Kamala Harris running a damn near flawless campaign, with just a month 1/2 of campaigning. She’s been holding rallies nonstop with Tim Walz & not making her talking points about her race or gender like Hillary. She’s offering expanded healthcare, reinvestments back into public housing, wants to take on corporate greed, protect reproductive rights and chose a pro labor, pro education running mate.
Yet, she’s either barely leading or ties in most polls with a guy that:
Is a convicted felon.
Liable Sexual Predator.
Gets sentenced in November.
Has several more pending cases.
Increased Drone Strikes by 300%. (Joe Biden dosent use drones anymore).
Illegally killed an Iranian General unprovoked with a missle strike.
Increased tensions in Israel/Palestine with the Abraham Accords.
Wants war with Mexico (his words).
Tried to coup Venezuela.
Will bend the knee for Netanyahu’s potential war with Iran.
Lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% (lowest in history).
Obvious tax cuts for the rich.
Told people to drink bleach during the pandemic.
Is the main driving force for America’s current division.
Constantly attacks marginalized groups.
Tried to steal the 2020 election (Find Me 11,000 votes in GA).
Did Fake Elector Slates to pressure Mike Pence to not certify the 2020 election.
Caused a riot on the capitol that lead to his OWN supporters dying.
Just got washed by Harris in the last debate, was completely unprepared on anything but immigration (“I have concepts of a plan”).
And so much more. So seriously what is it? Is it just the attraction to bigotry/racism? Is it to end “wokeness”. Is it because Kamala is a woman of color? You can’t use the both sides argument like Hilary or Biden, Kamala is the obvious better choice. Could you imagine if Kamala had as much baggage as Trump? The media would lose their minds.
Seriously, how the f*** is this guy still in the race?
It’s simple. Bigotry and greed. Trump plays to people’s fears that “others” will soon have the same rights they do while also assuring his rich handlers that he will make them richer. He’s convinced the poor to cut off their nose to spite their face.
Conservatism is a mental illness, it can’t be defeated with logic and reasoning
it can’t be defeated with logic and reasoning
YouTube channel Knowing Better made a video about the Seventh Day Adventist. Basically the same conclusion.
His debate performance was stunning because he spent 75% of his time talking about how we are being invaded by an enormous wave of criminals and insane asylum escapees who are violently claiming buildings and territory. I was like excuse me? Do I need to go check my yard for invaders? I didn’t realize we were being overrun. And yes I live in a state that borders Mexico.
“Conservatism […] can’t be defeated with logic and reasoning”
This is the key point that a lot of people miss.
If you wholeheartedly, or at least performatively, believe that there is a “natural” hierarchy where some people are better than others, then what one might see as equality is seen as oppression by hardline conservatives.
This is why emotion is the key component of Trumpian messaging, regardless of veracity.
The key is to never play the game. Always proactivity act with questions, never “defend” and react with truth; they’re not interested in the truth.
It’s not conservativism, conservativism has been captured by think tanks funded by oil and banking billionaires. They’re framed conservativism, gutted it, and replaced its insides with Libertarianism (and sometimes technocratic fascism), as that’s what gives them the lowest taxes, the most corporate welfare, union busting capabilities, and defends their wealth accumulation most efficiently.
They’re not good members of society, this is demonstrated in Trump’s fascism (which is based on Roy Cohn’s fascism). It seeks to destroy society, the nation, and government.
If the race were between The Literal Devil ® and Jesus Christ (D), the vote total would be 45%-55% just based on the letter they choose to run after their name.
Policy doesn’t matter when people base their entire personality on their political party identification.
Jesus was a socialist Jew. We had one of those run for President, too, but couldn’t make it past the Democratic primary.
But see how evil he looks…
/s
He got my first D primary vote… but NOT MY LAST.
Amen, preach it!
If you completely forget everything about Bernie; who he is, what he’s done, how he speaks, everything; he does look like a CEO who would lay off half his staff for a discount on a sandwich. But thats more because he’s an old white guy in a suit and they all look like that
He has joyful eyes
needs more puppies and rainbows
Jesus is a Mexican name. Check mate.
Closer to 50/50 with the electoral college.
