I probably know more conservatives than you do. Here are my anecdotal general categories of Trump voters:
They always vote Republican because abortion. Or small business or bathrooms or boys kissing, but mostly abortion.
They are racists, and are damned proud of it.
They are racists, and were not particularly proud of it, but then Trump came along, and now they know they have company, even though some of their new friends are a bit rough on the edges, see 2 above
They are assholes who engage in wage theft and shady dealings, and are basically Trumps but on a smaller scale, and see themselves justified by Trump.
This is a boring excuse. “My vote is meaningless” is the standard excuse of the non-voter and has been for centuries. Things are Gerrymandered, but leaving yourself out of the data pool means you will never be seen as any value by the numbers-based politicians people hate.
Extremely real issue that is a massive problem in the US, and we can simply look to Puerto Rico at what election day can turn into. This is absolutely engineered this way.
Also a problem.
This is also an excuse. Apathy is never the solution to disenfranchisement, and while the police direct intimidation at polls that are also turned into the single way to vote just giving up is not a solution. Understanding why someone is not voting is important, and so is someone trying to encourage them to vote - and voting is never going to be a good carrot.
This is also an excuse. Not voting is dramatically worse than voting for yourself, let alone voting for the many, many candidates that don’t have corporate backing and support their issues. Not voting because the purity of your vote is inexcusable.
Also, I’m not blaming the poor because the middle and upper class of America also doesn’t vote. The recent (in my lifetime) changes in voting patterns are probably mostly due to suppression tactics that promote an unfair advantage to the religious right, and conservative suburbanites. However, the US has never had a good voter turnout even among the lilliest white people without financial problems. Those are the people I am speaking directly about when I say they don’t have an excuse, especially since there have been increases in poor and minority voters in the past decade.
We have a sub-20% level of voter participation off presidential elections.
I didn’t say I didn’t understand why they wouldn’t vote, I said apathy doesn’t work and anything that boils down to the logic of ‘nothing is going to change anyways’ is an excuse. I support the hard work many groups do delivering this message to black communities - especially in places like NC where the effort is most obviously targeting minority groups.
Direct police intimidation at the polls is an entirely different beast, and that I feel is a big problem.
I think your message was fine, even if it wasn’t accurate. Politicians in several states have openly bragged about their suppression efforts, and anyone denying the injustice targeting minorities in the US is an idiot. And I understand that you think it’s gotten past the tipping point for voting alone to work, and that might be true - but I live here and would not like to flee the country with my family and that’s where that prediction gets to.
Historically, the voting drives in the 50s, 60s, and 70s in the Civil Rights movement made a massive, immediate difference. The constitution hasn’t been rewritten (yet), so a few years can completely flip things around still. So I hold onto hope.
I don’t want you to flee the country; if you do, we’re all doomed. Americans themselves have by far the best chance of stopping this; the rest of the world are very literally forced to rely upon the decency of ordinary Americans to save their lives.
It isn’t too late; the situation can still be saved. Non-fascist Americans outnumber the Trumpeters three to one. With numbers like that, even a peaceful movement can overthrow a bent government. Argentina is the most recent demonstration of that.
But if you wait for the courts and the midterms, we’re all fucked. You need to be in the streets, and it needs to be now.
This sounds like my experience, actually. But, if you ask them in so many words, it’s abortion 75% of the time, and “I want lower taxes” the rest. Even in hillbilly junction, most won’t cop to being racist, at least not in front of me.
abortion = racism because it was all about making it so black people can’t get access to population control and that’s a big thing that holds people in poverty
Yes, I know very few conservatives. They few I know through family relations diverge from many of the stereotypes. Especially around race. They have helped several local Hispanic families in their area for the last 20 plus years. Including helping the kids go to college. One of the daughters just finished her PH.d in women’s studies. The parents are not legal as far as I know. They would and have done just about anything to help these families. And yet they then watch FOX and still fly into a panic about the “Bad Mexican’s” coming here with drugs (ignoring the fact that there own son has been a full time raging meth addict for 10 plus years). And when we said before the election Trump is going to lump all Hispanic people together including these families they insisted he would would only get the bad ones. I just don’t get it. They love these people without reservation and yet do the mental gymnastics that all the racist shit Trump says doesn’t apply to their friends.
I agree, I meant once the authoritarian power truly sets in I’m gone. I’m not going to be a citizen of Gilead once “Islamic Extremists” machine-gun the congress. I’m throwing my support where I can now, and I carry a positive outlook that requires work and not relying on the decency of Americans.
[quote=“CleverEmi, post:346, topic:499”]
Even in hillbilly junction, most won’t cop to being racist, at least not in front of me.
[/quote]I have had a depressing number of people confess their racism since the election results, though at this point they claimed it never happened in a strange gaslighting attempt to the public announcements expecting “silent majority” support.
