They even refuse to speak to me now.
What have I done wrong? Can someone please explain? ☹️ I really don’t understand what happened. We have liberals here of course, but even the worst ones never behave like this.
Settler-colonies I would say fundamentally operate on a completely different Overton window from normal countries. I’d say you can blame this exchange student’s thin skin on her being close to institutional power; you can blame the “seeing anyone who doesn’t support her form of fascism for being the other type of fascist in her country” on her spending most of her life completely isolated from actually having to face the contradictions of settler society; and you can blame the general tribalism of national politics in the USA at least partially on settlers needing to absolve themselves of guilt by demonizing the “other side” that supports 95% of the same things.
I’ve started to informally distinguish between three types of US citizen abroad: my own type are “Americans”, we are polar opposites to “Seppos”, and between us Americans and those Seppos is an unstable middle ground that I call “Usonians”.
From my own typology, I might label the exchange student you met as a “Seppo” just from this description — her refusing to speak to you means that she is likely wholly disinterested in, and will in all likelihood actively try to avoid through kicking and screaming if necessary, coming to terms with the contradictions surrounding your country’s relationship to the USA, and what this relationship says about the USA itself. If she intends on returning to the USA after she is done with her studies, she must actively not build roots in the local community in which she now resides, and making her confront her own relationship to imperialism and settler-colonialism quite simply interferes with this.
The outburst you witnessed is in other words what I consider a “repair strategy” through which the settler-colony prevents “settler hemorrhage”.
However, I could always be mistaken and she might really be typologically more like a Usonian — that despite that outburst you witnessed, she could actually one day become informed and genuinely empathetic, in which case she could become an American. But I have an image of what the typical US-born exchange student is like, and with the class background I’m imagining, I wouldn’t bet on winning her over to our side.