And it pisses me off that people will vote for the dipshit because he’s an R, but i would vote for a half-dead horny toad on the other side.
Nothing I’ve read has ever explained Trump’s appeal like this article.
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about
Nothing in there makes a cute soundbite. “They’re racist!”, is far easier than having to digest what the author lays down.
Seriously, read it. It’s important.
It’s a good article. It explains rural America. It doesn’t explain the well off assholes living in Huntington Beach CA. It doesn’t explain the well off assholes living in suburban Inland SoCal. It doesn’t explain rich privileged shitheads like Musk and Thiel.
People like Musk are cynical, attention-seeking manipulators and narcissists. They aren’t afraid that their way of life is being threatened, they’re using the fears of others to further their own ends, and consider themselves above it all.
That article was the most cogent take I have seen on this subject. I have a similar cultural background (rednecks and urban, religious Polish-Americans), but see myself as a science-literate atheist. I have seen this first-hand, but wasn’t able to articulate it as well.
Those guys just don’t want to see the US go the way of Europe where scorched-earth capitalism has been tamed and extreme wealth is taxed extremely. They are wealthy beyond avarice and STILL don’t feel they are free because they come up against regulations and institutions.
They capitalize on the rural Trumpism because it is the path most likely to lead to unchecked capitalism. Remember, the US isn’t like Europe - yet. And It will take a lot of work to get it there. All those rich guys need is a government that will do nothing. So not only is tax-cut Trump their friend objectively, he creates chaos. And chaos prevents action. Rancorous divisiveness means a logjammed national agenda. Which is all they want: no action. Look the other way while they rape the world.
Honestly, hadn’t read this one and it’s got some seriously solid points in it.
I feel like this is just gift wrapping being a dumb racist hick in prettier paper. They are scared of cities because their full of black people, gays, and Mexicans. They like assholes who show the same level of hate as they do - who will keep the black people, gays, and Mexicans away. And they like someone who justifies hiding behind religion so they can tell themselves that God made them this dumb and rascist. So they can delude themselves into thinking they are really the good guy.
Great read. There’s 70+ million people out there choosing to vote for Trump, why? Even if the answer is complicated you can’t dismiss them all outright.
I see a decent amount of comments painting all republics with one brush. I think it’s low effort and unproductive.
Good read thanks
Good read. Thanks!
The problem with that argument is that 80% of people live in cities. There are not enough rural people for them to be a majority of the Republican party.
In america, land votes more than people. We have the electoral college, the senate, and gerrymandering. Rural areas by design have wildly outsized power. This was done intentionally to preserve slavery
That was an amazing read.
Jason Pargin is a goddamn hero.
Fun piece. I don’t know about best explanation ever.
It starts out talking about how movies idealize simple honest people from the heartlands (Star Wars, The Hunger Games, Braveheart) but then says:
the whole goddamn world revolves around them. Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes
So which is it? Does pop culture feed rural America’s sense that it is “Real America” or does it make them hillbillies?
As if explaining politics through TV and movies isn’t reductive enough, it can’t seem to keep its own story straight for ten paragraphs in row.
That was from before we knew better. We’ve seen since then that it is indeed racism and hatred that powers the Republican base. That’s why the GOP doesn’t need to have any real policy laid out anymore. They just have to promise to hurt the “right” people this time around. Any sane Republicans that existed then are voting Democrat now.
That’s an interesting point of view.
This explains a demographic analysis without explaining anything meaningful or unique. The article could be about any post-Regan Republican campaign (such demographic analysis is used by all modern campaigns, on bith sides), so it wasn’t a satisfying article. Combined with all the pop culture references, it comes off as quite immature and an unextraordinary explanation. Mediocre.
I remember the summer of 2016, when I was playing Pokemon Go in the parks and people I had never talked to and that lived nearby were playing it next to me. We were all celebrating when we caught a pokemon when we were after, and comparing which ones we’d caught with each other.
At the time I thought…who would buy Trump’s conman routine? Who actually thinks that the country is in a terrible enough place that we need to elect this person who seems to actively hate the country and seemed to want to set the entire thing on fire?
