I don't know how you bring them back.
They have been told that all of their issues are not their fault. It's the Left wing, it's the immigrants, it's the liberals, it's the blacks. That's easy. It's piss easy to tell someone their life is shit because of other people.
It's a lot harder to tell them to wake the fuck up and admit they've fallen for a lie. Their hero Donald Trump doesn't give a fuck about them. The party they've been supporting is the one who's kept them down on purpose. That the reason they've got no money is because the Republicans have increased their taxes while giving tax breaks to the rich, and bailed out big business to the tune of Trillions over covid, whilst refusing to send you a $600 check for 10 months.
Dom, the thing is that these people come from many backgrounds. Some of which will not have been happy at all. Then one day, they get attacked on social media for their political affiliation. The ones who came from domineering, strict, controlling parents will have grown up telling themselves, when I'm an adult, no-one will tell me what to do. And we loved to tell them what to do and think. Trump and Boris play a little game with that, called, make me your man, and I'll make sure they never tell you what to do again. They also give them little snippets, little signals of love and praise, and permissiveness which is likely to have been non-existant when they were growing up.
The more we harrangued these people, the angrier they got. And scared. Because they know that deep down, as much as they might slide into force and violence in defence of liberty, the left and centre would slide easily into beneficient directors and controllers of what they said, thought and did.
Got to admit. Lefties got properly nasty, no civility whatsoever. Middle class professionals screaming at people from mildly abusive homes, poor backgrounds, that they were disgusting wretches, that they all the priviledge growing up because they were white. Attacking young lads likely to have come from homes with skewed Male Female relationships about them being rapists. Saying they were the enemy. Young lads desperately trying to come to terms with the real world, where men are men and women have a mind of their own and are frequently not nice, where taunting people about their masculinity is seen as fair game. These boys were heavily disadvantaged because they had role models who were violent and abusive, cardboard stiff, or all powerful and all conquering.. this is what they were given by their parents and the media.
These people need respect and love to continue the journeys that we all go through. None of us are perfect, either.
And we must never treat verbal or personal abuse as fair game in politics. No wokeness justifies that. It ought to demonstrate to the individual how vulnerable we all are and how crucial love and gentleness is in living together. But they are getting the wrong lesson, at the wrong time, from the wrong type of teacher.
Basically, anyone interested in politics has to clean up their act on social media. I'm so sick of stuff like the gamey young left lads going on social media to call people like the countdown lass a C*** because she challenged Corbyn. I mean, the feminists I knew schooled me on that word. They'd have dumped me like a shot. At it again tonight, going after the clap for heroes girl. She's an innocent! How is it alright to abuse her??? You hate Boris, not her?! Tell her you think it's not a good idea and move on.
Civility is a pact. A truce. If we break that, then you find out what their inner truths are, the things they had to deal with, and what they really want, but gradually accepted they could not persuade others of.
There is no way most of these people are heartless or evil.
They are just people who had a different background. And that was not a choice they made.
They made the best of it and deserve compassion and respect like everyone else.
And they know things about us we need to know, some things we don't want to admit.
Reading what they want to believe about us, what they write in anger, is not how to find it. It just shows what a massive bellend a person can make of themselves by plonking a load of people they don't understand or respect into a group and coming up with reasons they can use to say they suck. We are definitely not above that. We make plenty of self-serving mistakes in thinking about others, and definitely carry our own unrealistic prejudices.
Why should they be good if we're not? Truth will mess you up.
They want it all. The good times they believed were happening back then. They want it more than you can know.
It'll mess everyone up, unless we go lightly, and stick to the rules that protect us and realise we can't know what's right for people who grew up in very different environments, and very, very different parent-child relationships.
Mess around with them in the wrong way, show no respect for the common rules, and especially if they were traumatised, or can't explain why they are angry, then you can expect see how 'nicely' they were playing.
Same for us. Exactly the same.
They were compromising. It was a truce. They can move back in time, a step at a time. You won't like those steps. We have to shine the light to get them to move forward again. Have to stop scaring people who just don't need it. Then maybe tell them why we get scared of them.