Very much so. In 2016 when Trump was running for the GOP nomination I thought that him winning the nomination would be a good thing. I figured at most he’d get 50 million votes, that the American people weren’t willing to make the race competitive. Mitt Romney got 61 million votes in 2012, so I figured Trump would top out around 50 million or so. Instead he got 63 million.
In my defense, I was basing this on the experiences with the tea party. After Obama won, the tea party put up a bunch of shit candidates for senate and cost the GOP a lot of senate seats in 2010 and 2012 that should’ve been GOP pickups. So I figured the same thing would happen on the national level. I figured the American public would treat Trump the way they treated Christine O’Donnell, Richard Mourdock or Todd Akin and reject them.
This has been one of the hardest things about Trump, is having to accept how many Americans are perfectly happy to have someone this dysfunctional and destructive be entrusted with power and the US’s reputation.
Are you sure about that? I looked up the questions and there are quite a few about religion and traditional values that a communist, even a very authoritarian one, would likely answer ‘disagree’ to. Which is kind of my issue with it: if you ask specifically about right-wing authoritarianism, then it’s completely unsurprising people who score highly on it would vote for the right-wing party.
There can’t be, really, since morality is inherently not objective. You can determine how well a person lives up to their own moral beliefs, or to someone else’s, but there’s no objective way to determine which set of beliefs is correct.
You realise there’s a whole world of crimes and ways to hurt other people that have nothing to do with bigotry, right? Arguably the worst thing Trump has done was try to overturn the 2020 election result, and that was merely self-interest.
I don’t think the issue is that liberals value moral foundations more or less than conservatives so much as that each group applies them differently. Eg, liberals consider it unfair for some people to have plenty of money and others very little, while conservatives consider it unfair to take money from someone who earned it and give it to someone who didn’t. Liberals worry about the harm to criminals from giving them long sentences, conservatives worry about the harm to future crime victims if criminals are not locked up.
Possible. Having argued with both on TwitteX, I’ve found them equally assholish towards anyone who disagrees with them, but it’s more jarring from left-wingers since they generally appear more caring.
I don’t think that’s an answerable question. Nobody sets out with the goal of giving fewer rights or less acceptance and integration to outgroups; you need to look at specific examples and see what the motivation is. For example, if you were hiring someone for a job, you might refuse to employ a Trump supporter, because you think supporting Trump indicates bad judgement. Here’s a thread where some people say they would engage in this form of discrimination, and give various reasons for it:
Similarly, many left-wingers want to ban certain kinds of speech. The effect is to take away the right to free expression disproportionately from right-wingers, but their goals are to stop misinformation and/or prevent harm (including psychological harm) to oppressed minorities.
For a right-wing example, consider the homeless people I mentioned earlier. Conservatives want to break up homeless encampments not because they enjoy oppressing the homeless, but because homeless camps create a nuisance that reduces quality of life for other citizens and even for the homeless themselves. Here’s an actual conservative argument for this:
In general if you want to understand conservatives’ motives for supporting policies you consider harmful or exclusionary, looking at specific examples and picking out the common themes is probably the way to go.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. We support corporations being profit driven because that’s the best system we know of for generating wealth and meeting demand. Its much easier to channel people’s self-interest in pro-social directions than to try and force them not to act on it, and a bunch of smaller separate actors are far more able to adapt and respond to circumstances than some distant and necessarily bureaucratic central planning department. That doesn’t mean we should just ignore negative externalities like environmental damage.
This isn’t factually true though. People high in RWA and SDO want a hierarchical system that gives themselves more rights and privileges. They actively want a system that gives men, whites, christians, cishet and Americans to have more rights and privledges than other groups. Thats a huge part of Trump’s appeal, the fact that white christian patriarchs are shrinking in power and having to share power with people who do not fit into that demographic box. Make America great again is just a dog whistle for recreating a sociopolitical system that puts white christian patriarchs on top despite the fact that in 2025, white christian patriarchs only make up ~30% of America.
There is no objective morality outside human biology. There are no morals on an uninhabited planet in a solar system 5,000 light years away. Morals are a construct of human biology and human psychology. Having said that, humans do have general trendlines. Humans generally prefer we be pro-social within our group. Humans generally prefer to be healthy and wealthy, and when they get healthy and wealthy they generally prefer to have more personal freedom.
Virtually every nation with a per capita income above 10k or so had universal K-12 education I believe. Virtually every nation (other than outliers like the US) have universal health care when per capita income is 20k or higher. Even in the US, we don’t have UHC but around 60% of medical spending is done by the public sector. The majority of nations that are high income and that achieved their high income status due to human capital (not natural resources) tends to prefer democracy.
There is no objective morality, but each human is not a brand new creation. We all evolved in the same environment, and humans share 99.9% of their DNA. This shared evolution and shared biology shows that, in general, humans generally want the same things (wealth, health, good things for their relatives, personal freedom for themselves, etc).
I think a big part of it is that liberals see the systemic issues that lead to crime. Lead poisoning, abusive parenting, being raised in poverty, being excluded from the mainstream economy, being disenfranchised from society as a whole, over-policing of minority groups, etc result in more arrests and more crimes for some groups vs others.