I still don’t get why rural voters latched onto a clearly narcissistic big city property developer who lies constantly and treat rural people like shit as a response to big city politicians who rural voters think lie constantly and treat rural people like shit.
Just because he said words they wanted to hear? Politicians do that all the time! How is he the one they believe?
All the points in the article are accurate, but it just doesn’t make sense that the personification of everything they hate about cities is who they end up worshipping.
He’s a fighter. He fights everyone, about everything. I think that’s the crux of it.
Over the 1990s and 2000s these people were completely and utterly forgotten. Textiles, mines, manufacturing plants, they shuttered over and over and over and over again, and their children moved to big cities en masse. Their small cities and rural towns went from being on a growth trajectory (everything was on that trajectory between WWII and NAFTA) to being on a path to contraction and decay. Over that time they got madder, and madder, and madder, and madder, and they watched the Republican party (the one who at least paid lip service to “small government” and “traditional values”) lean harder and harder into corporatism. They were promised good things over and over and over again, and they were constantly pandered to, then lied to, and then ignored. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Well, Trump was the first one who didn’t talk, act, and think like the other guys. He wasn’t a politician, and that’s a great thing because (as they’d all come to agree) politicians are lying scum. So then not only was he willing to fight ferociously for them (and only them), he was willing to spit in the face of the people who lied to them all those years. And those political figures started to look like whiny little children when they stepped up and started saying, “hey, he’s lying to you!” The voters’ response was, “yeah? so the fuck what! you did too!”
He flips the system on its head, and he exposes politicians for what they are, because he’s exactly like them but he doesn’t give a fuck about playing the political game. To them, this is a godsend (literally). It’s the first crack in the political system that gave them any kind of sustained, meaningful authority to push back both politically and culturally, and he delivered a court system that’ll now push the entire country to the right over the next few decades. They simply don’t care about the democratic institutions he’s destroying, because they never helped the rural folk anyway.
Note: I don’t personally agree with much of this nonsense, and I think it’s a lot like shooting yourself in the face to cure a hangnail, but I’m just giving you a sense of how they look at it, and why he’s so weirdly transcendent to them. He’s a rich, connected insider, who decided to burn the system down from the inside.
And dementedly burning down everything one sees and grabbing pussies doesn’t make one “a fighter” - just a narcissistic asshole criminal.
Hooray what a hero.
Even if I grant all the arguments are true for the sake of discussion, the fact that they’ve seen how incompetent and ridiculously stupid he is for FOUR YEARS not to mention he tried to destroy their fucking government and they’re all “yay we upset city people” Okay Granpa Jones but that makes you objectively a complete fucking asshole moron and your continued support of this rapist fraud criminal is not helping you in any way at any level. Try again. Got someone smart? Articulate? Anyone? We’re open - any age, any gender, any race - anyone? No? This guy huh. He’s your guy is he. Yeah.
But they didn’t see who he was. Their news media fed them a different story about liberals getting in his way and the immigrants making things worse and the government not letting him fix things. It’s all the “lazy” city people voting for big government handouts that’s making the world worse.
Anything he’'s accused of is just liberal politics and a hoax.
Interesting reflection in today’s world where we keep getting told that the current administration has done great for the economy, and yet the wealth devide keeps growing, and more and more people are living paycheck to paycheck.
There’s an also an interesting linguistic difference that is very noticeable between this movement and today’s repercussions of the inaction that followed. While in English we often speak of “anti-globalization” in French they say “alter-mondialisation”. A different globalization instead of against globalization. The French term much better described the left wing movement of the time, while the media only spoke of anti-globalization which now became a calling cry of the right.
Fun fact, a Twitter was originally conceptualized as a result of the 1999 protests^1 due to the difficulties and successes people on the streets had with coordinating via SMS (which at the time was rather new and novel).
Anyhow, I guess we should all vote for the neoliberal again, surely that will fix it!
and yet the wealth devide keeps growing, and more and more people are living paycheck to paycheck.
I’m actually go with “you are wrong”. Under Biden, the wealth gap has grown in absolute dollars, but only because the wealthy had so much more to start with. Lower income families saw much higher percentage growth in wealth and income. Mathematically, it will take a long time for lower income families to catch up, but this is a good trend.
