No common ground left to stand on?

Great Debates
1

In an interesting thread exploring why straight, white, males in particular, support Trump, (link) the following two posts struck me as both honest and at once disturbing. I hope that the two posters quoted below will not be offended that I specifically single them out. This is not meant to admonish or criticize them personally. There are plenty of threads for that and more appropriate forums in which to let the insults fly. The goal of this GD topic, for those who see fit to participate, is to see if any common ground remains between the two sides. Or, to conclude, after all, that the polarization is complete.

These are the two posts that I hope to examine/debate in more detail and I hope both posters will be willing to engage in the discussion to follow.

To outline their positions, in their own words:

A) Don’t care:

B) No common ground:

Not entirely sure how best to kick of the debate except to say that I hope the positions of “Don’t Care” and “No Common Ground” are not as intransigent as they seem.

2

I talk to a lot of Trump voters on Facebook. They still have some diversity of views. Some fiercely support the Kurds and want us to stay in Syria for them. Some fiercely “don’t care” and want us out. Everyone seemingly has their own pet cause. Some latched on to Trump because he supports one particular thing they want. Some want Trump to keep tweeting, some desperately wish he’d stop.
Edit: So I think there is still common ground all right with some liberals, at least for now.

3

I think there is more common ground on more subjects than is acknowledged. It’s emotionally charged media sells and dry analysis of minutiae doesn’t.

Of course, quite a few people have their will not compromise views. And of course when people who hold those views and also like to argue meet, well, that’s when the fun starts.

I think the most dangerous folks, by far, are those willing to use mob violence for the nominal goal of the greater good.

4

In the long run no one benefits from a culture of Not Listening / You So Wrong.

5

I lost faith in the human species on that election night and nothing since then has changed my perception. I think back to the infamous FW: FW: FW: The REAL Barack Obama back in early 2007 and how I read it and thought, damn, this guy needs to be stopped. And then shortly after I read a thorough debunking of the e-mail and thought, OK, I shouldn’t jump to conclusions and I should probably forward this to others on the e-mail chain. But the others didn’t believe the debunking. It was then combined with later evidence, that there is a certain large group of people who are impervious to facts that they don’t want to believe. And the internet exploits that. And there is nothing we can do about it because any organized effort to fight untruths is seen as an attack. Doug Jones won a senate seat against child molester by less than 1%. WTF is wrong with you people. People support Donald Trump, a frickin cartoon villain who can’t spell and thinks health insurance costs $11 per year.

The only thing that makes me feel better is the saying, “we get the country we deserve”. Humans are just too flawed to live in a great democracy, and looking back, we never should have expected much and should be thankful for what we have done in the past.

6

What about Breakfast At Tiffany’s?

7

Hopefully, 2020 won’t be too shocking.

8

I’d vote that the “Don’t care” aspect is the largest.

Ultimately, the point of Trump is to annoy PC types and to be a marvelous bastard who crusades against them.

Think of it like the History Channel. There’s what the channel is supposed to be and then there’s what sells to a popular audience. The popular audience doesn’t really care about what it’s supposed to be and all of your nagging them about it just pisses them off and makes them want to piss you off. They end up emailing in to the History Channel to tell them to show even more bigfoot and Hitler, just to annoy the eggheads.

And, likewise, the purpose of the US government isn’t to do things, it’s to serve as a thing to argue with about on the Internet, alongside fantasy football.

If Trump annoys CNN and the SDMB, then he has succeeded in all policy agenda.

It’s not like it really matters if people are getting murdered in Ukraine or Turkey or wherever the fuck.

Trump is who he is because he had a dad who worked hard, succeeded spectacularly, and gave his son the ability to live a life of riches that even the greatest level of incompetence couldn’t fully deprive him of. He never had to really grow up. He never had to accept reality or care about details or the ramifications of his choices, etc. But Trump also lives every day of his life knowing and hiding from himself the fact that he’s a failure compared to his dad, and that he simply doesn’t have the character or intelligence to ever do anything that could compare. Except that’s too sad to accept so, instead, he tells himself that he’s every bit as great as his dad and that his failures aren’t due to himself and that his fortune isn’t due to his dad.

And that’s who his voters are. White men who grew up after the Cold War in the world’s most prosperous country, and the world’s most powerful country, hearing people talking about Detente, the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, balance of powers, and all of the other enlightened ideas that got us to where we are today - that they can’t do or even understand. All they can do is fuck it up. And the choices are to accept that and feel bad about screwing over what our ancestors accomplished, or lie to themselves, pretend like they’re just as capable as the people who came before, and blame other people if everything they do causes things to fall apart.

Trump voters are little mini-Trumps. That’s why they liked him and that’s why the hold is so strong.

And, I’ll say, you’re never going to win against them unless you’re willing to tell them that, no, they are fuckups, failures, losers, and despicable ingrates. If you try to approach them like equals, you’re just feeding into their fantasy.

