That’s what drugs do to you. Or idiocy.
This. It’s the only reply that hits the nail on the head. There’s hate on both sides, I’ve seen plenty of it, and if Trump’s a con man, he’s not a very good one. The media has called him out on every statement he makes that they doubt. His popularity is more due to that than anything else he’s done. He defies the media’s interpretations and he does it purposely to rile liberals. That’s his real genius, and the reason he gets votes. Mainstream media has been dying a slow death since the internet came along, and the desperate search for sensational headlines has pushed them all into tabloid journalism territory. The public doesn’t believe the headlines, and Trump’s statements of ‘fake news’ sound credible.
I do think that LSLGuy’s “25 years” coincides with the '94 midterms and Newt Gingrich’s “Contract On America” - I mean “Contract With America”. Newt knew that he had the votes, so didn’t need to do any of the standard deal making - screw the opposition, we’re passing what we want. This was the genesis of the current party divide. I certainly blame Newt for our current political mess.
@Baal_Houtham & @Dr.Winston_OBoogie:
Congrats to you both. The rise of Newt + Limbaugh, each in their own way, was when things went from differences of opinion about a common set of facts (+/- a smidgen as always in human affairs) to an alternate set of facts and all spin all the time.
Limbaugh might have originally thought he was the RW version of what John Stewart became 20 years later. A humorist wryly telling slightly tall tales about the silliness du jour.
But very, very quickly Limbaugh realized “These idiots will believe whatever I tell them and buy whatever I sell them.” His instant success with the latter gave him vast money and quickly vast power. Which pretty quickly corrupted absolutely. Then Fox saw their opportunity to sell into the same market in bulk.
And Newt recognized how to convert that revolution in media commentation into actual action in Congress.
As an explanation of Trump supporters’ behavior, this is either ludicrously inadequate or utterly damning, and just makes Trump supporters look all the more like fools.
Hell, as a liberal, I get called all sorts of insulting and belittling names all the time by members of the conservative establishment, conservative media, and individual conservatives. Does it make me somewhat irritated with conservatives in general? Well, sure it does. Does it make me go out and support the candidacy of a grossly incompetent, mendacious, irresponsible “showman” politician who makes me bullshit promises of some kind of luxurious universal communist utopia and the utter defeat of conservatives everywhere? No, it fucking well does not.
You know, it is possible for rational people to exist in a political climate that has a lot of partisan bickering and disparagement WITHOUT jumping off a goddamned cliff into a swamp of permanent delusion. If that’s too difficult a task for Trump supporters, then their problems are deeper than merely having to put up with “much of the liberal establishment” hurting their widdle feewings by describing them as “fools”.
But apparently only one side is so incapable of handling the existence of mutual political-partisanship “hate” that it sends them over the edge into outright denial of reality and contempt for the principles of democracy.
Fuck’s sake, people. Your attempts at a sympathetic understanding of Trump supporters’ “thought” processes are making Trump supporters look far worse than the most scornful disparagement of them from the so-called “liberal establishment”. Fragile snowflakes, indeed.
That’s exactly the condescending attitude that hardens Trump’s support. You think you are smarter and better than thou, and people with differing views resent it. You and the ‘experts’ know all the answers, and look where it’s led us. You forget that there are people who don’t care for being talked down to, and that’s the problem. You may be liberal, you may even be smart, but your attitude turns them against you, no matter if you are taking the right stand or not. When the democrats quit treating people like they are their lessers, they’ll have no trouble getting support for their agenda. Until then, you’ll see more of the same things that happened on Jan. 6.
Look, I despise progressive elitism as much as I despise any other kind of elitism, but this sort of talk can’t be fair without pointing out that it cuts both ways. For every bit of liberal condescension that annoys a Trumper, there’s a QAnon or “if-you-disagree-with-me-you-must-be-unpatriotic” Trumpism that equally annoys a liberal. I’ve been suspended from a Trump-leaning message board before (months ago) for predicting that Biden would win in November. I’ve seen plenty of intolerance of opposing political views by the right, not just the left.
They’re all idiots. That’s not a liberal elite opinion; it’s demonstrable fact.
Idiots do not get an equal voice in the running of the country. Only an idiot would approve of that. That’s why liberals are horrified that people who ignore science, facts, experience, and the evidence of their own eyes have power to influence the laws, policy, and policing of the country. If they are considered lessers, it’s because of their own wrong choices, just as criminals are considered criminals because they decided to break the law.
Hey, you know who else had a cult of personality? Joseph Stalin. Just sayin’.
My guess would be the Gingrich revolution and 1994 midterms.
I guess you weren’t a Bernie supporter.
As for the rest of your screed, you’re pretty much proving my point. You’re not looking for rational reasons why Trump supporters support Trump. You’re concluding that they’re irrational and then using that conclusion to furthermore decide that they’ve “jump[ed] off a goddamned cliff into a swamp of permanent delusion.” Why would any Trump supporter, receiving that message, want to have anything to do with a liberal, or even a Democratic candidate? At least you didn’t call Trump supporters “low-information imbeciles”.
