Racism. Christian extremism. Both not exclusive to themselves. Both have felt ignored and feed on the the thoughts of being victims due to their “unpopular” beliefs. There is much more to this subject but this is the best I can simplify it.
It’s essentially these two things. And it’s easy to see from any political map that these divides line up really well along rural vs urban areas. People who live in cities have learned how to live together and tolerate each other (even if they don’t necessarily like each other). People in rural areas think of themselves as the ‘backbone’ of the country because or our early agrarian and later industrial development as a country. And in many ways, they really were. Farmers, miners, factory workers, etc.
But time has left them behind with factory farms, overseas production, robot factories, renewable energy, etc. They blame “the other” for their problems. The “other” or “the enemy” in their minds is often “big city” people with darker skin, or “academic pinheads” or “government bureaucrats” or basically anyone but themselves. To them, hearing news about something like climate change or same sex marriage is an “attack on their way of life and traditional values”. They haven’t learned how to adapt or take proper stock of their situation. They only know how to lash out at “the other”.
If rural people would calm the fuck down and gain some perspective, they could see that they have a lot in common with working people in urban areas. For example, we’re all being fucked over by greedy corporations and a tiny number of people with way too much money and power. But those same powerful elites do a masterful job of pitting all of us working class slobs against each other. This both amuses them and keeps us divided so we don’t build the guillotines. The country being ever on the brink of civil war is very much intentional.
And of course there are guys like Steve Bannon, who is like a comic book villain. Guys like that really do want to see it all burn to the ground so it can be rebooted in some fantasy world where “bitter old white males like me rule again”.
I’m interested to see if this rural/urban divide is going to shift in the future. With the ballooning cost of real estate and the rise of remote work, a lot of urban liberals are moving to more rural areas.
There’s certainly a group of people that enjoy city life, but a lot of people (myself included) just want some peace and quiet and only lived in or near cities to be close to work.
People are interesting. People produce culture. Cities are where people are. Cities are always going to be more interesting and more cultural.
You want to start a band in nowhere, Utah? Ok, well, you’re going to have a lot fewer people interested in joining or watching than a city of any size.
Some stuff might move online. But I’m reminded of an interview I read during the pandemic. Someone was asked “what can I do at an in person party I can’t do online?”. The other person replied, “fuck people.” So there’s that. In-person social stuff matters.
So like yeah I guess it might be cheaper but it’s probably going to be less interesting just because there’s fewer people around.
If you feel that way, then you probably should live in a city. Some people prefer city life; there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not for everyone. I have no desire to be around other people, and the “cultural” aspect of urban living holds no interest to me. I get enough human interaction through work. At home, I want to be un-bothered by other people and go about my business in solitude.
I do live in a city and wouldn’t have it any other way.
You don’t consume movies books television music art? Variety of food?
I recognize that some people want to be hermits but that makes me uneasy. But like, whatever, it takes all kinds I guess. Not a fan of subsidizing anti social behavior though. Lots of roads and highways and shipping and such to support people living in isolation.
I think you might be misunderstanding what I’m trying to say. I’m not discounting the value of human culture. I enjoy various types of art, and I am grateful for the people who produce it.
What doesn’t interest me in the slightest is urban “culture.” By that I mean going to restaurants, attending parties, seeing live music, walking to the corner pub, etc. I haven’t done any of these things in years, and I’m happy. If I discover a musician I like, I’m going to spend some money and buy their record, but I don’t need to be surrounded by a crowd of people listening to them live.
You mention the term “anti-social behavior,” but that doesn’t describe everyone who’d rather live in a rural area than a city. Some of us just like our peace and quiet. As far as subsidizing roads and shipping to rural areas, you like to eat, right? Where do you think the food came from? You live in a house or an apartment, right? Where did the wood, concrete, and raw materials come from? A huge amount of agriculture and production comes from rural areas, and it’s always going to be necessary to have roads and infrastructure to support this. The fact that I live in the same area that supplied your food doesn’t mean that your tax dollars are paying for roads solely so that I can drive on them.
I understand that people like you enjoy the busy life of a city and that you can legitimately take advantage of what a city offers. I’m not like that. Large gatherings of people don’t make me happy; they just make me want to leave. My original argument was that a lot of people live in cities because they have to for work. Some of them, like you, live in cities because it makes them happy. For the people that live in urban areas because they have to, I was speculating that many of them might move to more rural areas given the option. I’m not trying to shit on your lifestyle (although I do have strong negative opinions about bicycles on roadways), and I would hope that you extend the same courtesy. Life is short, and in a perfect world, everyone could live in a place that they enjoy.
Small towns, small minds.
Don’t underestimate the sexism (particularly gamergate 4chan incels).