The conservatives I know fall into two camps as far as cultures go: the backward, and the priveleged.
Some extended family members have lived their whole lives in tiny, rural, 99% white towns and are afraid of everything unfamiliar, whether it’s brown people or LGBT (turning a blind eye to some of their own family members) or the internet. Some are entirely steeped in redneck culture for whatever reason, and all the self-defeating politics that goes with it. Some… just seem like they should know better, but have calcified into little balls of xenophobia and are willing to believe every stupid, negative thing said about others.
And some are relatively wealthy, and will vote for anything that lets them hold on to as much of their hoard as possible. Oh, there are white American kids who can’t afford to eat? Here’s five bucks, but keep your taxes outta here. This orange guy is an utter fucking moron, but he wants to lower my taxes. And so on.
I suddenly realised. I have been trying to find historical parallels to Trump and I’ve been looking on the wrong continent.
Loudmouthed buffoon of extreme views who can’t help saying things he’s supposed to keep quiet? People he should listen to are ignored and leave? Complete futtwicks are accepted into his inner circle and make policy?
Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Did not end well. Expect the Schlieffen plan to invade Canada quickly and knock it out of the war before invading Mexico.
Worst of all I start to wonder if this is just a fantasy I’ve cooked up, or a sudden burst of percipience. Watch for the Secret Service being issued with pointy helmets.
As I’ve written elsewhere, I think that the basic problem with Trump supporters is zero-sum thinking. Life is a big game of king of the hill, and they find it absurd that they should be expected to “break the rules” and cede ground because some other group isn’t playing well enough.
You can even frame social issues like abortion in this way. We all know that it’s not really about life, or else pro-life churches would be busy raising money to support poor children. Really, it’s that they disagree with the basic proposition that we’re all better off if we respect one another’s right to live as we choose. For them, every person who marries their own gender or believes in evolution is an active threat to their way of life, and so they think they need to enforce their beliefs in order to preserve them.
The problem with mass demonstrations is that they don’t actually change anyone’s attitudes. In fact, you could make an argument that relentless campaigning on both the left and the right has only contributed to a hyper-partisan climate where people’s opinions are so entrenched that it’s no longer possible to have conversations across the political divide.
I think there’s a higher return on investment in:
Local politics, initiatives - It’s hard to climb a tower, but easy to plant a seed.
Culture - People have to be able to imagine a different world before they’re prepared to vote for it.
Technology - Technology changes the playing field — look at solar energy.
Loud, confrontational approaches provoke resistance and are best answered by subtle jujitsu. If you’re too focused on Trump, you’re not seeing the undercurrents that make much of his efforts ultimately futile.
I ain’t talking about US-style brief symbolic demonstrations; I’m talking about real protest, Argentina style.
Get in the street, block traffic, make noise, refuse police orders to move, and stay there until the job is done. It isn’t intended to change attitudes; it’s intended to make it impossible for business as usual to continue until the issue is resolved.
Less street theatre, more General Strike.
I think those are important and worthwhile things, and I hope that you have an opportunity to return to them once your country is no longer is the grip of anti-democratic fascists.
But gentle persuasion and incremental improvements are not adequate for the current situation.
The TrumpGOP are not going to allow themselves to be removed from power by an election when they control the administration of it. The US military in the hands of aggressive white supremacists represents an unacceptable and immediate threat to all people everywhere.
abortion is always a bullshit excuse. If anyone really wanted to lower abortion, then they would invest in a full range in human health care and health education. And also general education at least K - 12, preferably K - 16. But noooooooo we can’t do any of that because creeping socialism or some such bullshit
But we both know that things will have to get a lot worse before anything on that scale is likely to happen.
That may be so, but let’s recognize that the voters aren’t the only—or necessarily the most important—check on their power. The oligarchy isn’t unified behind Trump and the GOP, nor by any means is the national security apparatus. Even the Republican Party suffers from sharp internal divisions. If money and power can steal an election, money and power can un-steal an election. And, it can do far worse.
That may, indeed, mean that someone in a tower or a bunker decides that a general strike is going to succeed.
Meanwhile, I find it significant that we may only be alive today because Barbara Tuchman wrote The Guns of August, and John F. Kennedy read it just prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The “gentle and incremental” approach is so subtle that you rarely notice the difference it makes.
I’d pointed this out to others, but it never occurred to me to point it out here. Good ol’ Kaiser Wilhelm II!
Have you read “The Zimmerman Telegram” by Barbara W. Tuchman? Seems they wanted to get Mexico and Japan in on invading the US through Texas before we could get into the WWI. And used the US telegram “roundabout” to do it, too! Canada, however, is not mentioned.
When Woodrow Wilson found out - through the Brits, who’d discovered the whole thing - it was that, and not the sinking of the Luistania that made him declare war. Or so the book says.