There are no rational reasons for anyone to support Trump.
He is a known liar and con man, and this has been known for decades.
He is a known bigot and misogynist, and this has been known for decades.
Only a fool or a bigot would support Trump.
Trump supporters are low-information imbeciles.
It’s the old saying once again. “You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into”.
Trump played on the politics of resentment, first and foremost.
All those people who needed some explanation for their own failures and disappointments - any explanation, so long as it didn’t place any of the responsibility for those failures on the their shoulders. Better to blame the other, not themselves. So long as they can do that, they don’t care that they are much worse off then they were four years ago, and much worse off then they would have been.
Personally, I disagree with the far-right and the far-left. And if I had to choose between them, I’d probably choose the far-left. They’re generally less violent and their idiocy is based on a distorted view of reality and not, generally, on bad intentions. Nor do I think the partisanship in the US is one-sided. What I do think is that 47% of the US 2020 voting public, over 74 million Americans, are not all ignorant racist imbeciles. The vast majority are literate, rational, nice people who had their reasons for voting for and supporting Trump. I think the arguments that many people in the US live in left-wing and right-wing bubbles that exclude opinions that disagree with their beliefs are insightful arguments. Certainly if you look at the electoral map, ruralism versus urbanism is a factor. Tribalism, in which race plays a part, is also certainly a factor. I find insights on that sort of factors interesting. The caricaturisation of Trump supporters as simply ignorant? Let’s just say that I find the posts that do so ironic.
I obviously disagree with your previous post, and some of the rest of the post that the above quote comes from, but I think this sentence is spot-on. In my original post, I noted reasons why Trump supporters were dissatisfied with the state of the US and their grievances with the left. But I believe their is an emotional component to the Trump voters’ dissatisfaction that goes beyond bipartisanship antipathy. That emotional component, that resentment against economic and societal changes, was probably a gateway for Trump’s campaign message.
I believe I called them “low-information imbeciles”, if not in this thread, than certainly in others. And I’m sure more than once. I called them that because that’s what they are, because that’s what you have to be to support that vile orange traitorous, pompous, self-serving grifting piece of shit.
Why would a Trump supporter want to have anything to do with a liberal or a Democrat? They wouldn’t, and they’re not missed, just like the Orange Peril is not going to missed at Biden’s inauguration, just like no decent person regrets his banning on Twitter and Facebook. Sorry, but “the truth is somewhere in the middle” is a classic fallacy, especially when one side is completely unhinged by any objective standards. How many presidents have openly promoted insurrection in order to illegally maintain power, in this country that is supposed to be a democracy?
Many of them are undoubtedly regretting it now, but at any rate, they are not all what I would regard as “Trump supporters”; in fact, I would guess that a majority are not. They are dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, who as I said before would vote the (R) ticket even if the candidate was a fucking orangutan. They’re only concerned with the end result – right-wing policies, and the appointment of right-wing justices to the Supreme Court. Actual “Trump supporters” are the core base, the QAnon type lunatics who showed up at his rally where he incited violence like a tin-pot dictator, and who invaded the nation’s Capitol in a violent attempt to overturn democracy in favor of mob rule incited by Dear Leader.
I believe you misunderstand how charisma works.
It’s not about making people like you.
It’s about making people pay attention to you.
Positively or negatively, Trump is a master of vacuuming up eyeballs.
QAnon supporters make up only 7% of Americans, and it’s questionable how many of them actually support QAnon’s core beliefs versus being drawn to conspiracy theories. And apparently 28% of them planned to vote for Biden as of back in September.
But if you want to equate Trump supporters with QAnon, the Proud Boys, or other fringe groups then go ahead. I’m not really interested in analysing the motives of fringe groups.
That’s like saying that Biden supporters primarily consist of ADOS supporters, or the conspiracy theorist nutjobs that believe that Trump ordered the Capitol Police to stand down and allow the Capitol to be invaded on 06 January.
Well said. But …
How much of that resentment is false resentment, resenting things that are not true but that they have been told for a decade or two by RW media are true?
IMO, a very large portion of it.
So those folks are low information, if we really mean “low factual information”, not “low false disinformation”. If anything the typical RW Trumpist enthusiast (not mere R voter) is higher on information than their LW counterpart. The problem is that almost all that “information” is actually false disinformation. Carefully crafted disinformation designed to create a large mob of angry know-nothings. Which design has succeeded in spades.
Until we can get the rampant falsehoods mislabeled as facts out of the public discourse, you’re right that the gulf will be unbridgeable.
Certainly, he’s good at that. But I would bet money that most Republicans detest his personality, but support his policies. And I would double down on that since the election. He’s been a real heel since losing, and it’s a good thing he’s not getting another four. But he brought issues to the attention of everybody that have been shoved under the rug for years, like our loose southern border and yes, election fraud. Nobody wanted to talk about either, or do much about either, even though there are known problems with both. With the way Biden has approached the job, it appears we’re going back to the ‘under the rug, don’t rock the boat’ thing.