I had some pretty brutal discussions with my dad who is a hardcore liberal of the “the answer lies somewhere between the middle of left and right” type. He agrees with a lot of socialist stances and class war but refuses to acknowledge that a revolution is needed to achieve socialism, that killing people wouldn’t make us better than the owning class and that violence is bad and that we should try to change the system by voting that voting will bring lasting change and not a revolution…all this kind of crap. He thinks that i got too “radicalized” and that im stuck in a bubble of propaganda and now he wants to have more control of the media i consume and that when he sees me watching or reading an article that i show him the sources of these articles. He really wants me to “keep an open-mind” which to him literally just means returning to being a liberal. The more of these discussions i have with my father the more i feel a distance between us and i would love if we just ignored our political opinions and kept living our lives how we always did but he insists that i am being groomed by some megalomaniac organization or a goofy ah evil person to join some kind of leftist jihad: “Yes you are entitled to have your opinion but you should also keep an open mind but the problem is that your opinion is not correct” that all i hear from him.
Been there, belive me. Set a hard boundary with him. Tell him you love him and want to preserve your relationship but for that to happen, politics have to be off the table for discussion. A lot of these types also have plenty of opinions rooted in ignorance and they are not even aware that what they say and think is political, racist, sexist. etc. He also needs to trust that when he crosses this line, that he needs to respect if you bow out of discussion or respond appropriately to it. Either he gets the message or doesn’t, and that way the burden is not on you to maintain the relationship. If he doesn’t respect that, it’s on him.
Sucks to have to set that boundary and can feel cold. But it’s better than you harming your mental health by continuing to try and argue with him. You’re never going to radicalize him or change his mind. And if he’s anything like my father, some part of him honestly probably sees antagonizing you as “sport.” There is a huge generational disconnect today and most of these adults above the age of Millenial/GenZ seem to have a fundamental inability to grasp just how high the personal and immediate ramification of capitalism are on our lives. They got theirs and will pass before they ever see the worst of it.