Gamergate essentially created and unified the modern alt-right as we see it today, it should absolutely be in consideration towards modern political discourse.
They’re terrified of being treated the same way they treat minorities and women
A large amount of angry, angry disillusioned people. I’m culturally close enough to understand a bit, if not 100% of it. There’s been a lot of cultural change really fast in the West, and increasingly bad economic conditions for the poor, rural and/or uneducated at the same time. As a result, a bubble of people who are completely reactionary and want to tear down the establishment has formed. Trump just managed to mobilize them.
The part I don’t really get is the appeal of the guy himself. It’s like they want to inflict him on the people they’re angry at, as if he’s a weapon and not a leader who will be in charge of them.
It’s like they want to inflict him on the people they’re angry at, as if he’s a weapon
This completely nails it. Trump’s lack of a filter and eagerness to pick fights makes him look like a fearless champion for his followers. He isn’t going to pull punches or compromise with anyone.
A very conservative relative of mine likened supporting Trump to hiring a sleazy but effective lawyer: his personality and methods are irrelevant; you hired him to achieve specific results and the only thing that matters is his ability to achieve those results. If it makes the opposition scream then that’s just added entertainment.
What I don’t get is he had four years already to achieve results and all he did was make the country worse off, but somehow everyone seems to have forgotten that 😭
Yes, but he hurt the right people. Or at least put on a show of doing it, somehow Mexico got out of USMCA just fine.
Yeah, lot of bitterness from perceived left wing elitism that they feel derided them and marginalized them, Trump is not a political platform, it’s just resentment.
As fascism always is.
They could have picked someone who’s not transparently a crayon-eating moron, though…
Considering that both Mussolini and Hitler were also incompetent fucking morons, it’s no surprise that modern fascists also pick leaders like them.
They’re sending their best.
Trump represents modern conservatism, but he himself? I’m not sure he actually stands for a whole lot beyond his own orange bubble.
He’s mostly a blank slate (philosophically and intellectually) that the people around him can use to get their agendas enacted. He surrounds himself with sycophants and bootlickers, so as long as they promise him wealth and power, he is content to parrot the talking points he’s given.
Steven Miller, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, and all the others…those are the real evil motherfuckers. When Trump is out of the picture, they’ll find some other half-wit to puppet. The fight won’t end when one figurehead fades in to history.
idk, just one dude’s thoughts.
(Just to be clear, none of that absolves him of the real damage he’s done. Malicious indifference is still malicious.)
I suspect one of them would directly take his place, actually. Trump is kind of an anomaly in not having redeeming qualities himself, if you look around the world and through history.
They were absolute geniuses compared to Trump, and put on a far more convincing show of honesty - particularly Hitler, with his faux-compassionate warmups and vegetarianism. Mussolini had an actual career as an intellectual before he was famous. Hitler sounds kind of intellectually average.
Mussolini had an actual career as an intellectual
Well, he certainly considered himself to be an intellectual. Whether he actually was one is another matter entirely
He made an actual living as a newspaper editor, and got some good reviews according to Wikipedia, so apparently he convinced other people too. At the very least, he could pass.
I don’t think fascism is capable of producing competent longterm leadership. Like the ideology preselects for loyalty above all, it’s rabidly anti-intellectual and scorns anyone perceived as being an intellectual elitist. It’s purely emotion driven and requires ever escalating emotional rhetoric to keep the based angry at external all-powerfully weak enemies (lazy mexicans stealing your jobs, sneaky jewish bankers crashed the entire economy, thuggish high school dropout gangbangers in the inner city are criminal masterminds responsible for all the drugs flowing through rural communities who would overrun everything if they were smart enough to unify, take your pick of contradictory scapegoat.)
That’s not to say incompetence means harmlessness, there’s a lot of blood that has been spilled throughout history due to incompetence.
Well, they certainly got straight to the point this time. The last time it took a world war before they really started to shit the bed. I’m grateful, if confused.
Well… were not on the other side of this yet. Were still in the sort of early 1930s Germany era where the real problems people face haven’t gotten all that much better, and the fascists have made many decently successful smaller attempts at power but haven’t quite succeeded in that big push for power. like the stuff that is planned in project 2025.
Yes, fingers crossed Kamala wins and we get another 4 years, at least (us in the rest of the world included).
They do. They can’t lash out directly, so they are him as a legal way to do so indirectly.
They have to know it’s them next, right? I mean, clearly not, but that’s where I can’t mentally “be” them anymore. The rest is relatable, if mean.
Fascism.
The far right have been stoking hate and resentment for decades. But before Trump they always tried to maintain an air of respectability as well as plausible deniability. Then came Trump and threw all that out of the window. Also he has a talent to spout any nonsense with utter conviction. That is perceived as authenticity by the people who feel left out by the political process and that are simply too dumb to understand any nuanced discussion.