I left my Californian home and went back to my original state to visit my family. We went to several different areas of the state in fall of 2016 because my wife was from a rural area and I originally grew up in a slightly more suburban area. I saw the signs in the yards, I saw the discontent, and I saw how people did not seem to be reacting the same way to his craziness. I saw how casually they would put on his rants in the background while talking about other issues. I saw how some of them were amused by his antics. It had been a couple of years since I had last been back and it once again struck me how much worse the area appeared to be from the last time I was there. I was in a rural area when the “Access Hollywood” tape dropped. People seemed to visibly shrink at even the mention of the news. I thought he was done for, and that this was a bridge too far for his supporters to cross. That people would vote third party, or not vote at all. I did not get the sense that my thoughts were shared by those around me.
When I came back to California, people were talking about the debates. It was sunny and nice out, and people would talk about the projects they had going on in their houses, or they’d talk about work related affairs. People were sometimes amused by Trump’s antics, but everyone uniformly thought it was impossible for him to win the election. Having seen what I had seen in the weeks prior, I was no longer one of these people. “They’ll never let him win”, one of my co-workers said. I was stunned…who are “they”? Does the rest of the country actually believe this?
It turns out quite a few of them did. Many people thought there was just simply no way that Trump would win, because either the system was already rigged against him and would not allow him to win, or because the country was just not in dire enough straits to elect such a madman (as I once thought).
Hindsight is 20/20 but when I thought it was bizarre that he was even a viable candidate at one point in 2016, and I saw the decaying state where I grew up, I thought “if he wins the election, then we are in a much worse state as a country than I thought”. And we undoubtedly are.
Of course he won, but the reason that I have this somewhat rambling response to this question is that the answer to “why is he still in the race?” ultimately comes down to the overall state of this country.
He is in this race because this is where we are as a country: barely able to imagine a possible future that is brighter than the present, because we are still caught up in degenerative non-sense that keeps us thinking that our broken down towns, and our poor social bonds are caused by some horde of “others” instead of their true causes: our ever-widening wealth inequality, our ever-decaying moral responsibilities to each other, and our national instinct to absolve ourselves of our responsibilities by claiming that not only is it correct to be forever self-serving, but that even the idea of altruism is a lie.
even the idea of altruism is a lie.
Wow. You’re right. Helping others is as politicized as abortion. One of the tribes can’t even fathom uplifting their neighbors because that could be equated to socialism and it would get them kicked out of their in-group.
That explains the “virtue signaling” accusations.
I rmember stephen colbert’s face lol
Many Conservatives have been conditioned to stop looking for facts and believe what the TV tells them. Trump admitted as much during the debate. When challenged on the cat thing, he dismissed the reporter’s research and said that he believes it because he saw it on TV. His voters will, too.
Roger Ailes was Nixon’s media consultant during Watergate, and the lesson he learned was that if the media was on Nixon’s side, he could have gotten away with it. Ailes went on to run Fox News. That is no accident.
It’s honestly madness.
The former President, running a multi-million dollar campaign, with access to the best information in the world, has nothing to say but rambling “but the TV said, but the TV said!”
Just an absolute fool.
But he’s always been like this. He had the world’s largest intelligence apparatus at its service, but didn’t believe what they said when it contradicted what his buddies Vlad and MBS told him.
Oh I agree, you just want to believe that even the world’s stupidest person could eventually learn something. It’s not like this is a case of him being deliberately obtuse, which we often see, he truly believes his own nonsense.
Conservatives who are capable of good quality research, and honest self-reflection barely exist because those two qualities often destroy their affiliations to modern conservativism as it stands today.
So some become neocon-neoliberal hybrids, others become economic Libertarians or Fascists in sheeps clothing, but most, are just as they seem - people who feel betrayed and shut out by the prevailing liberalisms of the day (often personified in the form of an ex-wife, ex-boss, or minority on the street), and it’s something they don’t want to investigate or research honestly.
In fact, most conservatives of this “follower” ilk, are deeply and psychologically invested in their sickness, in maintaining their “honest dogma” as it explains past traumas and the state of their lives in easy and convenient ways.
