Well, I can really sympathyze with your view.
But, as Trotsky said about war, you may not be interested in it, but it’s interested in you.
I would FAR rather be doing crosswords and Junior Math Olympiad problems (or trying to do them), and catching up on all the reading I missed out on … but … to quote a Beat Poet’s line from the 1950s, when we were all worried about a nuclear war …
“I do not want to startle you, but they mean to kill us all.”
And, yes, it can be VERY frustrating dealing with ‘ordinary’ people. (Probably even worse for me, on the Right, than you, who I suspect would be somewhere on the Left, since, to quote a conservative thinker, ‘Liberals read. Conservatives watch TV.’.)
But we’ve got to.
Now … it’s not as bad as it looks. What a lot of the folks on the Left don’t seem to realize, is that there has been a huge shift among the base of the Right. I know we look like a lot of green-toothed rednecks, mindlessly repeating whatever our preacher-man said on Sunday, but that’s wrong.
As a minor interesting fact, the Right is increasingly secular. Religion, or more precisely adherence ot an organized religion, is dying.
More importantly the last 20 years have taught the conservative base something about the realities of America being the world policeman: it doesn’t work.
Once, you could count on the ranks of the Right, whenever the government decided to invade someone, to be foot-stomping, flag-waving cheerleaders for it. No more. Too many of their sons have come home in body bags, and they realize that out there in Absurdistan, they hate us almost as much as they hate each other. So there’s little enthusiasm for more war, even a proxy war like the ones we pushed the poor Ukrainians into.
AND … the Right used to be uncritical supporters of the FBI and CIA, etc. No longer.
AND … the Right used to against Free Speech for ‘subversives’. When in 1965 Eugene Genovese, a professor at Rutgers, announced his support for the Viet Cong, the Republicans wanted to get him fired. [Eugene Genovese - Wikipedia]
Now they’re for Free Speech – because the shoe is on the other foot, perhaps, but they’re for it.
And … rip-roaring old capitalism, as it has globalized, has not done well by the American working class, including its conservative base. [A good website: https://www.wtfhappenedin1971]
The central idea from that site.
So – there is objectively the basis for a ‘United Front’ between Left and Right in this country, over certain issues. For one thing, to restrain our insane foreign policy establishment from more overseas adventures. (Trump had a vague notion about this, but, of course, couldn’t articulate it in policy and personnel.)
But is anyone interested? No.
My view: if we could co operate with Stalin to beat Hitler, I can co operate with a Lefty to keep us out of war. And maybe do some useful things in other areas as well, such as jobs and eduation. Each of us can think of the other as Stalin.
Atheists on both sides ought to be among the first people to see the possibilities. (And, yes, there are some atheists who are conservative. See, for example,
https://TheAtheistConservative.com and https://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/
So, if any fellow atheists here are interested in discussing the possibility of some joint work for goals we both agree on, let’s have a thread for it. At a minimum, more interesting than bashing some poor Catholic fundamentalist.