I think it’s at least as wrong to try to link today’s Republicans to Democrats from 155 years ago?
I do know genuinely good people who support Trump. They are classic “low information voters” who are also single issue - abortion. All the science in the world will not sway them, to them a soul appears as soon as the egg is fertilized and abortion is murder (I haven’t had the heart to ask them about all the spontaneous “abortions” that happen every time a fertilized egg fails to implant. Guess God has lots of spare souls.)
This may deserve to be in another thread, but I think with Donald’s flailing trainwreck of a campaign, and the utter lack of time he’s devoted to typical conservative social issues, the time is ripe for Democrats to make inroads with Evangelicals and other single-issue voters on the subject of abortion. I think an argument that may sway some people is that under Democratic legislation permitting abortion and contraception, there is an overall decline of abortion in the first place. We may not ban it, but we will make it so that people won’t want or need abortion as much. Some enterprising Democrat should take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of Donald’s disaster to break these people of their voting habits once and for all
And you are wrong on this, many Republicans were progressive before (some even would had been called liberal), but many that could be Republicans are nowadays Democrats.
Sadly, they are absolutists. To them, a single abortion is the equivalent of the Holocaust.
The best line from Saturday Night Live’s 3rd debate “Cold Open”:
“Do you want to vote for the Republican? Or Donald Trump?”
It isn’t quite that simple; a LOT of conservative/Republican propaganda is focused on the proposition of loss Not so much outright fearmongering, but fearmongering centered around the notion of loss- actual or potential. They worry about loss of wealth, loss of stature, and loss of their community to reflect them and their beliefs, religious or otherwise, just to name a few.
This runs more or less counter to a lot of liberal/progressive treasured concepts, and is reinforced by the politicians by pointing out that in many (not all) cases, the beneficiaries of said losses are members of some *other *group- blacks, gays, hispanics, foreigners/immigrants, etc…
Look at it this way- if you are a 50-something white man in a rural area who is middle/lower-middle class, and you have busted your ass and are finally making ends meet with a little bit to spare, and you have a belief system that you are invested in, and want your children taught, and you hope to send your kids to college some day, how are you going to feel if one side of the political debate comes in and says that you should pay more in taxes, so they can give it to inner-city blacks, or that gays can now marry, contrary to your beliefs, or that the universities are going out of their way to let in underqualified minorities and reducing scholarship opportunities for white people in order to do so?
You’re going to feel like that side has NONE of your interests at heart. It’s not that you’re a bad person, but that side is doing things that seem explicitly against what you want and believe.
Conversely, the side that says that all of that stuff is nonsense and wrong, and seems to advocate for you and yours, is the one you’ll listen to.
That’s a somewhat simplified explanation, but that’s, IMO, the way the thought process goes.
Did you watch the third debate discussion about abortion? You really think the candidate that supports late-term abortions is the one to win over pro-life evangelicals?
People villainize and broad-brush because it gives visceral satisfaction. Trying to understand the other side and avoid stereotyping doesn’t give that same vicious pleasure.
With onyl 2 options, I know a ton of people voting “against the status quo” or same old tired political powerbase. ANYTHING but that. The fact that Trump could win a nomination or have anything remotely like 43% of the population willing to vote for him over HRC, isn’t damning of Republicans. It’s damning of the political process and those political people not bowing to the will of the people.
4 day old Papa John pizza or a bag of diarrhea filled with broken glass indeed.
Do most evangelicals are so wacky that they also think it is good to prohibit abortions also in cases of rape and incest or the life and health of the mother?
In essence, Trump did misrepresent the actual position of Clinton.
Personally, I have a hard time considering someone who thinks that a woman should be forced to carry her rapist’s baby to term a ‘genuinely good person’. “They’re good people but want to use the full force of the legal system to force a woman to act as a human incubator for the spawn of the man who forced her to have sex” just doesn’t ring true for me, especially when they’re willing to vote for a man who brags about raping women for their ‘single issue’.
(Snippage mine)
Ummmm… Dude? Most of the liberals here espouse liberal policies because they demonstrably work, and reject conservative policies because they demonstrably don’t. They do so for all the reasons you just listed - the republican platform is utter drivel, and their candidate is not worth the ground he walks on. If you’re looking for the kind who’s just liberal for bad reasons, consider trying DemocraticUnderground.
Uh… Guys… I did. I used to spend a lot of time on a heavily conservative forum, and most of what I did was try to figure out why these people supported Trump, why they supported his policies, and what their thought processes were. And I gotta say, I’m sorry, but these people don’t fucking think. At least, not in the way the average Doper does. Their arguments were a cascade of bizarre fallacies, inane nonsense, long-debunked claims from unreliable sources (with the constant refrain that “Snopes/Politifact/<insert literally any source to the left of Conservapedia> can’t be trusted” when you try to correct the misinformation) and completely blowing things out of proportion. Every single answer I got was wrong, inane, and dishonest to the point where if it were espoused by a poster here, that poster would be called a troll and probably banned.
These people do not fucking think.
They feel. They feel like Clinton’s email server was a huge deal. They feel that Clinton is dishonest and flip-flops far more than her opposition. They feel that BeforeItsNews is reliable, but The New York Times is just a leftist shill.
So I dunno what you want from me. I’ve encountered quite a few Trump supporters, and I have yet to find any single one of them having a decent reason to support him, or even to oppose Clinton more than him. Instead, they’re more directly characterized by an encounter I had with a trump supporter where the conversation gradually devolved into complete insanity as she expressed her certainty that the government was killing us all with chemtrails, and I could easily see it by just looking out the window and determining between the normal, fluffy clouds and the wispy, fake chemical ones. From there, she made it clear global warming was a hoax, the world was going to end anyways soon but god was watching out for us, and Obama was a Kenyan Muslim.
That’s the level I’ve found most, if not all, Trump supporters to be operating on. Maybe not that explicitly crazy, but definitely that incapable of rational thought. I don’t know if it’s tribalism to blame, I don’t know if it’s the right-wing misinformation bubble, I don’t know if a third of the country was dropped on their heads as a kid, but these claims, that maybe we should get to know these people better? I’m sorry, but I know these people. I’ve gone out of my fucking way to figure out why they’re voting for this guy. And they don’t have good reasons. They have really, really shitty, poorly-thought-out reasons. Because there are no good reasons to vote for Trump. And they don’t get that. It’s not about not understanding them. It’s about there not being anything remotely rational to understand.
This is the exact same criticism I hear about liberals from conservatives: ‘they are guided by emotions, not logic.’ Here is just one quick example:
I’m not going to make their argument for them, but they would probably consider an unwanted pregnancy less than murder.
Which cite nicely demonstrates that, while both side make the accusation, only one side makes it accurately.
True or false: Women make $0.70 for every $1 a man makes because of their sexist bosses.
IMHO, animal-rights activists who squeal about cute animals that give them the “awww” feelings, but care not for ugly (but equally endangered and important) animals, tend to be liberal-progressive.
And as usual, (really this is what I usually see) the conclusion the conservative got was based on a study that misses a lot of other factors:
And similarly it goes for the birds being affected by wind turbines, if you really want to make a dent on saving birds we need all to put bells in our cats.
What I usually do see is just incomplete information (that ends up misleading many) being passed as the whole truth by many conservative sources.
And liberals do it too.