Thanks for this. I'm Canadian but it's very hard to a) ignore your elections and b) understand why 70 something million people would vote for a con artist for the third time. The only thing before this that I've ever seen that made much sense to me is the idea of Trumpstalgia - nostalgia for pre-pandemic America, as if anyone could go back, and as if it was better for everyone.
I like "Trumpstalgia". There's always been that tendency among some to believe that things were much better in previous days. It's been accelerated under Trump because we've never had a political leader who leaned into and reinforced it so shamelessly. Combine that with the complete breakdown of trust in expertise and institutions (which has also always been a theme in a segment of the US population, but became supercharged from the mid-90s when the "wisdom of the crowd" and "do your own research" became a thing) and it's easy for people to latch on to simple beliefs that comfort their anxieties and give them a clear focus on who to blame for their discontents.
There is no “better for everyone” thing. How could that be? Who could make that decision? I believe it is a mistake and foolish to assume that “change always makes things better.” Unfettered power (which ALL politicians crave) links to unfettered money through taxes. They all cling to both. There are so many lies being told we can never ascertain the “truth” (if there is such a thing!). We all revert to our incomplete memory of the fictional “past” when things didn’t “seem” to be as bad as they are now. We would like to be prescient about tomorrow, but that’s not reality. It’s why we are always promised that “we will fix everything we broke.” Alas, we are always sailing on uncharted waters. “Tumbling dice.” And woe to those who “call it like it is.” If we had real access to the facts in any case…
There was a Pew study a few years back that looked at how well people can distinguish fact statements from opinion statements. A sizeable portion of the population has trouble with that. Part of the reason that fact-checking has so little impact is that much of the disagreement among factions is not a disagreement about facts as much as it is about values and preferences -- the lenses that we use to decide what we're willing to acknowledge as facts. Trump/Vance understand that well and have been very good at weaponizing it.
>To those who despise Trump, the notion of undecidedness is even more perplexing than those who are all in. Why can’t they see!?
what i want to know is why can't they see richard leland levine? and they really don't want to talk about it when i ask. oh well - i wonder if they'll talk about united states v. skrmetti when oral arguments start in december.
How odd that I should run across your post today, when about 2 hours ago I had a phone conversation while phone banking to GOTV in which I spoke about this same topic and made virtually identical points! Setting aside the MAGA true believers and the smaller subset of Trump supporters who think another Trump term will benefit them personally (financially), I think of the in-between Trump supporters as being bound by social inertia - they have always voted Republican and so they carry on doing so as the path of least resistance.
What you did not mention, which I believe is the plow that turned the fields in which Trumpism took root, is the Republican campaign over the previous 4+ decades to erode social benefit programs and institutions, while simultaneously demonizing pro-social ideas, to the point where "liberal" has become an epithet and anything to the left of libertarianism is communism.
If democracy lives to fight another day, pro social people will need to be more direct in our messaging and extremely proactive in implementing policies and taking actions to address the vast and unsustainable wealth gap that is the basis of the sense of anger and dissatisfaction we are witnessing.
Thanks for this. I'm Canadian but it's very hard to a) ignore your elections and b) understand why 70 something million people would vote for a con artist for the third time. The only thing before this that I've ever seen that made much sense to me is the idea of Trumpstalgia - nostalgia for pre-pandemic America, as if anyone could go back, and as if it was better for everyone.
I like "Trumpstalgia". There's always been that tendency among some to believe that things were much better in previous days. It's been accelerated under Trump because we've never had a political leader who leaned into and reinforced it so shamelessly. Combine that with the complete breakdown of trust in expertise and institutions (which has also always been a theme in a segment of the US population, but became supercharged from the mid-90s when the "wisdom of the crowd" and "do your own research" became a thing) and it's easy for people to latch on to simple beliefs that comfort their anxieties and give them a clear focus on who to blame for their discontents.
There is no “better for everyone” thing. How could that be? Who could make that decision? I believe it is a mistake and foolish to assume that “change always makes things better.” Unfettered power (which ALL politicians crave) links to unfettered money through taxes. They all cling to both. There are so many lies being told we can never ascertain the “truth” (if there is such a thing!). We all revert to our incomplete memory of the fictional “past” when things didn’t “seem” to be as bad as they are now. We would like to be prescient about tomorrow, but that’s not reality. It’s why we are always promised that “we will fix everything we broke.” Alas, we are always sailing on uncharted waters. “Tumbling dice.” And woe to those who “call it like it is.” If we had real access to the facts in any case…
There was a Pew study a few years back that looked at how well people can distinguish fact statements from opinion statements. A sizeable portion of the population has trouble with that. Part of the reason that fact-checking has so little impact is that much of the disagreement among factions is not a disagreement about facts as much as it is about values and preferences -- the lenses that we use to decide what we're willing to acknowledge as facts. Trump/Vance understand that well and have been very good at weaponizing it.
>To those who despise Trump, the notion of undecidedness is even more perplexing than those who are all in. Why can’t they see!?
what i want to know is why can't they see richard leland levine? and they really don't want to talk about it when i ask. oh well - i wonder if they'll talk about united states v. skrmetti when oral arguments start in december.
How odd that I should run across your post today, when about 2 hours ago I had a phone conversation while phone banking to GOTV in which I spoke about this same topic and made virtually identical points! Setting aside the MAGA true believers and the smaller subset of Trump supporters who think another Trump term will benefit them personally (financially), I think of the in-between Trump supporters as being bound by social inertia - they have always voted Republican and so they carry on doing so as the path of least resistance.
What you did not mention, which I believe is the plow that turned the fields in which Trumpism took root, is the Republican campaign over the previous 4+ decades to erode social benefit programs and institutions, while simultaneously demonizing pro-social ideas, to the point where "liberal" has become an epithet and anything to the left of libertarianism is communism.
If democracy lives to fight another day, pro social people will need to be more direct in our messaging and extremely proactive in implementing policies and taking actions to address the vast and unsustainable wealth gap that is the basis of the sense of anger and dissatisfaction we are witnessing.