Their struggle isn’t shared thou. Trump supporters are not a monolith, they are composed of a diverse number of groups with different and often competing interests.
Yea they all deal with the same rise in prices, the same lack of services from their government… the same treatment from not racist members of society.
Ok sure the corpos and whatnot who put him in place dont share the struggles, but all the civies who voted for him sure do.
It is absolutely shared in the sense that any hardship they face is solely because they voted for Donald Trump. We ran into this last night with my MIL. She thought both the employees at Lowe’s and Panda Express were “harassing” her because they somehow knew she was a Trump supporter.
My wife said that people were just having a hard time right now to avoid the conflict and her mom responded that “Oh that must be Trump’s fault too” and stormed out of her husband’s birthday party lmao.
Trailer Park burnt down? Must be someone who hates that they love Trump. Economy crashing? Must be because they just hate Trump.
It’s so fucking annoying.
Sounds like your MIL is in the 2nd stage of grief.
This is BS.
Every single election we are told that economic hardship is the only thing pay attention to. Sure, many of these rubes will continue to be fooled and are irredeemable. But a shit ton are going to notice and eventually get tired of getting fucked.
I am not saying they will stop voting republicans because they do seem to like the pain, but they would sure as hell eat the current administration
Hardship will just make them blame foreigners
Something about the LiBeRaL dEeP sTaTe keeping him from deporting them fast enough. The “in” group has to be simultaneously strong and helpless, the “out” group weak but somehow paradoxically able to prevent the “strong” leadership from accomplishing anything for the good of the people.
Not if the argument is to offer the democratic party and more neoliberalism as an alternative. Yes, they’ll gladly suffer for fascism.
It’s our job to offer something better that explains their suffering and alienation. Thankfully this guy named Marx did a pretty good job explaining it.
Historically not true. USSR collapsed, Nazi Germany collapsed etc.
And if you think that is true why doesn’t every government try “hardships” to keep it’s people together? You start from the false idea that this would work…
And they can also continue to blame Biden.
Biden is also a tool of neoliberalism and class warfare. The fact that we sit here understanding that Trump voters will “endure suffering” for fascism should tell us something. It is because a vast majority of people in this country are fed up with neoliberalism that has existed since Reagan.
One side of the country has moved to the left and found actual answers that explain the alienation that they feel and the reason for their frustration. That reason is class conflict and worker exploitation. (This is sadly a small amount of people)
Another side of the country has been fooled by fascism and xenophobia. These are the Trump supporters.
And then we have the “middle” that is a minority in this country that is continue to defend neoliberalism. This is the democratic party and it’s loyal “vote Blue no matter who” block. These are often the people comfortable enough still to not feel frustration, that do not actually feel the economic impact.
Sadly that minority that is still holding strong to neoliberalism and the status quo is heavily preventing the country from learning actual leftist ideals.
No one wants the status quo and neoliberalism. So the average American is leaning right for “something else” because the Democratic party is offering them nothing but the status quo and weak policies.
The Democrats inability to evolve to a leftist populist message, under Sanders, is a very important part of understanding why people voted for Trump twice. They gave the Democrats one last chance under Biden and felt no material improvement to their lives.
It’s why they will blame Biden and hold onto this “change” in Trump. They will gladly suffer under something different than to suffer slightly less under the same system that has caused their struggles and alienation.
Unfortunately for us the only party that is somewhat normal is the dems and like you said they’re stooges for the capitalist class. I see no way out of this. I believe the dems are controlled opposition at this point. They would rather defend the status quo than fight for economic mobility. Bernie was right the whole time. While the republicans were cleaning house for MAGA, dems were eliminating all internal opposition. We need to do the same here on the left if the Democratic Party is to be saved.
People are way too focused on change at the federal level. You need to start small and local, building groups that can create the grassroots support actual leaders will need to get elected.
Start with your cities and counties and work your way up.
Yes, this is all they will do.
Shun them. Trump supporters are evil, try and avoid working for them or with them in any way. Don’t talk to them. There is no need to be friendly. These people are actually supporting a Nazi revival.
Great Trump will be celebrating our withdrawal from our neighbors all day. The best thing that can happen to him is for us to keep yelling “you’re evil” at half the country. It just reinforces his position with every cry of hate.
Are there some actual ideological Nazis following Trump? Of course. But the vast majority is just sick and tired of the status quo that does nothing for them. And as a result they got taken in by a huckster politician.
