Thing is you can actually be radical. In a healthy democracy you need some small fringes to exert pressure, e.g. civil right activist groups and so on so that the government isn’t able to just completely ignore portions of the population.

But to be effective as an activist you have to know when to put on pressure and when to unite. Malcolm X or Fred Hampton didn’t go vote for David Duke just because MLK was a pacifist.

This was the wrong time to pressure because as always activists dramatically misread the levels of actual support for their cause and dramatically underestimate how much support the general populace gives the opposition.

Most people don’t even agree on the very basic facts of reality or that such a thing can even exist and that for instance pretty certain observations made using the scientific method aren’t just equally weighed to someone’s opinion, how tf are you gonna expect to convince them of anything? What you gonna write some long post on it? Good luck - they literally cannot read.

Humanity is just a dogshit species. To even agree that we shouldn’t stab ourselves in our proverbial balls with a proverbial milwaukee power drill - it takes like generations and most people are always for the status quo and the worst possible version of everything is the default we have to work from and with, it’s just a cruel joke and it would be more existentially comforting if progress was outright impossible.

Only a radical speaks in absolutes