Get them together in groups and it becomes a self-reenforcing system. Self-propagating. It’s a self-sustaining set of problems and problem mindsets.
Some for conspiracy theorists, gets to be a real problem when they get a platform too.
Did everyone just collectively agree to forget 2016? The polls were all favoring Clinton by a dramatic margin. CNN famously had a headline where they predicted Clinton had a 99% chance to win off of the polls.
And what ended up happening? 538 (before bought and neutered by ABC) gave the odds 65-35 or so, in Clinton’s favor. Trump ended up winning that 35%. This year, according to polls, Trump’s odds are better than in 2016. Kamala has the upper hand, but
A) lots of things can change suddenly before the election (like the Hilary emails thing)
B) polls are not the ultimate arbiter of who will win an election- actual real votes are
C) Trump more than likely has some “extracurricular plans” in store, much like Jan 6th, that has a chance of working.
Tldr: don’t get drunk on positive news. Keep a level head and you’ll see this election is still very close to a coin flip
Exactly, remind people to get out and vote
gave the odds 65-35 or so, in Clinton’s favor
I don’t think people realize how close that means the race was. 50/50 is like a coin flip. 35% is like rolling a six-sided die and getting either a 1 or a 2. It’s not the most likely outcome, but it’s not a surprising result either.
I also believe that there are a significant number of Trump voters who have quieted down out of embarrassment (but will still vote for him)
We have the baby boomers on the edge of dying. They are afraid of it, but there is nothing that can be done - so those fears shift to other things that “could” be dealt with.
-Immigrants destroying the culture they grew up in (that culture went away for other reasons),
-Gays and trans people being happy (The closeted Senator Graham saying there is no happiness in real life - why did gays of old have to suffer and hide if it was all for not?),
-The worst economy in the history of the US! (They are in their 80s, don’t have a job, and running out of money, so it is bad for them)
-Small town on the edge of dying (because there is no jobs or amenities because they didn’t want them in their town)
Trump speaks their insecurities and offers a path to fix things that no other politician dares to go down: “Burn the system to the grown and the people you hate will be hurt”. Because modern Republicans care more about hurting the ones they hate than helping themselves, either because of self hate or a illusion that they won’t get hurt in the process.
The whole “small town on the edge of dying” bit. Holy shit have I experienced that firsthand.
See, what happened with a lot of these towns is that their industry became a part of their pride and culture. Where I’m from it’s coal. Trucks everywhere have a decal of a coal miner with one of two phrases. “Coal keeps the lights on.” and “6 inches from hell.”
My grandfather was a coal miner, so was his father, and his father, on both sides of my family. My father realized that the industry was dying so he left (and left us here haha). My brother did it for awhile but left it behind because of the drug problems in the mines. There was a whole underground urine market that kept things moving.
Even the poor fools who never worked in the mines go on and on about coal like it’s some kind of idol.
I would imagine the same thing happens in other places. The people fear big changes until their fear backs them into irrelevance. I’m getting older, so I can relate to that, only I vote for my kids, not to make me feel less afraid. Whatever world they grow up in won’t be one that I’d be perfectly comfortable in. It has always been that way as far back as we have been recording history. No sense in fighting where the world is going just because I don’t understand it or relate to it.
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That sure is part of it but don’t forget about voters. Even with all the gerrymandering and other sh*t, he does actually have a base of real supporters who can and do vote. Now the question is, how does he have supporters? I think the general answer is for decades if not generations, the Republicans have been systematically destroying public education, presumably because it’s much easier to trick an ignorant electorate into voting against their own interests than it is to trick a well educated electorate. They have been preparing for this for a long time… To really protect our democracy, we must invest in our population - and specifically in education. We need smart, critical thinkers to take this country forward.
There’s this bizarre assumption that debates shape public opinion rather than sharpen prior biases.
Liberals watched the debate and concluded Harris was normal and therefore won.
Conservatives watched and concluded only Trump is willing to speak The Truth to a hostile media and therefore won.
Undecideds don’t like either one of them for a variety of reasons. But nothing these two said on Tuesday really turned heads. It was classic Trump and classic Kamala.
