Ah honest attempt to 'see the other side' by a Progressive

Politics & Elections
1

There are a couple threads here where posters have told Progressives or Dems in general to see the world from a Trumpers point of view.

I am very Progressive and have been for a while. I started out my adult life as a Progressive. However, there was about 15 years or so in ‘the middle’ where I was swinging into the Right. If I hadn’t stepped back, who knows, I might be a Trumper now. What brought me back? Watching the second Bush in office/Cheny etc…but what really nailed it for me was when the Republicans in 2009-2010 ACTIVELY seemed to be trying to push the USA into a severe depression. I follow the stock market and have for a long time so I got to see that they were trying. I considered that a grievous crime akin to treason and I STILL have anger over this…quite a bit actually. I have never voted ( R ) since then, not even once. With all that is going on, maybe you don’t remember that time vividly…but it was a BAD…VERY BAD time. We were near the cliff there as well.

Leaving aside racism and other extremely inflammatory points, which I think have some truth…why would someone be a Trumper? I sat back and examined that time in my life when I swung Right.

  • Dems seem to have a decent heart…but they want to help people other than me. Even worse, they want to deprive me of opportunities in order to help people that are not me. This makes them my enemy.

Whenever the Dems try to implement something, it is for someone else. NEVER UNDERESTIMATE something as simple as filling out the race ID form when going for a job. Someone having to click ‘White Male’ will KNOW it can’t help them and will likely hurt them. Now, you can argue all you want that this isn’t so…but the person will think you are full of BS. They KNOW this is true and it pisses the help out of them. When someone else gets promoted over them and that person is not a white male…they KNOW it is because that person was not a white male and they feel cheated. It doesn’t matter if it is true or not, the person will feel it is true. heaven forbid you are TOLD you didn’t get the promotion because they wanted to promote a woman/minority etc…you have just made a Trumper for life. I remember my anger when this happened to me and I was told that then needed to promote a woman. The anger.

There are other like a $15 minimum wage. Well, I make more that $15…so, again, helping people other than me likely at my expense. Again, you can argue that it wasn’t at my expense…but the resentment is there and I might look at you like you are full of BS. Weirdly enough, I was always very much for increases in minimum wage, but I was not the majority.

There are other examples but to keep it shorter…I think the average person who thinks well of Trump is tired of Dems trying to help people other than them. Please, no arguing whether this is true or not…that is what they think. You might ask about why they are so against health insurance…well that is next.

  • The average guy/gal swinging Right, unless rich, is held hostage by Capitalists. They fear for their jobs/home/family/lifestyle etc and instead of being angry and demanding of Capitalists, their response is to give the Capitalists all they want so they can have a job. I know, stupid…but they are totally cowed by the top 1%. Why are so many against National Health Care? Well…the Capitalists are against this and they might take away my job! Plus there is some of the first point as well, I don’t need that much HC but them damned ********* and ******* will suck up all the resources…so helps people other than me.

  • Many people are still religious. I believe ‘religiousity’ is actually at a low point in its history in this country, but many are. For some reason, these people associate Dems=atheist and, well, God before self so will vote against their self interest to ‘help’ God.

– Freedom - Many people associate Dems = restricting freedom and Repubs = leaving Freedom be…You can debate about whether true or not but that isn’t the point. Many people see it this way.

In short, Dems are unpopular with many people because they don’t have your interests at heart - only other people that are not you, they actively try to hurt you to help others. They think your policies are well meaning but dangerous to you personally and they don’t believe in GOD!

How do Dems fight this and bring these people around?

I don’t know. I wish I did.

2

There are Dems who have the exact same concerns about financial insecurity and social impact in their lives. They have the same worries and fears about their jobs and healthcare as their Republican neighbors. Yet, they find a way of seeing these challenges and recognizing that there are better alternatives to the insular Repub thinking that you described in your OP.

Now, from your perspective, why do you think that is?

3

Lack of smarts. However, that is irrelevant.

4

The problem with understanding the Trumpers is that they are using alternate facts. I may be willing to debate with them over policies, but how can you debate them over facts?

5

A suggestion has been floated that all those who wish to have that conversation with them, must first learn and put into practice a pretty advanced negotiating technique that leverages empathy and no small amount of psycho-therapy techniques which are often used in complex international peace negotiations with intractable parties.

Some have also suggested that history shows that it is always the progressives that must lead change because the nature of conservatives is to oppose it. It’s in the names.

Personally, I’m starting to think that noses will get bloody before this is meaningfully resolved.

6

I’ll quote a friend of mine from his social media:

When asked for details, silence for a week. When pressed further by others, the response was this:

There is no way to make an impact on someone like that. Beyond cult.

7

Your opinion/guess is the only thing that matters?

8

I don’t understand how no-one responded with: Show me – I want to believe!

How could you resist?

9

I did respond because I can’t help myself. I wrote:

[quote] We’re not asking the mainstream media. We are asking you to show us what you mean when you say “when you start seeing some of the things I seen you’d understand.”

What are some of the things you’ve seen? Then, we’ll understand, right?[/quote]

Silence. He obviously believes he has special messages from God and special secret information he can’t share.

He’s anti-vaccine, young earth creationist, anti-schools, anti-Islam.

He does multi-level-marketing schemes, too.

