this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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The average progressive or even liberal in the US hates hearing this, but the vast, vast majority of Trumpers are actually "okay" people, and you would all get along splendidly in just about any other context.
The problem is though, they are dumb. Don't get me wrong or think I'm sticking up for them. I just have some amount of sympathy and pity because I grew up out in the boonies in Southwestern USA, I was raised conservative and only flipped in my 20's after seeing too much horror and war hurt people I cared about, and by extension, I learned to care for more than just the people I know.
A lot of people haven't learned that. We take for granted that empathy is a learned skill, and we expect others to have it on demand and we tend to resent those who don't exercise it. My take is that we're expecting people to exercise muscles they've never even stretched. These are people locked in communities that they will likely spend their whole lives in, often times decaying outskirts of America, rampant with drugs and alcohol abuse, stuck in low-wage jobs or jobs that demand them to spend every waking moment working. They have no time nor opportunity to learn how to incorporate "care" into their daily misery, much less political knowledge. Then someone like Trump comes along, someone they only hear clips of and hear their "news station" praise while simultaneously explaining that all their problems are because of people who "hate america" and are trying to destroy families with scaaary things like abortion and gender-fluidity. It makes sense if your brain is desperately looking for a story to explain why you're so unhappy. Which is how all our brains work.
We all have to remember that the worst people in the world are identical to us. We could have been born in their lives with their ignorance and tunnel vision, and all their feelings of fighting against a stacked-deck and hopelessness against change that will (supposedly) take away their only comforts in life.
I am getting really uncomfortable with the hate the left is directing at people who are simply dumb as fuck. Yes, they are dangerous, yes they are capable of doing better, and on top of that the only examples we SEE of this segment of America is the most horrific and malicious, the people storming the capitol or screaming at rallys or beating up protestors. They are the worst, but not necessarily the rule.
I had family members who were going to vote Trump and JUST needed to see the clips of him speaking that don't make it to Facebook news feeds to change their mind. Approach this from a place of education and compassion and you will all have better results.
Let's save our hate for the real evil, the grifters and pundits who are pied pipers for the ignorant. They are smart and know what they are doing and it's pure evil.
My personal experience essentially echoes what you've said. I've usually found that when I actually ask Trump supporters, which is probably most of the people I know, what they think and why, they are pretty candid about it. They will also voice frustrations, many of which I can understand or even agree with them on. There is a lot more common ground there than you might think.
The problem is that most of the issues are complex and nuanced. Not that surprising. Issues that impact the population of an entire country, or even a sizeable chunk of it, are bound to be pretty complex. Here's where things go off the rails.
Kind of like you said, Joe Blow from Louisiana is often uneducated at best or a complete moron at worst. Joe Blow does not understand all the complexity surrounding the issues he's upset about and figures that if he doesn't understand it, neither does anyone else. He's also a little too proud to admit he doesn't understand it.
This is why Republican party completely abandoned an issues bases platform, aside from completely fabricated pearl clutching social issues like those scary tRaNs PeOpLe or AboRtIoN. They know full well that they have nothing when it comes to meaningful solutions to actual problems and if they did, the few supporters they have with functioning brain cells would start to ask to many pesky questions. A divide and conquer strategy is much simpler and more effective; albeit incredibly destructive.
I have a gaming group that I regularly spend time with, they are about as diverse as you can possibly imagine. We have back-country gun-toting conservatives playing alongside college campus protesting trans girls, hispanic immigrants, US marines, housewives, people from China and Philippines, midwest American Christians and one extremely loving gay couple who do everything together.
While we do have a few ground rules, more like courtesy guidelines, like no arguing about politics, it's not something I've ever had to enforce or moderate, and if you were to overhear the group on an average gaming night, you would think they are just the closest and tightest group of people who lift each other up, help each other out, laughing together and telling lewd jokes until they laugh so hard together that they wheeze.
This group has been the end-product of years of "distillation" in that the people who have issues with other people's identity or politics or can't set aside ego to have fun with people and make new friends, they just have naturally fallen by the wayside, so what's left is a group of people who are bound together by something much stronger than politics or ideology, and that's intelligence.
The one common thread that everyone left here has is that they are sharp, they like to talk through issues, they talk about ideas and science and sociology and relationships and enjoy the very simple act of trying to understand other people.
Curiosity about others will carry you through life far, far further than one might think.
This is also something that many people outside of the USA don't understand: 49% of the americans are not voting for the Trump/republican shit show that they see in their foreign media, but rather for a heavily editorialized image of the person and party.
More accurately, 49% of voters. Out of all of the eligible voters in the 2020 election only 66% actually voted. And, that election had the highest turnout in over a century.
So when trying to calculate how many eligible voters voted for Trump in 2020 you'll have to take the statistics above into consideration.
49% of 66% is 32% if my math is correct. 32% of eligible voters voted for Trump.
Sorry for being pedantic but it annoys me when people say that half of America supports Trump when it's just not true.
I’m bad at math, but should that be 32% of Americans not voters.
33%, but yeah. Both are true.
66% of eligible are voting, 33% of eligible are not voting. Of the 66% that did vote, half of those (I used 49%) voted for Trump. Half of the 66% is 33%.
So, of the eligible voters, 33% voted Biden, 33% voted Trump, and 33% didn't vote.
Or, if you want math:
.66 * .49 = .32 or 32%
Edit: I misunderstood the question and gave an off-topic answer. Someone else commented the correct reason: not all Americans are eligible to vote. Children, felons in certain States, etc. Since they didn't/can't vote they're not counted in the "half of America" statistic often quoted.
Half of eligible voters voted for trump, which is about 32% of America in 2020.
Forget empathy. Trumperinas do NOT vote their own interests.
MAGAGAs (make america great and glorious again) are poor and oppressed but vote to lower the taxes on the billionaires and to raise them on themselves, vote to take away public services from themselves, vote to remove the remaining 2 regulations on the megacorps, banks, and big landlords that oppress them.
In a world that made sense everyone in favor of deregulation should be forced to ride Boeing, and leave us, the sane folks, alone.
They got convinced that the interests of the billionaire class align with their own. That's stupidity. You can't fix stupid with empathy.
I don't want empathetic people. I want people to rep their actual material interests, cogently and sincerely.
Right now we have people voting for the "leopards eating faces" party get surprised when their faces get eaten, because the morons wanted to believe they were the leopards too.
Servative trash. No mercy for the servatives. And I am tired of all the moralizing language. Kumba fucking ya. Horseshit. We ain't gonna hug and kiss this shit all better. Morality is a fairy tale and we cannot base a world worth living in on a lie. Morality is a lie on the scale of religion. Morality is what causes people to self-restrict and self-censor. Morality is what prevents the guillotines.
If morality were against the status quo and against the interests of the billionaires, it would have been outlawed!
We all need to rep our material interests. Even one billionaire is a policy failure.