After reading of what you wrote reminds me of Hitler when we learned in grade school. So if he gets elected American’s a pretty fucked.?
Have a gander at project 2025 if you want to know what that future looks like.
I and hate to admit it have read it all. And I never thought I would say it but one book made me feel unclean, dirty, and really question America so much I may find work elsewhere.
Yep, he’s literally Hitler, just without the mass genocide (yet).
We’ve always wondered how so many people followed Hitler, now we know
There is plenty of genocide, war, and all that. It’s just done at a sustainable pace and mostly in places that don’t look like US soil. Hitler rushed and got a reaction. This time it’s going to be worse.
A lot of old-fashioned “good old homegrown” folks who feel that the world is changing and the economy is leaving them behind. Think of coal towns, mid-west mining towns, etc…
Insert a republican who tells them enough times that it’s not the fault of big business screwing literally everyone over, it’s actually the fault of the immigrants/LGBTQ+/Mulsims/Blacks (insert marginalised group of choice here) coming and taking what should rightfully go to Good Honest Working Folk/Christian Evangelicals (Insert the group you’re trying to court here) and then promise to change that.
The low-key greatest quote came from LBJ in an off-hand remark to an aide. Not even from a speech.
“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.”
True then. True now. And true internationally. There is no country where the Conservative Right Wing doesn’t play by that exact rulebook.
people are realizing that the American dream was a lie and they don’t want to believe that the people they voted for all along are the ones who caused it
It’s called the American dream, because you’d have to be asleep to believe it.
no, if you were a white middle class boomer born between 1945 & 1970ish who managed not to go to vietnam, you got to live the American dream. then we methodically voted for the people who stripped away all of the policies that made it possible
Hey, my boomer dad got to be a slave soldier AND live the dream.
Because his dad was a dentist and he could afford to pay for college after Uncle Sam, it turns out, got him shot twice, blown up once, and gave him leukemia.
But at least Vietnam doesn’t have universal healthcare.
actually 87% of the Vietnamese population are covered by social health insurance (as of 2018)
I know, I’m referring to the fact that all that got done to him to defend a fascist state against Big Scary Communist Ho Chi Minh who actually wanted to be a US Ally against Chinese influence in Asia.
And then they didn’t even fucking win. Which was probably good, but still.
Hello, fellow Carlin-ist.
It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it…or, you are in it if we’re talking about carlinists as a club.
The Carlinist club has no member status in the America club, unfortunately.
The funny thing is it used to kind of work for a lot of small businesses and poor people in general. It sucked but you could do it. Only true visionaries like hunter s Thompson and Carlin really understood that the system was rotten before it all started to fall apart.
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Anti-federalism – Deep rooted distrust of the Federal Government has been around since the dawn of the USA, though its often been part of the minority.
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Know Nothing / Native American Party – 1850s era movement. Protectionist, isolationist, nativist. Originally they popped up as anti-Irish and anti-Catholic, but overall the concept is that immigrants suck. The modern concept is: “I know nothing”, about the movement. The overall idea is that even in the 1800s, it was bad to look like a racist bigot, so you’d keep your support for these causes secret. Everyone in the party knows that “the Know Nothings are larger than everyone expects”, but no one really knows how big the movement is. And that’s the point.
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America First – 1930s saw the rise of Fascism vs Communism in Europe with the dawn of the Spanish civil war. The “America First” movement focused on isolationism and even pro-German / Nazi slant mixed with religious fervor. This was pushed by tech-gurus of the time: Charles Lindberg (airplane entrepreneur, first Trans-atlantic flight, etc. etc.), and the Christian Front. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Square_Garden).
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NAFTA – 1990s free-trade by Bill Clinton opened up Mexico and Canada as incredible trading partners. However, local industry / local steel lost out as companies started to shop in Mexico for material. As Bill Clinton was a huge pusher of NAFTA, the anti-NAFTA political group consolidated under Republicans. This is likely where the bulk of blue-collar workers is coming from, especially because Trump started adding Tariffs / anti-globalism concepts back to the forefront of American Politics.
Some more recent context:
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Trump has been building his brand for decades as a very rich, very macho straight-talker. Even in the 80s and earlier, there’s a large number of Hotels, Casinos, Resorts, Golf Courses (etc. etc.) that have relatively high reputation among Americans in general with Trump’s name.
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Trump reads from the teleprompter in “another voice”, openly showing his disdain for public speaking and the political system. Anyone who has lost faith in the political system loves this. Trump pretends that the teleprompter is forcing him to talk and its all just a “through the motions” thing. Then Trump obviously goes off teleprompter and talks about different concepts, the “real stuff”. (Or so goes his branding). This simple trick is enough to get the gist to his followers: don’t listen to what I say (because I’m being forced to say this politically correct crap). This means that Trump’s true actions are only limited to the imagination of the listener.