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That’ll fade by election day. Trump’s strength comes from the deluge of right-wing media that bombards people. These debates are going to blotted from their brains - if not completely subverted by talk show re-edits and talk-overs - in another month.
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if you are rich and souless
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if you are a moron. I am tired of people saying trumptards are “misguided” or some bullshit like that. If you voted for him in 2016, sure, you could have been misled. But after his trainwreck of a presidential run, if you vote for him, you are just stupid. Straight up a dumbfuck.
Moron is no longer enough. Republican voters at this point are malicious, not stupid, not poor gullible fools, they are malicious people who actively seek to harm others, no matter how ‘nice’ they may seem.
I am not interested in hearing about how someone knows a Republican who is such a nice pleasant person, willing to help just about anyone, kind, caring, etc. It is a mask, like that of…I forget the precise medical term, either psychopath or sociopath. But the irony is they are worse because they do have the capacity for empathy, but they choose not to.
And this is, and always has been, who they are. This is not new. This is exactly who they have always been, people who, if they lived in a different time, would happily own slaves, or watch someone tortured for the evening’s entertainment at the coliseum, or any number of such things.
That’s the people we’re dealing with, and they are a significant portion of the population as they always have been.
- Everybody against everybody off a ledge, means the weirdest turd of a bully floats to the top.
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Many good points on here. I’d also suggest watching “Get Me Roger Stone”. In it, Stone basically details his secrets to getting the ‘silent majority’ to pay attention. He says that fear is a bigger motivator than love. He says that the uneducated can’t tell the difference between entertainment and politics. There’s so many lines in that documentary that will make your ears perk up and be like, damnt, this was exactly how they did it.
He says that fear is a bigger motivator than love.
He’s correct in a sense you may not notice.
Those voters fear Harris and what she represents, and love some idea of what GOP could in theory represent.
So the fact that Trump is shit means less for them as it’s on the side they love, while Harris being stronger makes them even more afraid.
That is, the best strategy for Dems to insure victory would be to successfully present Trump as having a potential to win to his own voters. Then they would care about him being a felon and such.
You lost me in the last sentence. I think what you said rings true with an exception. I don’t believe that the people you’re referencing will bother with learning how to care again. It would be a tacit admission that it was willful ignorance.
They’ll just be afraid.
Seriously, how the f*** is this guy still in the race?
Some very deep pockets.
People want to say it’s just racism, but we have to stop ignoring how much of this is happening because of obscenely wealthy media moguls who don’t give a damn about the future of the country and are only worried about ratings, and holy shit, Trump brings in ratings. The crazy fucks who vote for him are deeply influenced by this media, like Trump, they believe everything they see on TV.
-Leslie Moonves, CBS CEO in 2016, on Trump
I worked in local television news from 2000-2010ish. I watched it spin out of control during the Bush years. I remember the President of Dinsey-ABC (waaaaaaaay prior to Disney+) claiming she would nail a TV to her child’s dorm room wall since her child had expressed she didn’t need a TV because she had a laptop.
“You’re going to have a television if I have to nail it to your wall,” she told her daughter, according to comments she made at a Reuters event this week. “You have to have one.”
-Anne Sweeney, President of Disney-ABC in 2009
These fucking dinosaurs did fuck nothing for twenty fucking years while the internet ate their lunch. The only idea they ever had was doubling down on insane shit to grab views. They never once considered becoming a better source of news or providing any kind of real local value to communities.
It’s the money, especially the money in traditional radio and television media, that is propping him up. He’s truly the last gasp of a dying generation, desperate to keep control over people who are way more informed than ever before and the only tool they have in their toolchest to fight that is misinformation and disinformation.
The same deep pockets that were able to kick Joe Biden off the ticket. They didn’t give a fuck when people like you and I said Biden was too old, but once the folks with the money started talking about it being an issue, Biden got curbed.
Unlike Biden, conservatives are in a cult and losing Trump would lose their voters. They’re attached at the hip and they can’t dump him in the same way without essentially just admitting they will lose hard this year.
What’s keeping him in the race is the delusional nature of his supporters. Think about all those points you wrote about what a horrible person he is. How many other candidates could survive even one of those controversies? He lives in an imaginary world of his own creation where whatever he says he believes to be true, and his cult like followers are so brainwashed that their perfectly smooth grey matter just soaks it up like a sponge. There’s precious little he could do or say at this point that would have his base leave him.
