Seems pretty cut and dried
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Eh, hardly monolithic. 55 / 37 is pretty overwhelming, but still over 1/3 of the youngest voters went Trump. 45 / 53 in the 65+ group is a lot closer than I would have guessed. So yeah, majority but a long way from monolithic.
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To me this is painfully personal. The problem seems global, in Brazil the Bolsonaro election radicalized my father, my uncles, my brother and I’m having a hard time keeping my son, that wants to be in the Army, in check.
Yeah, my father when young was your stereotype of military man totally prejudiced (machist, violently homophobic, racist and always right) but I’ve spent most of my life showing him that different people don’t bite, presenting friends from diverse walks of life, counterpointing the “those people” view.
Decades of work undone in less than six months. It’s like the neural pathways for hate were just dormant waiting for someone to feed them.
It’s not just normal assholery, it looks cultish: They all parrot the same things without even thinking about what they are saying. Some words have become triggers to make them experience extreme emotions, so they simply stop listening and rage.
My loved ones are encased in a thick shield of anger against everything that their cult leader doesn’t aprove - and this shit is spreading fast.
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^A million times this. Turn off the TV, leave the house, go volunteer some time at the hospital, school, library, whatever. Find a new hobby. Take a walk. Do anything else.
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My mother lives in Argentina and when we talked about Brazil lately, where we have many friends, she was surprised about my view (same than yours) on the situation …
The was I see this trend though is less a radicalization of the masses towards the right but rather the desire for leadership and security. This is what these populists use quite effectively with al the right crap on a side-note, and it works shockingly well
Please don’t get me wrong, I am far from trying to defend the Trumps here. I just think that maybe this situation is far more complex than “us & them”.
I was afraid to write anything or to share how sad it was to lose such a good guy who cared so passionately about his friends. I was afraid because his life’s work was monstrous.
I feel like that has been America’s 21st century.
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Nearly half of those 45 and over voted for Clinton.
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Speak for yourself there.
I know plenty of people who are seething masses of hatred barely ready to boil over and scream at the next moron that crosses their path, and selective cognitive dissonance and large amounts of alcohol are the only thing that keeps them appearing sane.
Saying that there is no reason to be massively and disproportionately pissed off at the stupid on another side is just playing into the idea that both sides are somehow equally to blame and equally culpable and that is complete bullshit that I will not acknowledge
I meant that with all due respect, and a large glass of rum which I am pouring…now.
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I wish you the best of luck sincerely. This is what scares me the most the uttermost more than anything else- that no matter what I believe, that a lot of this craziness of right wing idiocy has taken on some form of blind cultism in the world now with people like Bolsonaro, Duerte, Trump, Orban, Sisi, etc.
It’s like even adjusting for people with different views there is some sort of locomotive Force of ignorance and blind obedience that is leading these idiots to their doom and there is nothing I can do to counteract it and no amount of fact that can stop it because they don’t listen to reality anymore
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Nope. No desire to keep that relationship intact when they believe in things, vote for things that make my life shitty and make the life of people I love shitty.
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Underlying forces driving the rise of global fascism:
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The fading historical memory of WWII
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The unleashing of unrestrained capitalism after the end of the Cold War
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The impending climate apocalypse
Cultural, political and natural forces acting in combination.
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I hate this idea people need to experience things to know them.
Sometimes it’s mild (implying someone wouldn’t have seen a very good film because it came out in the 80s), sometimes it;'s more extreme, like this one.
I’ve been to the Holocaust museum. I’ve been to a concentration camp. And so can people who don’t have living WWII veterans in the family. It’s incredibly well documented, and people who deny or diminish it are the same who were doing so while Nuremberg was prepping the nooses.
I know this isn’t the “politically correct” thing to say, but some people are absolute garbage - and it’s not because they’re a certain race, religion, or gender. They’re aggressively mediocre, they know it deep in their bones, but they also feel entitled to being special, so they will latch onto anything that lets them sit above others.
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This Earth, Wind & Fire lyric always stuck with me:
if there ain’t no beauty, you got to make some beauty
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The two are not mutually exclusive.
And the “look, [other faction] are subhuman monsters!” narrative is a shitty and dangerous piece of propaganda regardless of which side is pushing it, because it drives us all inexorably towards the last argument of kings.
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on a similar topic, my best friend’s father retired a few years ago and has since become a flat Earther and conspiracy theorist.
He was previously a very easy going guy who I enjoyed talking to. Now it is virtually impossible to hold a conversation without him bringing up some bizarre theory, sometimes totally at random.
He immediately shuts down anyone who disagrees with him and refuses to listen to them and spends most of his time locked in his house on the internet. It is very sad but nobody seems to be able to get through to him
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Faux news from the Obama years. What if they covered cadet bonespurs the same way?
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My parents considered themselves politics-agnostic for years and years, watching both CNN and Fox (because their nightly news started at 9pm, earlier than the other networks), saying that they not only didn’t consider themselves members of any party, but that talking politics was as verboten as talking about explicit sex acts. It just wasn’t done in the house and you certainly didn’t talk about who you voted for.
Bit by bit they started to crack. My dad would say “this seems really… biased…” while watching the news. And then Trump happened. Now they’re openly liberal and take any opportunity to rail against Trump, the Republicans, and Fox News… and they live in the heart of farmland Trump country.
On the other hand, I have other family members who never talked politics, either, and are now openly Trump-rallying pro-gun anti-abortion antivaxers, so I guess Donald brings out the best and worst in people.
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My view is that people are mixed bags with different proclivities, biases, and vices, but that trauma and anxiety create vulnerability, and that vulnerability can be weaponized by propagandists.
It’s also horrible in and of itself. I’ve said this before, but one of the many things I’ll never forgive Fox News for is introducing deliberate and needless stress and anger into my father’s life in his final years. We never got into arguments about it (we’d found a general modus vivendi regarding our political differences), but I wish he’d spent the time when he was stuck in his bed watching more pleasant and relaxing and funny fare than that garbage factory.
I don’t fully agree here. What it really does is radicalise people who are already conservative and make them more comfortable with racism and hatemongering.
Bobo just sells those things in a sneaky way.
And of the Depression era. The right-wing populists seemed to know the time was ripe to re-emerge exactly at the point these periods started dying out of living memory.
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