It’s a good explanation. And it confirms the core nihilism motivating these voters. “Burn it all down” is an abdication of responsibility and self-infantilizing by forcing that responsibility on everyone else.
Their frustration and motivation, while I can understand it, is an insult to those of us continuing to keep it together as they make everything worse.
Who they worship doesn’t matter. Based on the article, they voted for a brick to be thrown into the window of the elites. It really doesn’t matter who that person is, just as long as they inflict damage on the elites who have been marginalizing them for years.
It was a super informative article and I hope people read it, and not assume from the title or read the summarized version like we usually do.
If we keep labelling them ‘deplorables’, it’ll make things worse. We need to reach out and listen while also helping as best we can.
I still don’t get why rural voters latched onto a clearly narcissistic big city property developer who lies constantly and treat rural people like shit as a response to big city politicians who rural voters think lie constantly and treat rural people like shit.
Are you firm on the stance that it’s only bigotry, and not, like, I dunno, motions wildly to the article a complex set of multidimensional issues?
What’s the logical fallacy called when you misuse a logical fallacy?
E: “fallacy fallacy” or “argument from fallacy” (also known as: disproof by fallacy, argument to logic, fallacy fallacy, fallacist’s fallacy, bad reasons fallacy [form of])
Description: Concluding that the truth value of an argument is false based on the fact that the argument contains a fallacy.
Hey, if you want to believe it’s just simple noble country folk that support Trump and not a bunch of fucking bigoted shitheels, that’s your benefit of the doubt to give.
If you want to convince me, you’ll need to do better than an op-ed in Store Brand Mad Magazine from someone who is airing his grievances that New Orleans got too much attention after Hurricane Katrina.
Are most of the people who voted for Trump bigoted shitheels? Possibly. Is everyone who voted for Trump in 2016 a bigoted worthless life? Absolutely not. Not even close. He campaigned on a multitude of issues, if you’ll recall. And before that thought enters your head, no, I voted for Sanders in 16 and Biden in 20.
I know it helps to simplify things, but you can do better. Think outside of the Monkeysphere, or whatever you need to call it so you don’t feel like you got the idea from Store Brand Mad Magazine.
Perhaps not, but January 6 left no doubt about the supporters who remained with him.
I’m not sure about your associates, but about 1/8th of the people I know voted for Trump now claim to have not done so. They have so much shame and regret over it that they lie about ever doing it. Post-2019, most who were big Trump supporters aren’t anymore. There are still a couple doucheknuckles who have firmly twisted themselves inside the asshole of the propaganda well, but they are the loud few.
For this at least, we can be thankful.
Lemmy: where everyone to the left of Biden must be a Russian Chinese Shill bot child, but let’s give actual Trumpists the benefit of the doubt.
You and I have very different Lemmy subscriptions.
Because rural voters are stupid, because Republicans have spent the last 30+ years destroying public education, especially in rural and minority heavy areas.
This isn’t an insult, its a fact.
When you’re uneducated and have little experience of the outside world… well, youre extremely easy to convince with rhetoric over actual policy results.
Then combine that with the massively super effective Republican media machine (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones) which reinforces the religion + culture + politics of the rural Republican areas, and there ya go.
I dunno, it seems obvious to me, but thats probably because I was raised by a ditto-head (Rush Limbaugh’s term for his followers) who later became a Q Anon, illegal-firearm-manufacturing-in-his-garage wacko, in a poor, technically suburban but realistically rural area.
Why latch on to Trump in particular?
Because he made it ok for them to mask off and hate all the things they hate but have been lying about hating for decades.
Its a kind of catharsis for them, that manifests in collective hatred of inferior enemy groups.
You know, standard fascist shit?
It doesnt matter that Trump himself is the antithesis of what an idealized Republican person would be. What matters is he lets them feel comfortable expressing themselves.
I still don’t get why rural voters latched onto a clearly narcissistic big city property developer who lies constantly and treat rural people like shit as a response to big city politicians who rural voters think lie constantly and treat rural people like shit.
Just because he said words they wanted to hear? Politicians do that all the time! How is he the one they believe?