The same thing that is powering most other political figures, all of which can be termed “Populists”
People are angry about a number of things. The wealth gap is very large, they are constantly told that the reason they aren’t doing well in life is because of their own failings, whilst they watch elites with political access get away with things they can only dream of. They’re being told immigrants and/or AI’s are coming for their jobs. They’re being told they can’t have what their parents or the wealthy had because Climate Change, or because inflation.
This generates a great deal of friction, which in turn pushes people to radicalize their beliefs. You can’t continue to sell a liberal, centrist viewpoint of the world when it simply isn’t working for them. They might cotton on to “dumb” ideas, but this does not mean that they are stupid. It means that they are angry. This is is demonstrative of a deeper problem that is being very deliberately ignored or papered over, because those in power have a vested interest in keeping the gravy train running for as long as possible. The sheer scale of the problems we now have to deal with are exceeding the kinds of moves and actions most Western politicians have learned over the years, so we aren’t getting appropriate results out of our political apparatus.
In times such as these, many people will look to the past for ideas on how to deal with their current situation. They sometimes come back with bad ones, sometimes they come back with good ones, and the pre-existing power structure will do everything it can to resist both of them, because to change is tantamount to completely losing grip on power for many of the people invested in the way things are. They cannot adapt, and once gone they will never get it back.
So we have a kind of a worst-case situation with a maladaptive leadership, extreme public resentment and actual natural/physical catastrophes forming a kind of crucible that this civilization needs to endure.
The trumps/erdogans/farages/orbans/lukashenkos/putins/meleis of this world are symptoms of these issues.
Republicans have been taught to ignore reality and give in to their hatred.
Despair is also a key party platform. The more hopeless someone is, the more likely they are to invite catastrophic change like Trump promises.
I would say that all Americans were. Republicans/conservatives overachieved however.
People really underestimate how violently angry “liberals” can be, too.
Just the other day in my city I had some violently unhinged liberals comparing a drug addict who tried to run from cops, failed, and killed someone in the process to mass shooters. Right, because someone with serious mental health and addiction issues who wasn’t trying to kill anyone but rather escape the cops is totally the same as a mass shooter. They were all but calling for her death and doing the good old FOX News of digging up her entire criminal history to show how terrible she is and how much she deserves death.
I’m in an extremely “progressive” city deep in the Northwest.
The US is absolutely filled to the brim with unhinged violent freaks.
This is a serious answer so it’s gonna get down voted to hell, but whatever.
There’s a huge portion of Americans who are suffering. Their personal lives are kind of awful, they live in communities that are impossible to get ahead and the communities are often that way to due the direct actions of the political establishment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Above all else, these communities don’t really feel heard by the liberal establishment. They feel as though their concerns are dismissed by what they see as the powers that be. They feel that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked. They also feel as though a lot of entities that fucked them are liberally coded.
To these people, Trump is the guy who makes those people seethes and tells them to fuck off. That endears them to him and offers extreme loyalty. They often dismiss the allegations against him because at some point every single conservative has been implied to be a disgusting person in popular culture.
Ironically I think a lot of Trump’s worst actions solidified the support of his base, because of where America has been at since his political ascendency. The US culture war has been raging for a decade now, and both sides have a habit of taking extreme positions while vilifying their opposition. That is naturally going to cause people to get more aggressive, which in turn villifies Trump.
An example I love to use is vaccine skepticism during covid. There were two huge groups of vaccine skeptics in America: rural whites, and black Americans. Both had suffered greatly at the hands of an aloof medical establishment, and both had their suffering ignored. While the Black community’s wounds run deeper, the rural white community was fresh off the opioid crisis. They had every reason to be skeptical about big pharma lying to them for profit, because that’s literally what happened just a few years prior.
The liberal response to the black community was understanding and outreach. The medical community made a huge effort to reach out to black community members and popular figures in black culture. There was a direct acknowledgement of the medical establishment’s bigotry in the past. There was not a culture of shame for people who did not choose to get vaccinated. This was also reflected in news articles and social media posts.