You write of half the country a just basically evil by nature and you’re playing his game for him.
I hear you, but there are a few things you have to understand; MAGA is not 50% of the population.
Of registered voters, only 47% have a declared a party affiliation. So immediately 1/2 of the USA’s voting population cannot be considered Republican or Democrat.
If party registered voters, you are correct in that it is a 49% (D) and 48% ® split. That puts Republicans at almost a perfect 25% of the population.
Not all Republicans are MAGA (arguable), with various polling putting 52% of Registered Republicans as MAGA supporters.
Why? Some vote Republican because they don’t like Democrats, or don’t want a woman president (Trump has only won against women, Biden beat him by a landslide).
Summary: It’s almost a perfect 50% by 50% by 50% divide! MAGA is about 12-15% of the population.
All MAGA has to do is radicalize key voting areas to win the electoral college, but these crazies are fickle and vanish quickly. Remember the Tea Party movement? … yea, me neither really.
That’s what I’m saying but my wife says I still gotta go to her dad’s house with her.
I really, really, have no interest in talking to that man. She shouldn’t either. He was a shit human before Trump was president and he’ll be a shit human long after. Half his kids (none of her full siblings, just her half- and step- siblings…her moms side is like some of the best people I’ve met and my MIL is probably the nicest lady in the world) are equally shitty, as are half his grandkids.
I mean hell, she gave up Target because of DEI, and she visits Target far more often.
Aitah?
One thing that worked with my partner was asking them if they had a racist or a mean relative and asking them how they felt spending time around them when they were kids.
We haven’t talked to his parents since November and he says he ain’t missing them at all.
Toxic-ass motherfuckers.
Seriously? Put on your big boy pants and say no.
Doubt, fortunately. The extremists will largely never be turned, but most Trump supporters are moderates who care more about their own well-being than solidarity with the group. Mussolini is a great example of how an idiot dictator can quickly fragment his supporters and end up in the streets
“You can’t reason out of a position you didn’t come to through reason.”
They just hate for hate sake. It’s time to come to terms that the dumb will not be saved by gentle parenting but need to be dragged into reality.
Sure, but most of Trump’s voters did vote for him for a reason: their lives got noticeably harder under Biden. When their lives get even worse under Trump, they’ll vote for another change of party.
The cultists waving Trump flags and buying Trump teddy bears and reading Trump bibles are fueled by identity politics, but the idea that the average Trump voter is one of those cultists is a lie that Trump would very much like you to believe
It’s frightening how many people on “our” side are willing to simply believe that half the country is irredeemably evil by nature and not just taken in by a smooth talking conman after having been abused by the system for decades.
History has shown again and again that, when it comes to actions, there is no practical difference between evil by intention and ignorance by stupidity. When people are willfully dismantling the foundations of society, I really don’t give a shit if they are aware of the consequences or not, I am unwilling to forgive them either way.
The difference is that ignorance can be remedied. If they were just evil for evil’s sake then that’s it, might as well give up now.
It’s not the consequences for them I’m worried about, it’s the consequences for all of us if we give in to this dumb “they’re just plain evil and the only way to win is to physically fight them” mentality.
I like your optimism. But yes, I do believe that ~30% of our country is ignorant and racist. They are the perfect target for a smooth talking conman.
Ignorant is not the same as evil. Ignorance can be fixed. It’s easier to just write people off but it doesn’t solve anything unless you’re really eager for another civil war.
“quickly” only after massive damage is done.
Y’all learned nothing from the election if you’re still trying to turn them.
not trying to turn them
trying to thin them.
If we had taxpayer universal healthcare, that’d be easy. Just give them all semaglutide. Problem solved.
I just encountered this last night with hardcore Trumper family members. They believe his tariffs are because the tariffed countries have their military subsidized by the American government and they need to pay their fair share. They think xwe’re going to have to “feel a little pain” for a year or two, then “it” will be better. What is “it”? Who the hell knows. They certainly don’t.
And where did they stand on feeling a little pain when egg prices went up during the campaign?
That was Biden’s incompetence! The mental gymnastics astound.
My dad isn’t a Trump supporter but he sure sounds like one. He’s fine with tariffs because “we won’t be paying them”. The underlying belief is that we shouldn’t import electricity or other goods, we should be producing our own, we should be self sustaining. And these tariffs are speeding up factories to open up in the states and produce US goods. The adjustment period (a few years at most) will be hard but worth it in the end - everything will be US made. Wohoo?
