After innumerable threads around here, I’ve wondered why so many people seem to be so attracted to the whole right-wing populist agenda and ideology. Specifcally, what about the modern world isn’t working for these people, and how do we move them away from these ideologies?
Please, none of the usual glib answers like “Because they’re X”, where X is stupid, uneducated, racist, homophobic, poor, etc… I feel like there’s got to be more to it than that, and all those things are symptoms or consequense of whatever these root causes are, rather than the root causes themselves.
I’m sure there are a wide variety of reasons. Here are some I believe are common: Unhappy people who feel the need to blame others. Maybe from a bad divorce, estranged family, feelings of unfair treatment at work or in the community, extreme loneliness (maybe including inceldom), traumatic incidents (say, a minority or migrant criminal victimized them or someone close), and similar. I don’t think happy people are easily drawn to MAGA/Trumpian aggression, misogyny, bigotry, etc.
Also, very commonly I presume, there’s just old fashioned ignorance and bubble-thought – everyone around them says Democrats and liberals are the devil, and they haven’t been exposed to even the possibility that any of that could be wrong.
Apologies if it is glib, but I do think that fundamentally it comes down to racism and homophobia. With lack of education thrown in. It’s no coincidence that the vast majority of MAGA support is in rural ‘heartland’ areas that are lily-white and, at least on the surface, consider themselves having ‘traditional Christian values’. They’ve seen on the media for years people of color, people who are LGBTQ, and other so-called ‘woke’ values and characteristics, and feel like the country is being overrun with these ‘non-American’ types. trump is the only major political figure who has given voice to what his supporters have quietly believed and whispered to each other for a long time.
But what makes them feel like the country’s being overrun? I mean, you see all those categories of people on TV, but I’m not sure why Will and Grace or seeing Steve Harvey host Family Feud would make someone feel so threatened?
That’s what I’m getting at; there seems to be this immense fearfulness about the modern world among that crowd, and that’s what’s driving all of this. I don’t understand what’s so threatening about it- is it media manipulation/unscrupulous actors taking advantage of a lack of understanding and fanning the flames?
I’m trying to get my mind around the mindset of someone who lives in say… Floyd County, TX, lives on a farm and only sees other rural white people in their daily life, being actively threatened by the presence of POC on TV or in politics?
The drive to make poor people blame other (browner) poor people for their problems, and leave those wonderful “job creators” free from taxes and regulation has been central to right-wing politics since day 1. Keeping people ignorant and skeptical of experts has always been beneficial too.
The main thing that’s changed is social media, and to give Trump credit, he was really a pioneer. People live in their own bubbles now, so all you have to do is think what version of reality your base would like; it’s largely irrelevant what the truth is. You can literally have your own private military walking the streets and killing American citizens and the same people that claimed to be against government tyranny will lap it up because you told them to.
I’ve seen a few articles that have speculated that AI will cause politics to shift once again, as now people will be confronted with the truth in AI dialogues. I wish I could be that sanguine.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
and that brainwashing leads directly to this,
“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of whom will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.” ~ Davis X. Machina
It’s not about facts, at least not more than the personal facts of their own lives… it’s about feelings. Some people don’t really care about facts, at least not unless they confirm and support their own feelings.
Others might have some sort of twisted logical reasoning – genuine hatred and bigotry; extreme selfishness about taxes or some similar financial issue; nihilism and misanthropy.
It’s all in the slogan: “Make America Great Again”. It’s playing on this nostalgic, fictional ‘Leave it to Beaver’ imagined past where everybody was white, went to church, shared the same values, and were safe to walk the street. Nobody was gay or, worse yet, trans.
Of course, back then there were people of color and LGBTQ people who were often, at best, marginalized, or at worst, terribly persecuted. Gradually society became more accepting of non-white, non-straight peoples and their attendant cultures, and it became much more common and accepted in the media to portray those lifestyles. Which terrified a certain, large segment of uneducated, white America. MAGA plays this fear like a cheap fiddle.
It is really hard for people without a college education to find work that pays well and gives them some reasonable degree of social status. Democrats have been kind of crappy about finding solutions to this, other than “just get a degree” or “get vocational / technical training so you can do some specialized job that is just as complex and requires as much thinking and problem-solving as getting a degree.” This works out great for people who are bright but belong to a historically disadvantaged group, but meanwhile, people who are genuinely not good at learning and figuring out new things are frozen out. At the same time, they’re easy prey for someone like Trump, who is amazingly gifted at talking in a way that resonates with them (probably because he is genuinely not all that bright himself, whereas most “folksy” politicians are faking it) and also at making them feel like they belong.
A lot of the scapegoating he engages in is of groups that skew toward the bright and successful, whom his base sees as succeeding at their expense, like academics and immigrants. (Honestly, I sometimes think the whole “anti-woke” thing is more about targeting academics and knowledge workers in general, more so than actual marginalized groups.)
