Nobody is giving conservatives a pass. But we aren’t going to solve the problem if we don’t spend time understanding why people are voting the way they’re voting in an international trend, and it isn’t that everyone just became a lot more racist overnight; it’s because in many countries, the reality has become choosing between a more social liberal or social conservative neoliberal party, and one would need to be blind at this point to see it’s the second part of that descriptor people are done with.

I’m saying this as someone who is absolutely a lesser of the evils voter and advocated for such; but I also understand what’s actually driving support for people like Trump, AfD, and the like, and it isn’t a surge in intolerance; it’s material conditions, like it almost always is.

The criticism gets directed at the center left more than the center right because they are the ones more politically viable to change, or at least that’s been the view. Conservatives concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few is itself a conservative position in the traditional sense. Any party claiming to be left should be antithetical towards that.

Don’t mistake that for giving conservatives a pass. They’re worse, I’ll absolutely vote center left neoliberal if they are the only alternative; but convincing them is to fundamentally change their views more than a center left party.