Never mind that our current infrastructure is crumbling and nothing is being done about it. And Trump is siphoning off any resources the us has. Never mind that many people today live paycheck to paycheck and as a result of this self imposed trade war will starve or freeze to death in the interim. Never mind that even if the US government decided to invest in this, it would take many many many decades to make US self sustaining, and once achieved prices will be higher than if we were to import the goods.
Yanis Varoufakis explains the reasoning
I like Yanis but I really don’t think that’s what Trump is doing.
I’m sorry, but Trump’s “America has been treated very unfairly” is more likely just an extension of his own persecution complex, which in turn is just fascist rhetoric, always with the grievance, eternally playing the victim card (“they humiliated us but we will get our revenge”), so I feel like Yanis is trying to interpret the well-known fascist humiliation fetish into a coherent economic vision… But it just isn’t. Trump’s woefully incompetent, so the only way what Yanis is saying would make sense is if his Heritage goons or oligarch buddies whispered stuff in his ear… although I would be highly doubtful even then that this is the plan, because their priority here seems to be to loot and plunder the state and turn it into a kind of Russian oligarchy with Christofascist characteristics. They’re way too high on power, as can be seen by how much they say and do right in the open, thinking they’re untouchable.
And I didn’t even mention the whole Curtis Yarvin network states tehnofeudalism, which Yanis should know about since he has a whole book called Tehnofeudalism, and I hope he mentions Yarvin and Peter Thiel in there and isn’t just saying how WEF style neoliberalism will eventually usher in tehnofeudalism, right? Right?!
PS: UnHerd is a pretty sus publication with a very TERF-ish bent. While they do sometimes get prominent lefties to write for it, it’s always for articles like this that are useful to them as they don’t really challenge the MAGA worldview (source: a MAGA acquaintance recommended me a recent Yanis interview rehashing this very article, and his takeaway was how smart Trump is). Tread carefully, there’s always an angle with this site.
That’s a great read and makes a ton of sense. Thank you!
I wrote another reply to the person who posted but I don’t like repeating myself, so I’ll just give the cliff notes:
Trump’s “America has been treated very unfairly” rhetoric is more likely just an extension of his own persecution complex, which in turn is just standard fascist rhetoric about how “we were once great, but we’ve allowed ourselves to be humiliated by our adversaries… but now we’ll be great again and take our revenge on all of them”. It’s nothing new. And while I have a high opinion of Yanis, I think he’s just wrong here, and I think that’s exactly why UnHerd (a sussy “alt-left” pro-TERF publication) was happy to publish his article.
That and cons will always find a way to spin something to cause outrage and anger towards anyone but themselves.
Just went through that with an elderly neighbor recently.
She broke her foot and is in poor health, so we were walking her dog twice a day cause we are nice like that. She was always praising us for being such good people and a godsend to her.
One day, she made a comment that she thought Trump was doing a great job and I gently tried to explain to her that he was ruining our lives and countless others out there.
I was hoping she would have a moment of introspection, but no. She just immediately went on about the democrats, how we get offended too easily, and how she thinks I swear too much but she doesn’t hold it against me.
Everything except: “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
Told her we no longer feel comfortable walking get dog.
Cue the waterworks and the “What about me? I can’t walk!”
It’s not worth engaging with these people. There is something broken in their brains.
They are brainwashed. The people we hate are actually some of trumps biggest victims. They are the victims of brainwashing. And they will soon be victimized in other ways as well. And when they question it, Trump will blame them, othe people, anyone but himself. And like victims of narcissistic abuse, they will do the mental backflips required to forgive Trump.
I know they are brainwashed.
I don’t even hate her.
I feel bad for her because she’s legitimately fucked without our help, but I cannot continue helping her when she cannot even acknowledge that both my life and her own life are so much harder because of her vote.
She cannot even say she is sorry because she legitimately believes she has done no wrong.
She’s blowing up my phone to ask us to please continue walking her dog but I cannot do that anymore.
The mask has fallen off her face.
Did the dog vote for Trump? Help the little fur ball out. I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.
Are we all just cowering down? Reading these comments makes it sounds like we should just all give up.
I do not think it is saying we need to give up fighting.
I think people like me need to hear these messages because we have conservative friends and family we haven’t given up because we think that once things get absurd enough, they will finally see the error of their ways.
We still believe they are good people, but they are clearly not.
There’s something really wrong with them, and it is not within our power to remedy.
