That's quite unfair. Trump's support cut across a wide swath of (mostly white) Americans, including educated and/or well-off coastal and Midwest voters. Many, many people who considered themselves well-informed, in the mainstream, and in their right mind, voted for him. And nothing changes until you can convince those people of the truth, which is that they screwed up.
Also, nothing changes while the wedge being driven by the powers who want a populace divide has power, on both sides.
It's by design that those splits happen, when the desk jockeys earning six-figures are seen (and a lot of times, see themselves) as a completely different caste of people than the factory workers, gig workers, etc. it sucks all the air out of the room from real issues: less fortunate people left behind, lack of opportunities, the encroaching of work precarity which will eventually turn even to the current high-earning workers. It completely erases any reasonable public discourse about the real causes of all the social malaise symptoms we experience on the day-to-day.
It's harder to give any sympathy to people voting against their best interests, they've been swindled, bamboozled, and are completely oblivious to the bamboozle, which makes it all the more frustrating. Still, at least extending some pity to their ignorance might help oneself to feel less angry (but still disappointed) about their decisions, they don't know better and it fucking sucks.
> Still, at least extending some pity to their ignorance might help oneself to feel less angry (but still disappointed) about their decisions, they don't know better and it fucking sucks.
The issue is that this isn't a new phenomenon. This has been happening since at least Reagan (over 40 years ago). That cross-section of America has decided to vote against their interests in every major election for decades. I'm over it.
And instead of recognizing that like normal people, they want to push the onus onto literally anything else (immigrants, trans people, higher education). Fuck that. And fuck them for continuing to want to drag us back to the stone age.
It's not but it's designed to not be a new phenomenon. People are kept uneducated, ignorant about the world, how it works, why does it work, how society works, etc.
They are fed lies and don't have the capacity to understand they are lies. It's partly their fault (for the lack of curiosity) but it's also systemic, such a phenomenon can only happen in this scale if there are systems fostering, and procreating it.
Not saying your feelings are invalid, at all, they are absolutely understandable but it's also the reaction wanted by the ones keeping others uneducated: a larger divide, an ever increasing gap between the people most similar in society. It's divide-and-conquer, we waste our time and energy raging against folks who are purely ignorant, not against the ones keeping them ignorant and easily manipulated. We lost our temper trying to converse with them, which further increases the division.
Not here to give any solutions or tell you to change behaviours, applying in real life a more measured approach to reach these people is really fucking hard, frustrating, etc. but just saying that the reaction of "fuck'em" is exactly part of the strategy for continuing dividing and conquering us.
I don't disagree that those in power don't necessarily see this divide as a bad thing. And I gave a ton of leeway to those who voted for him in 2016. But a lot has changed since then.
what's even worse is not just how stupid things are, but how mean they are as well. And I absolutely not saying that calling them stupid is a solution, but it's THE ONLY LANGUAGE THEY UNDERSTAND. Seriously. The last 8 years have been chalk full of articles and pieces on how Democrats can reach those people, and they all essentially say the same thing: They like that he's an asshole. So fuck them.
I thought this election had much lower turnout than the last? That coupled with the fact that incumbents lost globally due to inflation, it isn't surprising that Trump won.
Pretending it was because we didn't baby the MAGA voters enough is misguided, IMO.
Lower turnout for Democrats, not Trump. Most of the stories about some demographic skewing right in 2024 are exaggerating the trend because most of those people voted for him in 2020, too, but many Biden voters stayed home.
(I’m not saying that nobody changed their vote, only that looking at percentage point changes distorts the view unless you factor in disproportionate no-show rates.)
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton said the quiet part out loud recently: the efforts that he characterized as fighting voter fraud were straight up suppression of votes in Democratic majority districts.
Exactly. The characterization that the entire margin was caused by Democrats staying home is hiding the fact that many were fraudulently disenfranchised.
"the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect."
Many of those voters aren't ill-informed, they're simply ok with a dictatorial jackass running the county, so long as that dictatorial jackass looks and acts like them, and does the things that agree with their world-view.