Their response to the rural white community was basically the opposite. The medical establishment’s outreach was extremely limited by comparison. The opioid crisis was written off as a failure by the Sacklers as opposed to any systemic issues that the medical establishment needs to address. Vaccine skeptics were repeatedly and aggressively shamed, with open discussion in regards to simply enforcing vaccination via mandates. Basically every MSM article talked about how the vaccine hesitancy was a character flaw. Social media went even farther. Not only did they call conservative vaccine skeptics things like death cultists, but there were forums dedicated to making fun of antivaxxers dying of covid. People would post private Facebook posts of people they knew by two or three degrees of separation, and then liberals would more or less celebrate their demise. You even had the return of the word “sky fairy” on reddit to describe when these people prayed to God.
Trump, for his part, encouraged people to get vaccinated. He stated multiple times at his rallies that vaccines could end covid, and that they were making him look bad by not doing so. He was, at his own rallies, booed so loud he had to stop talking. He quickly changed his tune.
A consistent trend in liberal circles is the belief that they have complete moral and intellectual authority, as well as the belief that this authority gives them the ability to treat people who don’t conform like shit. I’m pretty sure I’m voting for Harris, but there are also times where I felt like I should just say home. It’s completely fucking insufferable, and ironically has a ton in common with evangelical christian politics that dominated the US in the 1980s. So long as that mentality is there, you’ll have people like Trump gaining undeserved support.
The culture war has been going on for a lot longer than a decade, it’s just only in the last decade or so that it’s been amped up to 11 in terms of how aggressive it’s being fought. Conservatives are almost always on the losing side of social issues that require a culture shift. Women’s suffrage, civil rights, seatbelt laws, anti-smoking laws, gay rights… the list goes on, and the fight is never quite done for some, but they always lose in the end.
The very fact that conservatives are very pro for things like coal mining that liberals are trying to legislate away create strong reasons for some people to hold their noses and vote Republican regardless of how noxious the candidate is. When their livelihoods are literally at stake and the liberal response is “Well you should have gone to college to learn a new skill or trade” it makes sense that they are corralled right into the arms of conservatives. Economic drivers are the most powerful force behind the conservative movement right now, not culture bullshit that deep down they don’t really care about. It doesn’t help that very few people understand the relationship between “the economy” as outlined by experts and “the economy” as experienced when paying for groceries or filling up their car at the pump. It doesn’t matter that conservatives almost never deliver on their promises to fix the economy and often end up sending the nation into a recession, if bad decisions on a national scale lead to temporary relief on a local scale for some, that’s what they will remember when voting next time.
Liberals need to be doing more to bring disenfranchised voters into the fold. Educating them without being condescending or dismissive would be an excellent start. Turning down the temperature in politics is not possible without also lowering the stakes, backing off of hardline positions in the short term might be the most effective way of undermining support for terrible conservative candidates.
I think this is accurate. But I’d like to restate it.
The Left (as the apparent big tent party full of literal minorities) has been learning to deal with disenfranchisement and the feeling “that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked” for its entire existence. Because of a huge variety of factors, the Right is losing some of its influence. They are not handling this well. The Left (being well acquainted with feeling unheard) should have been able to help the Right through this transition. Due to deep seated insecurities on both sides, we are no longer able to help one another as a people. Buckle up.
This is actually a very good and nuanced reply.
We’re going through similar problems in Britain. There are a lot of people from deprived communities that suffered during the seventies (Winter of Discontent, high inflation), had their manufacturing/mining jobs and access to social housing dismantled under Margaret Thatcher during the eighties, were ignored by successive leaders (John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown), then suffered through austerity at the hands of David Cameron.
Meanwhile, the media had been pushing tonnes of hatred towards immigrants and to nobody’s surprise, hate crimes against Muslims and Eastern Europeans have skyrocketed. Things are so bad that we voted to leave the European Union in 2016, voted in a corrupt Tory government that pulled us out of the bloc in 2020, and given the trend of our most recent election, it’s becoming increasingly likely that we are going to vote in a far-right government by 2029 or earlier.