All the points in the article are accurate, but it just doesn’t make sense that the personification of everything they hate about cities is who they end up worshipping.
He’s a fighter. He fights everyone, about everything. I think that’s the crux of it.
Over the 1990s and 2000s these people were completely and utterly forgotten. Textiles, mines, manufacturing plants, they shuttered over and over and over and over again, and their children moved to big cities en masse. Their small cities and rural towns went from being on a growth trajectory (everything was on that trajectory between WWII and NAFTA) to being on a path to contraction and decay. Over that time they got madder, and madder, and madder, and madder, and they watched the Republican party (the one who at least paid lip service to “small government” and “traditional values”) lean harder and harder into corporatism. They were promised good things over and over and over again, and they were constantly pandered to, then lied to, and then ignored. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Well, Trump was the first one who didn’t talk, act, and think like the other guys. He wasn’t a politician, and that’s a great thing because (as they’d all come to agree) politicians are lying scum. So then not only was he willing to fight ferociously for them (and only them), he was willing to spit in the face of the people who lied to them all those years. And those political figures started to look like whiny little children when they stepped up and started saying, “hey, he’s lying to you!” The voters’ response was, “yeah? so the fuck what! you did too!”
He flips the system on its head, and he exposes politicians for what they are, because he’s exactly like them but he doesn’t give a fuck about playing the political game. To them, this is a godsend (literally). It’s the first crack in the political system that gave them any kind of sustained, meaningful authority to push back both politically and culturally, and he delivered a court system that’ll now push the entire country to the right over the next few decades. They simply don’t care about the democratic institutions he’s destroying, because they never helped the rural folk anyway.
Note: I don’t personally agree with much of this nonsense, and I think it’s a lot like shooting yourself in the face to cure a hangnail, but I’m just giving you a sense of how they look at it, and why he’s so weirdly transcendent to them. He’s a rich, connected insider, who decided to burn the system down from the inside.
Except he didn’t fight for them and he lied constantly about fighting for them with no results.
And dementedly burning down everything one sees and grabbing pussies doesn’t make one “a fighter” - just a narcissistic asshole criminal.
Hooray what a hero.
Even if I grant all the arguments are true for the sake of discussion, the fact that they’ve seen how incompetent and ridiculously stupid he is for FOUR YEARS not to mention he tried to destroy their fucking government and they’re all “yay we upset city people” Okay Granpa Jones but that makes you objectively a complete fucking asshole moron and your continued support of this rapist fraud criminal is not helping you in any way at any level. Try again. Got someone smart? Articulate? Anyone? We’re open - any age, any gender, any race - anyone? No? This guy huh. He’s your guy is he. Yeah.
That’s what we thought.
Yeah it does.
Like, by definition. He fights.
But they didn’t see who he was. Their news media fed them a different story about liberals getting in his way and the immigrants making things worse and the government not letting him fix things. It’s all the “lazy” city people voting for big government handouts that’s making the world worse.
Anything he’'s accused of is just liberal politics and a hoax.
If only there was a group of people who told us neoliberalism and NAFTA would be disastrous!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests
https://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/testimonies/comesatime.htm
Interesting reflection in today’s world where we keep getting told that the current administration has done great for the economy, and yet the wealth devide keeps growing, and more and more people are living paycheck to paycheck.
There’s an also an interesting linguistic difference that is very noticeable between this movement and today’s repercussions of the inaction that followed. While in English we often speak of “anti-globalization” in French they say “alter-mondialisation”. A different globalization instead of against globalization. The French term much better described the left wing movement of the time, while the media only spoke of anti-globalization which now became a calling cry of the right.
Fun fact, a Twitter was originally conceptualized as a result of the 1999 protests^1 due to the difficulties and successes people on the streets had with coordinating via SMS (which at the time was rather new and novel).
Anyhow, I guess we should all vote for the neoliberal again, surely that will fix it!
