But is it what the Party emphasizes, or is it:
- a small constituency of Democratic voters and activists, and
- the caricature of Democrats painted by conservative surrogates, pundits, politicians, and media outlets?
Whaaaaaahhh???
There was one party in the past year that kept SCREAMING and SCREAMING about the “rights of transgendered people.” OVER and OVER. Constantly!
(Here’s a hint, if you’re having trouble grasping this fact: the name of the party starts with an “R”.)
No, that’s what the Republicans claimed the Democrats were focused on. And what the Republicans themselves focused on. The GOP spent something like $200m+ specifically on anti-trans advertising. Why aren’t you mad at the Republicans for “emphasizing” that so much?
And the Democratic platform was far, far more friendly to the working class than the anything the Republicans (who have been largely responsible for promoting policies that are anti-union and create wage stagnation for the past four decades) have proposed. And the Biden administration created a massive number of jobs and pushed for higher wages across the country. Why do you think they’ve abandoned the working class?
But you do make a compelling case for why so many people voted for Trump - because the Republican Party is extremely good at promoting convincing lies, even to people who don’t vote for them.
As a Brit, a few years ago upon the result of the Brexit referendum, I found myself loudly asking…
“How the fuck can it be that more than half of my compatriots are dumb as fuck, racist bigoted arseholes (n.b. ‘assholes’)!?”
It caused cognitive dissonance, because…
a) Anyone who would vote for Brexit would have to be subhumanly evil, stupid, or both
and
b) Most of my compatriots are not subhumanly evil and/or stupid
and yet
c) Most of them who voted did so for Brexit
Was I really so out of touch? Or was it the children who were wrong?
Eventually, I learnt to conclude that it was the former. This was a humbling experience, as “Everyone around me is dumber and morally inferior to me” was a comforting and energising position to take.
I feel comfortable in believing that I’m never going to take the position that supporting the persecution of women, minorities and everyone to the political left of Nazis was a moral choice to make. Everyone who voted for Trump was stupid, ignorant or vile. There’s simply no other option with how blatantly horrible he is.
I’m not going to walk up to somebody dying because of Trump and tell them that they need to understand and feel sympathy for the people who voted for their death. Nor will I feel any sympathy at all for the people who voted for their own persecution; when the leopards come for them that’s just karma.
Being out of touch with the majority view doesn’t mean you’re wrong. Brexit has been objectively harmful to the UK in all sorts of ways, most of which were identified before the referendum. People voted for Brexit for a lot of reasons, and many of those reasons could very broadly be categorised as “stupid”, “evil” or both. Believing that we were going to get better trade deals is stupid. Believing that we’ll have more democracy if we leave the EU is stupid. Believing that cutting ourselves off from one of our bigger sources of doctors and nurses will reduce NHS waiting times is really fucking stupid. The same type of consideration applies to people who voted for Trump because they thought he’d bring prices down and save us all from an immigrant crime wave.
Note that people can be generally intelligent and kind and yet make stupid and/or evil choices because of their beliefs. We tell ourselves stories to justify our actions. Sometimes those stories are fairytales.
You are so right. I work in an open kiosk and as I see my fellow creatures walk by I think:…“Trumper, non-trumper, trumper” every other person is one. I do not get it.
I really wish we had some way of identifying ourselves when out and about. Something subtle and not confrontational. Like wearing a blue wristband or something. I don’t know.
I’m just frustrated with half of my fellow citizens out there.
I had something only slightly different in mind:
LOL I wasn’t thinking of anything like that - just something to show camaraderie like the pink breast cancer ribbons or something. But I get your point.
I came here to say this, and I’ll add to it. People have always tended to vote for the candidate who “seems presidential.” It’s a vague sense that some confuse with a gut instinct. It’s not the only determinant, but it’s a powerful one, and it requires no analyses, no awareness of current affairs, just this one amorphous hunch which, as a hunch, isn’t subject to examination.
In the end, a Black/Indian woman just “didn’t seem presidential” to a whole lot of voters. You might argue that Trump, with his oversized suits and orange makeup and his nearly incoherent ramblings, doesn’t seem presidential, either, but he’s stood behind the podium with the presidential seal, and he speaks with authority. And–though they don’t admit this, don’t even considerate it–he’s a white male.
The “hunch” won out over conscious consideration. In fact, it guided it.
My version …
Trump is:
- A poor man’s idea of a wealthy man
- An unintelligent man’s idea of a smart man
- An illiterate person’s idea of a highly literate man
- An impotent man’s idea of a powerful man
- A coward’s idea of a brave man
- A patriot in the eyes of the treasonous
- A heathen’s idea of a man of faith
- An insecure man’s idea of a confident man
- A profoundly broken man’s idea of “stable”
- A savage’s idea of a gentleman
- An incel’s idea of a ladies’ man
He is, in short, a narcissist, a serial lawbreaker, a misogynist, and an inveterate con man – no more, no less.
He is ‘simply’ supply. One individual. That there exists in this country so freaking much demand for what he sells is, to me, the profoundly distressing bit.
Per Fran Lebowitz, he’s “a tourist’s idea of a New Yorker.”
This is brilliant.
I don’t disagree. Brexit decimated the industry I work in, and has tangibly decreased the career opportunities, earnings and job stability in my particular industrial sector. I’m less happy than most about it. What’s more, I think people voted Brexit mostly for the wrong reasons; they were misinformed and misled - and voted for something which hurt the country - and my career in particular - in return for vague promises to ‘take back control’, whateverthefuckthatmeans. Needless to say, no control was taken back, and we are all worse off as a result.
Here, the Brexit/Trump analogy falters a bit - because while the pro-Brexit campaign was dishonest and disingenuous, Trump is a whole-other-ballpark of batshit. However strongly I felt against Brexit voters, Democrats are justified in feeling orders of magnitude more strongly about Trumpists. But matters of degree aside, my underlying thesis is the same for both cases: "If your conclusion is that you lost the vote because half the people who share the same country as you are irredeemably and inhumanly awful - to the extent that you would excommunicate family members and suggest publicly shaming and ostracising those on the ‘enemy’ team (as forum members have done here) - then part of the reason that people don’t want to be in your team is because people like you are in it. The political left has a huge PR problem among moderates and centrists, and wildly hateful histrionics are not helping at all to win people to the cause.
I don’t like the orange man, for what it’s worth, and shudder to think of him as the leader of the free world. But the bizarre, paranoid, vengeful, sadistic and hateful rhetoric coming from the left now makes him look good in comparison.
It is. Thanks @DavidNRockies!
The bizarre, paranoid, vengeful, sadistic and hateful rhetoric didn’t just appear out of nowhere. It comes after years of the bizarre, paranoid, vengeful, sadistic and hateful rhetoric we’ve suffered from MAGA the better part of the last decade. You’re saying we make Trump look good by comparison? Bullshit. Your double standard is bullshit.
The Republican president-elect ran on a successful platform of calling his political enemies traitors, pedophiles, and dog-eaters. But it’s the Democrats who are being too mean.
Sure. Got it. Excellent fucking analysis right there.
But isn’t the reasoning, here “Trump - and by extension his MAGA-minions - said all sorts of awful and hateful things - which are bad. So now we’re going to be as equally hateful, because it’s our turn. Except that when we do it, it’s revenge, so it’s okay and justified”? Leaving aside the accuracy/truthfulness/whatever of the claims being made on either side, my assertion is that to those who are neither in the progressive nor MAGA camps (me by definition, but also plenty of Americans I’m sure), this just isn’t good for optics.