hyper individualist liberal ideology in a nutshell. It's like Jack Nicholson's character says at the beginning of The Departed "I don't want to be a product of my environment, I want my environment to be a product of me."

Nobody gets to choose that! It's wishful thinking.

This is why a lot of communists are very clear that the point of getting elected isn't to succeed in reforms (thought that is nice) it's to get inside the glass house so you can commence rock throwing.

Literally all you are doing by getting into "the system" is switching classes. It's no big mystery why these so-called "progressives" that hold seats in the halls of bourgeois power become more revisionist and reactionary over time.

Good luck finding a politician that has resisted this trend. There aren't many, if any at all. I would love to retract this statement by being proven wrong, though.

I just posted a song in c/music where the hook is "you can't change the system from within, the system changes you" lol

Weird coincidence coming here and reading this

People have a really poor understanding of ideological state apparatuses and their function

I've seen it brought up before that in the past when the US had a stronger socialist movement, it had people who ran and were elected to US Congress but then used their position subversively, and their terms were generally short-lived in the process. How I wish this was AOC – she seemed to abandon that once Trump was out of office.