What we can do instead, is redirect our time and our energy towards others in our communities that are ready to flight.
The message of the post itself is that we have power and we need to exercise our power, and we cannot wait for foolish people who believe in Mr. Orange.
As for the comments, you conveniently did not say which comments you disapprove of. So it feels kind of hand wavy to try to respond to you. I see many comments written by people who are clearly not cowering down, so either those showed up after you got here, or your interpreting them very differently than I am.
All Trump’s gotta do is blame the Dems. Already going that route
And his dumb ass parrots will repeat his lies forever no matter what evidence they’re presented with
Group think is bad. Larger the group the lower the IQ.
Does that count here and on Reddit? Although I’ll say here on Lemmy, folks are much more open to actual dialogue than on Reddit.
Although I’ll say here on Lemmy, folks are much more open to actual dialogue than on Reddit.
I mean yeah. At least Lemmy instances aren’t site banning people for upvoting the wrong thing. Or communities using bots to autoban anyone who has ever posted to certain communities. Or communities banning anyone who isn’t fully on board with the “correct” views about all things at all times.
Turns out not reinforcing a space as an echo chamber reduces the degree to which it is an echo chamber, who would have thought?
I mean it has the same incentives. Try to ask something that goes against the group ethos and you’ll get downvoted to hell pretty quickly. Not quite as bad as Reddit I’ll agree.
So like music, the more popular the simplest chords it has.
No, they’re selfish and borderline retarded sheep. When a few retarded sheep start making the suffering noise, they’ll all join the chorus because they don’t have the capacity for independent thought
There is no need to swing Trump voters over.
There are more citizens who did not vote at all who can be engaged with and energized - because these policies are going to fuck them too.
We need to pretend to be conservative and be like: “I VOTED TRUMP AND HE DID NOTHING FOR ME, BOTH SIDE ARE THE SAME, I’M VOTING LIBERTARIAN 😡😡😡”
If half of conservatives voted a third party candidate, it would splinter the republican party.
Aka: the Reverse Kremlin stretegy
One danger, though: Trump’s campaign managers will try to swing them as well.
I am hopeful! But it will be a fight.
Imagine both parties swinging to third party accidentally 😏 -> 1/4, 2/4, 1/4
Too good to be true, lol
There’s a saying in my country: don’t get drunk on cold water. Meaning don’t gaslight yourself into wishful thinking, because hope can be a hell of a drug.
A third party win won’t happen overnight. The only way you can realistically get it is with ranked choice voting. Otherwise you’re stuck replacing Democrats (and why not, Republicans — in smaller races you can absolutely run a Bernie style progressive who keeps the focus on economics!) one by one because the institutions are already in place, and they’re really powerful! Also, remember they’re just institutions: parties don’t have ideologies, people do.
And before you think to vote for people like Jill Stein or whoever else while hoping that maybe this year the miracle will happen (i.e. getting drunk on cold water), remember that there’s a lot of groundwork that needs to be done by that candidate for them to be viable, and it essentially boils down to this: the whole country needs to know about that person and recognize them on the street come election year — if that’s not the case, then they’re either delusional, underfunded, or most likely an opportunist (possibly even an intentional spoiler paid by the opposition, like RFK was in the Dem primary).
Source: me. I’ve been on the third party hope train back in 2020, emboldened by “leftists” such as Jimmy Dore, BJG, Richard Medhurst, etc.
A third party win won’t happen overnight. The only way you can realistically get it is with ranked choice voting. Otherwise you’re stuck replacing Democrats (and why not, Republicans — in smaller races you can absolutely run a Bernie style progressive who keeps the focus on economics!) one by one because the institutions are already in place, and they’re really powerful! Also, remember they’re just institutions: parties don’t have ideologies, people do.
You’ve basically got three options:
- Reform the party from within (this is how we got MAGA via the Tea Party).
- Replace one of the existing parties with a new one (this has happened a few times over the years, and failed many more).
- Change the underlying system in a way that doesn’t inevitably collapse into a two party system. For example, approval voting. RCV is better than what we have, but it still has serious issues with spoiler effect and strategic voting, they just look a little different than they do under FPTP. STAR and Approval are much better, but STAR is comparatively complicated to explain and report on while Approval is dead simple.
Yep, pretty much — thanks for that! Much clearer than my morning-brained pre-coffee rants, haha.
😇I agree 100%
The cons will swing libertarian and the libs will swing socialist, and then we’ll get a president that only 1/12th of the country actually voted for