[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3485447.3512282
I’m actually go with “you are wrong”. Under Biden, the wealth gap has grown in absolute dollars, but only because the wealthy had so much more to start with. Lower income families saw much higher percentage growth in wealth and income. Mathematically, it will take a long time for lower income families to catch up, but this is a good trend.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2024/feb/us-wealth-inequality-widespread-gains-gaps-remain
It’s a good explanation. And it confirms the core nihilism motivating these voters. “Burn it all down” is an abdication of responsibility and self-infantilizing by forcing that responsibility on everyone else.
Their frustration and motivation, while I can understand it, is an insult to those of us continuing to keep it together as they make everything worse.
Left wing doomers and “revolutionaries”: sweats profusely
Who they worship doesn’t matter. Based on the article, they voted for a brick to be thrown into the window of the elites. It really doesn’t matter who that person is, just as long as they inflict damage on the elites who have been marginalizing them for years.
It was a super informative article and I hope people read it, and not assume from the title or read the summarized version like we usually do.
If we keep labelling them ‘deplorables’, it’ll make things worse. We need to reach out and listen while also helping as best we can.
It’s not what he says, but how he says it. He knows what outrages them and plays on it. He pretends that it outrages him too.
Because he gave their bigotry a voice.
First, train yourself to get suspicious every time you see simplicity. Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency.
Credit to @shalafi@lemmy.world - this applies very well to this comment.
Yeah, what does that Occam guy know?
Are you firm on the stance that it’s only bigotry, and not, like, I dunno, motions wildly to the article a complex set of multidimensional issues?
What’s the logical fallacy called when you misuse a logical fallacy?
E: “fallacy fallacy” or “argument from fallacy” (also known as: disproof by fallacy, argument to logic, fallacy fallacy, fallacist’s fallacy, bad reasons fallacy [form of])
Description: Concluding that the truth value of an argument is false based on the fact that the argument contains a fallacy.
Good philosophy.stackexchange discussion about it.
Hey, if you want to believe it’s just simple noble country folk that support Trump and not a bunch of fucking bigoted shitheels, that’s your benefit of the doubt to give.
If you want to convince me, you’ll need to do better than an op-ed in Store Brand Mad Magazine from someone who is airing his grievances that New Orleans got too much attention after Hurricane Katrina.
Are most of the people who voted for Trump bigoted shitheels? Possibly. Is everyone who voted for Trump in 2016 a bigoted worthless life? Absolutely not. Not even close. He campaigned on a multitude of issues, if you’ll recall. And before that thought enters your head, no, I voted for Sanders in 16 and Biden in 20.
I know it helps to simplify things, but you can do better. Think outside of the Monkeysphere, or whatever you need to call it so you don’t feel like you got the idea from Store Brand Mad Magazine.
Perhaps not, but January 6 left no doubt about the supporters who remained with him.
Lemmy: where everyone to the left of Biden must be a Russian Chinese Shill bot child, but let’s give actual Trumpists the benefit of the doubt.
I’m not sure about your associates, but about 1/8th of the people I know voted for Trump now claim to have not done so. They have so much shame and regret over it that they lie about ever doing it. Post-2019, most who were big Trump supporters aren’t anymore. There are still a couple doucheknuckles who have firmly twisted themselves inside the asshole of the propaganda well, but they are the loud few.
For this at least, we can be thankful.
You and I have very different Lemmy subscriptions.
Because rural voters are stupid, because Republicans have spent the last 30+ years destroying public education, especially in rural and minority heavy areas.
This isn’t an insult, its a fact.
When you’re uneducated and have little experience of the outside world… well, youre extremely easy to convince with rhetoric over actual policy results.
Then combine that with the massively super effective Republican media machine (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones) which reinforces the religion + culture + politics of the rural Republican areas, and there ya go.
I dunno, it seems obvious to me, but thats probably because I was raised by a ditto-head (Rush Limbaugh’s term for his followers) who later became a Q Anon, illegal-firearm-manufacturing-in-his-garage wacko, in a poor, technically suburban but realistically rural area.
Why latch on to Trump in particular?
Because he made it ok for them to mask off and hate all the things they hate but have been lying about hating for decades.
Its a kind of catharsis for them, that manifests in collective hatred of inferior enemy groups.
You know, standard fascist shit?
It doesnt matter that Trump himself is the antithesis of what an idealized Republican person would be. What matters is he lets them feel comfortable expressing themselves.