This is a big part of what is so frustrating about this situation. There is an easily recognizable other that is responsible for a lot of their problems. That group is the Republican oligarchs, including Trump. All it would take to fix things is for them to wake up and vote the elected officials of the Republican oligarchy out of office. And yet they refuse to do so because of their extreme denial of reality.
@Crane -
So accepting my response to your questions as a basis for the hypothetical, defining that as “the problem”, what do you suggest as “the solution”?
Beyond that do have any other response to your question, any different statement of “the problem”?
This is a question where it would be very helpful to have conservatives (not necessarily Trump supporters but not inclined to vote for Democrats, either) answer. We tend to think the worst of the opposition.
But there appears to be economic angst in the heartland and an ill-informed tendency to blame recent immigrants for it. That’s understandable to a point but still not exactly a glowing recommendation of their reasoning skills.
The following are concepts that have been expressed to me by rightists:
Freedom of religion applies only to Christianity. Other beliefs are not religions.
The native population of America descends from the white northern European Christians who created our Constitution.
Sexual dimorphism and race are identities that were created by God.
Authoritative leadership is God’s plan. God is the head of the universe and men are the heads of families and of the nation. Our President is the ultimate authority.
Rights are given by God, not governments.
The second amendment gives us the means of protecting these basic truths.
The rightists see any violation of these beliefs as personally demeaning to them - as expressed above, pushing them down in the pecking order. So, the rise of blacks politically, the presence of blacks in commercials, female military officers, female politicians, queers getting married and people swapping gender are anathema to their world view, overshadowing their social status. A passive Biden and an authoritative Pelosi ‘make their heads explode’.
So, the ‘problem’ is the seditious events initiated by individuals and groups. The remedy is to eliminate the belief system necessary to support those events. Since that belief system has a religious component and is embedded in the social norms of half the US voting population, it will be a very large task.
(Add to your list: morality is not about doing right by your fellow man, but about “serving God’s will”.)
It is a bit of a quandary for the Fundamentalist in a republic, isn’t it? I mean, by definition the Kingdom of Heaven is the ultimate absolute monarchy in which it is not even possible to merely imagine what if things were different.
I put it this way in other threads: they just know the Constitution was divinely ordained to be about setting up governance of a republic of white christian landowners (and to be truthful, well, it sort of was, wasn’t it?) and changing that is going against what is ordained. This order can be inclusive to those who can totally assimilate and will embrace it completely. And it can even include toleration of those who can adapt, as long as they know their place. But know your place you must.
The notion that the nation may be changing under their feet is utterly abhorrent to them because those truths, if they are truths, must be immutable, and any change to that is an abomination. That over the last couple of generation the lives of people like them have seen a deterioration has to be the fault of deliberate nefarious actions by The Others.
Sounds like a job for re-education camps. Maybe somewhere cold like Siber … Alaska! But it could get very crowded with so many millions crowded there.
That was explained to me by a man with a masters degree in engineering married to a woman with a degree in chemistry. They broke with local rightists because the locals would not take a stand against Jews and Catholics. Which points out that if these folks ever came to power, they would immediately splinter into absolutist factions.
Plus you’d have to drive them through Canada to get them there, and frankly, we’re not up to that level of risk. We already have too much toxic materials being shipped around here!