He’s full blown cultist.

10

Ah. Yeah. He’s a gonner.

11

Former Republican here and still view myself as a conservative. I think to have a serious go at this topic you have to decide what you are actually interested in:

  • Understand people who voted for Trump (this constitutes 73.8m people)

  • Understand the “Die Hard” Trumpers who worship the ground he walks on, praise him at his rallies etc

The first group is a much longer topic of discussion. The second group is fairly short. I’m guessing maybe people are more interested in the second group, and I think the answer there is much simpler as well.

The Die Hard Trumpers are overwhelmingly fueled by what I would call “cultural grievance.” White grievance is a very big portion of it. Conservative Christian fueled grievance is a smaller portion of it. General “nationalist grievance” is probably a smaller part of it. The typical Trumper wraps all of these cultural grievances around themselves at the same time, but you do have some outliers who maybe are only one of these and not the other two.

Trump in my opinion specifically “activated” these voters because he went straight for them. This, combined with his amazing aptitude at defrauding people, his false background story as a successful businessman, caused a lot of these voters to basically view Trump as the closest thing to a secular Messiah we’ve probably seen in American history (since maybe Washington, who was often spoken of in his time and for years after it in almost religious messianic terms.)

This is a strongly held, almost religious style worship of an individual. This is why you can’t really logic or argue these people out of their position, they didn’t arrive at it via logic, and logic won’t lead them out of it. The best thing for society is for these people to leave the voting base and to die off of old age. There is likely no significant other outcome for them. Most of them won’t ever just wake up one day and not be a cultist and be appropriate members of society.

12

I think you’re misinterpreting this. BlinkingDuck is saying “Trumpers believe x. Don’t dispute x, because that’s not the point. The point is that Trumpers believe it, true or not.” You can argue with that whole sentiment if you want - that’s the point of the discussion board. But if you argue against ‘x’, you’ll just be shouting in the wind.

13

My observation is that it is a majority opinion here that there’s no reason to make a distinction between the first and second groups. If you’re in the first, you are complicit in the actions of the second, and so therefore you might as well be the second.

So I think it’s a long topic of discussion either way.

14

I don’t think the argument against a $15 minimum wage is that “it will help others,” but rather, that it may drive up unemployment and also make things harder for small-business owners. Plenty of conservatives themselves, after all, are working minimum-wage jobs and would benefit.

15

I’m interpreting it to mean that BlinkingDuck doesn’t want anybody to talk about whether any significant number of Trump voters might have different motives than objecting to anyone getting help who isn’t them.

I’m actually more interested in the larger group.

The second group has glommed onto a guru. This is not a phenomenon limited to conservatives, unfortunately; and, equally unfortunately, it’s massively difficult to pry people who have done this loose, though sometimes they’ll eventually come loose on their own or at least switch to a different guru. One can hope they’ll pick one who’s more benign the next time.

16

Exactly. Whether it is true or not is irrelevant in this instance.

17

The average pro-Trumper doesn’t care about other arguments. They don’t own a business and likely never will. They just want to keep their job.

18

Martin_Hyde’s post is the place to start. I think some of you focus too much on the hard-core Trumpers–who we’ll never agree with–and deciding that all Trump voters are the same. I don’t think that’s true. In my larger circle there are thoughtful people who voted for Trump that are not racist or hateful; their focus is just largely different from mine.

An example is abortion. I am a moderate, meaning that I think abortion should be legal at least for the first trimester. The Trump voters I know disagree and they look at the vocal minority on the left that want all abortions to be legal and denounce everybody who thinks otherwise to be misogynist and part of the patriarchy. Understanding that issue means possibly backing off on the rhetoric and maybe allowing some late-term restrictions.

19

I can understand the OP. An acquaintance was very upset that some people were getting something for nothing; I don’t recall what. The point that it was .02% of the Federal budget didn’t make a dent.

I’m happy with my income, and don’t mind paying taxes so that someone else can have some financial help, even though some people cheat and get “something for nothing”.

20

Right- they are probably wrong about most everything. We know that. It doesn’t help in this discussion to rehash that argument.

But WHY they think that way, or how they came to that conclusion is very pertinent.

The OP hit one nail right on the head when he said:

That’s the perception among many who aren’t on the Left, not necessarily just people who are on the far-Right. Why? Because of what amounts to a fairly large messaging failure on the part of the Democratic party, and lax party discipline.

Look at it this way- a large part of the Democratic party’s raison d’etre in terms of policy is to redress historical wrongs, work for equity, and help the downtrodden. So as a result, there’s a lot of messaging going out about that from various levels of the party. Some is explicitly aimed at certain ethnic groups, and some is more generic.

And there’s a lot of messaging about various social justice and equity-related initiatives- not all of which are aimed at specific groups as well. Stuff like UHC, higher minimum wages, etc…

So what happens, as best as I can tell, is that a significant percentage of people conflate the two and draw some partially correct, or incorrect conclusions from them. They see Democrat politicians talking about/to black and hispanic leaders/voters, and they see them also talking about UHC and higher minimum wages, and immediately assume that the goal is to implement UHC and higher minimum wages for black and hispanic people.

And then they say “Well what about me?” and figure that the Democrat politicians are not looking out for them, and that in the end, they’ll end up footing the bill for someone else.