Yes, I think this is a key factor. The racism and whatnot was an underlying problem that’s been around forever, but the economic decline of a large part of the US over the last 30 years or so made it a lot worse. No one wants to blame themselves for not getting a good job, or losing their house, or whatever, so they were easy targets for cynical politicians who told them that it was the minorities, immigrants, and liberal elites who were to blame for all their problems.
I think this is just continuing the largely untrue trope that Trump’s supporters are mostly the working poor. The statistics mostly don’t support this.
This may be part of the problem, but it doesn’t explain the vast majority of people in farm country who have been economically hurt by trump and his stupid policies time and time and time again, and yet continue to support him.
There’s always been friction between and resentment of ethnic groups creating a pool of dissatisfied/angry people to exploit for political purposes.
The difference now is that there are a lot of social media influencers and related businesses making up trash, feeding anger towards professionals and eagerly exploiting divisions for attention and profit.
What we are seeing now isn’t an aberration, but rather a culmination of a concerted effort to feed race resentment. It started in full force with Nixon’s southern strategy and continued with Regan’s delegitimizing of the government and discrediting of public service.
That’s part of the brainwashing. Blame the other, not Trump. It wasn’t Trump’s stupid trade war that wiped out their export market, it was those darn Chinese refusing to buy Proper American Products! Their fundamentally racist attitudes towards foreigners makes it really easy to deflect their complaints into racist conspiracy theories.
But that’s not necessarily a new thing. As mentioned it has been there all along, there’s long been a Cold Culture War and now it’s that the stars are aligned for it to boil over.
There has always been this cohort, who in the face of modernity have a fear of being literally “left behind”. And not just socioeconomically, but of their very identities and ways of being and feeling going extinct. That their grandchild will be an alien to them. This is why “Great Replacement Theory” keeps getting revived with a different “replacer” every generation.
And not just of their ways and identity fading into the past, but of those ways and identity being condemned and they for having been part of it. Thus the special revulsion at “woke” emphasis on that the past was racist, colonialist, etc.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere, many of them feel “the way things were” was some sort of natural rest state of the order of the universe. As others have said, they see the more-diverse media and the delocalized economy of today and what they see is not something new being built by the market, but Mayberry, the “natural order”, being deliberately erased at best and labeled as evil at worst.
That the aforementioned grandchild will not only be an alien to them… but will be taught to want to spit on their graves.
That’s what they thought they were seeing happen. And they thought they heardTrump and MAGA promise them to stop that.
Now we’re on to something! This is what I’m talking about- what about all this feels so threatening to them? They’re collectively reacting like they’re being threatened or that they’re fearful of something, and they’re reacting in an angry fashion.
How do we calm all that stuff you mention down? It seems to be a pretty pervasive pattern of thought, if so many are willing to go along with it that Trump gets elected twice. I feel like maybe the path forward isn’t to decry them as ignorant racist hillbillies, but rather address what it is that they’re so afraid of.
I think you are underestimating the extent to which right wing news media has contributed to this.
I watched my father, and later my stepmother, become hugely fearful of the world around them due almost solely to watching Fox “News”. It was on in their house morning and night. My father’s conversations began to regularly and noticeably include words like, “scared,” “afraid,” and “frightened.” He was always talking about immigrants.
Fox and other right wing propaganda channels focus with laser-like focus on ginning up a sense of victimhood and fear in their viewers. Couple this with people who correctly perceive that they are being done dirty by… well, someone, give them a cohort to hate (brown and black people) in lieu of the true culprits, and you’ve got the society we’re all living in now.
There’s a reason why one of Trump’s first moves in his first term was to grant expanded licensing access to Sinclair Media, which now controls a very large share of local news stations. I remember Boris Epshteyn, a Trump minion, was tasked with making a daily 2-minute propaganda statement for Trump on every Sinclair station. I don’t know if he still does it as I no longer watch local news on tee vee.
Control the message, and you can control the people. It’s a tactic as old as the hills and it works.
I agree with much of what has been posted previously. I think it’s the realization of many that their parents had it better than them. The dad working in a blue collar job could have a stay at home wife, raise a couple of kids in a house in the suburbs \with a new car in the driveway. That’s no longer possible and never will be again. They want someone to blame. To them it seems all of a sudden you had women and minorities in the workplace. You had people all of a sudden being different than you and not hiding it. All of those “other” people were living better than they used to, at your expense. They believe in zero sum games- if the “other” gets ahead it’s because they’re taking from good old white heterosexual Christian males. It ain’t right and by God and sonny Jesus they need to take their country back.
Then along comes a guy who hates the same people that they do. Someone who is ignorant and damn proud of it. Someone who is racist and sexist and gives them permission to be the same. Someone who, like them, were pissed off at those pointy-headed kids in school who got good grades and went to college and now telling them how to live their lives. People who told them they have to make some changes in energy use and production in order to slow down global warming. I mean, how can global warming be real if it snowed last year? They found a champion of ignorance and hatred in DJT and they will support him no matter what.