Political Memes

Coming from a family raised conservative, Christian, Republican and most changed to the left... It's both

Distills down to, "Nice guy; little on the dumb side." and "That guy is smart; but he's kind of a psychopath."

So has been said, "I've met smart Trump supporters, and I've met kind Trump supporters. I've never met a smart, kind Trump supporter." The semi-smart psychopaths tend to be the ones grifting the rest, like Bannon or Musk.

Billionaires can distort reality; alter reality for the masses.

For the "poorly educated" working-class Trump supporter, as many Americans know in their extended families? I tend to view them as victims used as pawns.

Maybe - and I realize this is a radical concept - they aren't all the same person acting for homogeneous reasons?

It... It's almost like there's more than one of them!

I'm unsure which view OP holds. To be honest I'm unsure myself.

It doesn't seem right for it to be so black and white, but God damn if I don't have to ignore every piece of experiential evidence I have to hold that view.

Overwhelmingly conservatives do not pictures themselves as evil. They do believe that everything is zero sum so making positive changes somewhere means negative changes in other places. They do not believe in "win-win" scenarios and believe there is a catch or additional conditional clause.

By this logic they also see the tremendous harm being done and believe that there must be an inverse, so tremendous good being done. That's their faith in the economy or security or some vague idea like "prosperity" filling in the gap. They don't want to be evil or encourage harm but only through great harm can we achieve great salvation.

It's fucked thinking but one that is important to consider. They NEED a trade off whether gold or bad. The truly evil people are the ones who don't need good, like billionaires, and still inflict harm. There are about 1,000 people who can have their resources shared with the world and literally 80% of all problems like war, housing, and food security will be solved.

Holding right wing views because you grew up and live in a society that incentivizes being right wing isn't a complicated idea or even surprising, and I think we do ourselves a disservice by supposing that it is.

I rely on Grey's law to get through my days: any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. Ignorant? Malicious? It doesn’t matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

Can't understate the importance of fear in the right wing. Everything is motivated by fear. Fear of the unfamiliar. Fear of change. Fear of losing what they have. Fear of facing their mistakes. Fear of losing control.

Por que no los dos?

Motivated and magical thinking. Intentional ignorance. Evil values.

I think you are underestimating the amount of them that are just ~~so fucking stupid~~ as well.

ah yes, the world is only black and white - enjoy living life that way? sure makes it easy doesn't it? ;)

They're not evil because they want to be evil; they're evil because they fundamentally don't care. Ibn Khaldun famously (????) said "the morals of oppressed peoples decline." Scarcity makes people desperate and causes them to make questionable or even evil decisions that they believe they need to make to survive. These decisions are then rationalized and justified to avoid cognitive dissonance (i.e. we didn't do it and they deserved it). Combine that with this economic oppression and it's not hard to see why the far right gets so much support; if you accept the underlying assumptions and feel desperate enough it's not hard to sell "your suffering is their fault, it's either you or them" to enough people to do some pretty evil shit, and they won't feel guilty about it because they've already done the math.

It is certainly easier to think the top way than the bottom but in much the same way it’s a more complicated explanation that crime rates stem from socioeconomic inequalities and must be solved with community outreach and spending on xyz than just saying “blah blah people are natural born criminals”