It is terrifying to me that so many people use abortion as their sole determinant of who should be president (and likely, Congress as well). I assume this stance is rooted in the christian notion that as soon as a sperm fertilizes an egg, that zygote is a human with a soul (and therefore is murder to abort). There are many problems with this view, but I’ll only touch on one thing.
Assume I follow the christian dogma about abortion. Now, as a hypothetical good christian, I would certainly not have any abortions, and I’d “educate” my kids not to do so. Great! My family is a shoo-in for heaven. If some dirty heathen has an abortion, I can rest assured that that person will be judged accordingly by god, and put on the express elevator to hell. So pretty much all the bases are covered without even thinking about governmental involvement … why would I care so much that the gov’t also be riding shotgun in my Jesusmobile?
There is no conceivable way to win these people over to voting for a Democrat. The things they want are fundamentally incompatible with the Democratic platform. If the Democrats start caving to these assholes in a desperate attempt to win their unwinnable votes, then we’re screwed.
Another reason it’s kind of bonkers to cite a Presidential candidate’s stated position on abortion as the one criteria that matters is Presidents don’t really have that much influence on abortion law.
Before Trump there had already been five Republicans in the White House since Roe v. Wade and none even came particularly close to overturning the ruling.
There is no conceivable way to win these people over to voting for a Democrat. The things they want are fundamentally incompatible with the Democratic platform.
I’m not so sure. Trump voters were not a monolithic group. I’ve spoken to a number of Republicans who ended up reluctantly voting Trump not because they liked him but because they sure as hell weren’t voting for Clinton. Some of these people told me they would have considered voting for Bernie. These are people I know personally and I believe they were sincere.
You’re probably right that the raving white-supremacists are probably beyond hope, but they don’t make up the entirety of Trump voters.
Rural / small city America has been hit hard by economic and industrial shifts and opioid abuse, and something is going to have to be done to address that.
On the other hand:
The same thing happened in big cities 40 years ago, and rural / small city whites didn’t give a flying fuck because the deindustrialization and shattered communities and drug abuse were happening in big cities full of blacks and all those troubles must be their fault, right?
And then there’s the important point:
“You need to give us an opportunity to admit we may have been wrong without saying we’re bad people."
But then:
But you know, I’m tired of getting called a cuck and libtard and beta male.
Yeah, no. To paraphrase Margaret Atwood: Trump voters are afraid we’ll laugh at them, we’re afraid they’ll GET US KILLED-- because we’re an immigrant, or Muslim, or Jewish, or gay, or trans, or black or by rolling back our health care, or by poisoning our water, or just because Trump stumbles into a war with Iran, North Korea, or China. They made their choice. They put a thin-skinned, racist, man-child in the most powerful office in the world, who can launch nukes as easily as he whines on twitter. They have made us and our children demonstrably unsafe, and I will never forgive them for it.
I’ve heard the shitty, racist way they rationalize the opioid epidemic hitting the midwest - it’s that “poor blacks don’t have jobs because they do drugs, poor whites do drugs because they don’t have jobs.” Which is some bullshit.
Mae, an only child, has returned home to Possum Springs, where times have changed since the closing of its coal mines. Now living in her parents’ attic, she discovers she possesses certain paranormal abilities, and uncovers a dark mystery that leads her into the nearby woods. Mae’s friends include Bea, a cigarette-smoking alligator; Mae’s best friend Gregg, a fox; and Gregg’s partner, a bear named Angus. Paste describes the themes covered as “mental illness, depression, the stagnancy of the middle and lower classes, and the slow death of small town America.”
Co-designer Scott Benson grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian household in Pennsylvania and knows what has come to be called Trump country well. I’m really looking forward to playing it.
They already did. The big delusion we’re all laboring under right now is that the GOP “won” and Democrats “lost”. Republicans lost just as bigly as Dems. In fact, they lost the thread well before Trump even announced, he’s just a consequence of the leadership vacuum they left hovering over a base of moralism, bigotry and veiled threats of violence dating back to Gingrich.
Every damn one of those reasons listed are absolutely untenable to anyone with a solitary gram of empathy. I don’t know if it qualifies as judgement to call a spade a spade.
Stupid uninformed racist whiners. EVERY one of them.
I work with a guy that has a “Proud to be a Deplorable” sticker on his (brand new) truck. That guy and the supporters interviewed in Mr Altman’s essay can suck it. I am tired of journalists and armchair psychiatrists trying to get into the heads of these people. There is nothing inside them but fear, hate, intolerance and misdirected feelings of rage.
I wasn’t talking about swing voters or moderate Republicans who may be convinced to switch their vote by a candidate who actually understands the economic anxiety of rural whites (to whatever extent that was actually a motivating factor, because it never seems to come up anywhere but in political thinkpieces). I was specifically referring to the people in this interview who said that they would always vote anti-abortion, or that immigration is bad, or that “our culture” is something that somehow needs “protecting” (protecting from what?). Those positions are untenable for any Democratic candidate who wants to motivate their base to the polls. There is absolutely no reason why any Democrat should listen to these people as though they might be convinced to vote for them. If you want their votes, run as a Republican.
But to speak of your friends, what did they hate so much about Hillary Clinton that they thought Trump was a sane, reasonable alternative? Were they just not listening to literally any single thing that came out of his mouth?