You need to break them off of that. You can’t let a group of people who live by avoiding reality run the show for long. If the History Channel turns into alien central, that’s one thing. If you have the US government giving away Earth, just as authoritarian governments are aggressively spreading anti-democratic propaganda across the globe and showing how powerful single-party rule is - the USA won’t last long. And nor will the global peace that we’ve enjoyed in the last few generations.

9

Just for clarity: are you saying that’s who all “of his voters are”? Or do you have some kind of ‘at least 50%+1’ formulation in mind? Or do you mean well, no, that’s mostly not true; let’s start by figuring it was less than half, huh?

10

I think I remember the film.

11

The whole “I don’t care” thing (when it comes to what POTUS says) seems especially mysterious to me. I don’t know how to find common ground with that. POTUS is (was?) the most powerful person in the world. Why would someone not care if they act like a jackass? The fate of various people around the world literally depends on what the president says, but conservatives just don’t care? I don’t get it.

The whole wanting to piss off liberals is another aspect I don’t get. How does that benefit the person who holds that view? On the left, LGBT people just want the same rights cis hereto people have. Black people don’t want to be racially profiled or killed by police for being black. Climate change warriors don’t want the polar ice caps to melt and to avoid the subsequent rise in sea levels. All of those motives are easy to understand and none of them involve wanting to piss off conservatives. That’s why I don’t get where the whole wanting to piss off liberals thing comes from.

If conservatives are starting from those two positions I don’t see how there can be common ground.

12

What issues do you think constitute the common ground you are speaking of?

13

Which is what the left has been doing since the moment the man was elected. How is that working out for you? If he wins a second term, will you acknowledge your strategy was flawed?

14

That’s the part that I’m stuck on as well.

Progressives/liberals/Dems advocate for causes like UHC, accessible education, human rights, climate change prevention, etc… They don’t advocate for these causes because it hurts conservatives or works to deny them their rights and opportunities. Now, in fairness to many conservatives, climate change, foreign policy and human rights are also important issues where there is room for common ground with progressives.

So when WSMs (white straight males) say they either “don’t care” or, “no common ground”, when it comes to Trump and his policies, what positions are they advocating for, exactly?

15

Can we try to avoid these types of labels and pre-emptive conclusions for at least a page or two of this discussion. I’m not looking to put people’s teeth on edge immediately out of the gate.

16

People voting out of spite are not necessarily voting for good policies or effective leadership. Republicans notable worked to obstruct the last administration out of spite. It worked out in their favor in many key instances. But was that leadership?

The election of Trump was in many ways an act of spite. There was a wide GOP field with a number of better qualified candidates, but the majority of Republican voters chose an arguably worst possible candidate. It didn’t help that HRC did not inspire a sufficient number of Dem voters to come out in key battleground states. But I don’t think a case can be made that they stayed home out of spite. Maybe somebody is willing to try in another thread.

To finish my thought - it seems to me that “Don’t Care” is an abdication of the position that there is something defensible about Trump and his character. It seems to me that it’s an admission that there is nothing there that can be effectively defended, and the only remaining alternative is to declare a scorched earth, “Don’t Care” strategy; One that is difficult, if not impossible to engage or argue. And that’s the point, after all.

17

Just to be clear: when I said we apparently have no common ground, it wasn’t about the difference in the policies we each favor; it was in direct reference to how we view that hand-raising at the debate: I saw it as them clearly taking a position, and you seem to think, no, it’s pandering to the base, expect no real changes.

18

I can understand the “don’t care” mentality. The thing I can’t understand how Trump has been able to tap into it.

You have a group of people who hate politics and think all politics is corrupt. They don’t know or care anything about the economy, the environment, foreign policy, or legal issues.

How does Trump connect with these people and get them to register and vote? How do you create a movement around people whose core identity is they don’t believe in movements?

19

I don’t think we can.

And that is illustrative. What Republicans and Trump voters and Trump supporters “don’t care” about is this kind of screaming. It’s been going on since 2016, and it keeps getting louder, and if and when Trump is re-elected, it will get louder still.

“Racism” and “white supremacy” and “collusion” and “you’re a fuck-up and a loser” and “you’re deplorable” and blah blah blah. Don’t care.

And there is a further, rather fine distinction that might be made.

Someone screams insults at me and mine. Then, in something or other, like an election or an investigation, that particular someone loses. It is hard not to take a certain pleasure in watching them splutter and scream even louder. That’s not quite the same thing as doing something to piss the someone off.

Not really. More like recognizing that the other side isn’t listening, so there is really no point in engaging.

Witness the umpteen threads on the SDMB where some liberal says he doesn’t understand what the other side thinks. Which always devolve into 95% liberals telling each other what the other side thinks, and most of the remainder liberals telling the other side what the other side REALLY thinks.

Both sides aren’t listening to each other. Progressives aren’t listening to conservatives telling them what they think, and conservatives aren’t listening to progressives telling them that they think we suck.

But’s that all right, because I don’t care.

Regards,
Shodan

20

Nitpick: You phrase this as though a significant number of white Alabamans opposed the pederast. Nope, relatively few whites turned; it was that and high black turnout that let Jones squeak through.