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Trump is playing and leaning into the borne again Christian role. From a religious perspective, the “former enemy / former outsider” coming into religion is a common story and religious love it. Trump was openly a Democrat in the 90s / 00s before switching into Republicanism.
The “bulk” of Trump’s political style is Know Nothing + Macho + anti-political correctness.
I would add the admittance of China to the WTO as another proximate cause. And one which probably had more of a material effect than NAFTA; but, NAFTA had already become a GOP talking point and it just stuck. China’s entry to the WTO was also moved over the finish line by Bush II, though most of the ground work was laid by Clinton. So, it wouldn’t have had the same clean narrative as NAFTA. US Employment in manufacturing went into freefall in late 2000 and early 2001. This was also during a recession, so that is intermixed with the effects of those changes in international trade. But, even as the recession receded and the US entered an economic boom, leading up to the 2008 crash, manufacturing employment in the US either held steady or decreased slightly. It’s unsurprising that the same period saw a lot of offshoring of manufacturing to China. And this was also the period of Neoliberal economists pushing “comparative advantage” and how the US losing all those manufacturing jobs was a good thing.
So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
– Barack Obama, 2008
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His televised narcissistic collapse (now in it’s 13th year) has emboldened every Archie Bunker wannabe, vacuous contrarian, all the racist chucklefucks, and miscellaneous shitstains the country has to offer. The rest of the people are sick and tired of having their empathy and compassion mocked and derided, their hopes and dreams dashed, and their future turned into nightmare fuel.
Yes, he was always a privileged asshole devoid of human compassion or understanding, but this is the moment at the WHCD on 4/30/2011 where he broke beyond repair: https://v.redd.it/sk0jqm81r5kd1
every Archie Bunker wannabe, vacuous contrarian, all the racist chucklefucks, and miscellaneous shitstains the country has to offer. The rest of the people are sick and tired of having their empathy and compassion mocked and derided, their hopes and dreams dashed
I couldn’t help but to read this in the most tired, South London accent ever.
Big question with a lot of nuance and different angles you could approach from. What I think will clarify some things: the emotional side of liberal vs conservatives is that one side sees how humanity could be better and strives for that change, while the other worries that we’ll get worse and resist the change.
Well for quite some time, things have been rapidly changing like no other time in history due in large part to advancements in technology. Both sides can see that we’ve ended up in some dark places as a result and generally the world is more confusing, divided, and stressful than ever.
In reality there is a lot of great progress that we’ve made in recent times. But people who are slow to adapt don’t see it that way, which makes them extremely uncomfortable and left feeling like it totally justifies their philosophy. But nobody is listening because the popular media shuts them out.
So basically they’re throwing a huge temper tantrum and trying to kick over the sand castle everyone else has worked so hard to build, because they feel fed up, self-righteous, and ignored. They don’t see it that way, of course, they feel they’re renegades tearing down a godless society and saving the world. They vote for a buffoon because they’re tired of that idea being weaponized against them, so they’re owning it. With him they’re able to take center stage and be so loud and in your face that you can’t ignore them.
I think the current economic and political system is failing a vast majority of Americans and like other authoritarian demagogues in the past, Trump misattributes that problem in ways that resonate with the bigotry and racism that exists in American culture.
America has had a long history of nationalism and exploitation that leaves it ripe for cherishing those values and minimizing critical thinking about current structures and questioning how those really only benefit the rich and powerful.
I think the current economic and political system is failing a vast majority of Americans and like other authoritarian demagogues in the past, Trump misattributes that problem in ways that resonate with the bigotry and racism that exists in American culture.
You just explained in one sentence what I bumbled my way through in four paragraphs. Well written, my friend.
He basically told all the racists, homophobes, transphobes, xenophobes, and anyone else who feels they’re entitled to more than anyone else that they were right and they don’t need to maintain any air of dignity or even basic human compassion about it anymore.
Look at that list and you’ll see it’s all people who base their whole identity around hatred of things they’re afraid of or don’t understand. That’s what he tapped into, ignorance and fear.
Fear and lies.
See, all the really open minded citizens in America were just so happy when the country elected a black guy as president that they just had to go out and share that joy with the rest of the world!
There’s always been a sort of background radiation of this. Decades ago Rush Limbaugh was prolific in inspiring a weird new direction of fashy talk radio shows and Fox capitalized on it like no other. Trump didn’t do it, he just rode the surf.
The fear of being unable to protect one’s self and family as one ages.
