I am disgusted that so many Americans support Donald Trump when his mendacity and incompetence are so widely known. Some of the GOP and political right's high profile figures are almost as bad: Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert and more.
I am disgusted at the corruption on the U.S. Supreme Court by justices like Thomas and Alito, and by the gross disregard for judicial norms and logic and common sense in many of the rulings it has made since the 6-3 conservative majority was put in place on the court (through dubious political tactics).
I am tired of the counter-majoritarian rules of the U.S. federal government lead to gridlock most of the time.
I am tried of having to deal with people who make bad decisions based upon the misinformation they receive from Fox News and less prestigious conservative news outlets.
I am tired of having my country's policies influenced by people who don't believe in evolution, who think the world is flat, who think the moon landing was faked, who think that the U.S. government is hiding secret technologies it received from aliens after they crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, who think that Noah's flood really happened, who think that vaccines are a threat but prayer heals, and on and on and on. And, I am tired of the nut jobs like Tucker Carlson and Evangelical Christian clergy who perpetuate these absurdities.
I am tired of living in a country where one of two major political parties, the Republican Party, absolutely refuses to acknowledge reality and embraces corruption and criminality and political violence. I want a political environment where you can have your own opinions but you are not free to make up your own facts, and everyone has to obey the law.
I am tired of living in a world where a handful of authoritarian bad actors like the current leaders of Russia and North Korea, can cause so immense harm to global peace.
I despair that in the 21st century, Saudi Arabia is still executing people for witchcraft.
And yet... the world gets better every year (over year) and longevity gets better every year (over year) (with the inevitable random fluctuations). The old ways die hard, and require generational changes to complete. Because old folks are intrinsically conservative, change takes time. The 20th century included several large societal movements that attempted to move faster than the "normal speed of change" and wound up breaking more than they fixed. It will take time for that pain to leave common memory.
ReplyDeleteSo this kinda addresses your question "what things are hard to change?". LBGT rights are something (that in retrospect) were easy to change. US Black-White relations are being driven by demographic mixing in a way more powerful than any elite driven policies. Making drugs less illegal only required the dope smokers to graduate to the ruling generation. Moving away from a capitalistic form of economy would be very hard. Getting global winners (US, China, Europe) to give up nationalism? Also very hard.
With respect to why so many US folks (even some of my rural relatives) are willing to support Trump... that one my all-seeing-eyes fail me on. I do hope that Biden takes a hard turn to the center before it's too late. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump rolls out a Medicare For All plank first (i.e. before Biden) as part of his populistic platform.
@Guy
ReplyDeleteOne particularly distressing thing is that there are groups of Americans for whom longevity is decreasing in the medium term (not just random statistical noise) and there is a heavily overlapping group of Americans for whom economic well-being is static or slipping.
"The old ways die hard, and require generational changes to complete. Because old folks are intrinsically conservative, change takes time. The 20th century included several large societal movements that attempted to move faster than the "normal speed of change" and wound up breaking more than they fixed. It will take time for that pain to leave common memory."
Perhaps. But there is nothing natural or conservative about the political right in the U.S. being O.K. with extreme corruption on the part of U.S. Supreme Court justices (especially Thomas and Alito).
Media outlets that actively and willfully spew false information as Fox News does are likewise not what old people living today grew up with. Media commitment to at least trying to be truthful was the norm from WWII into the 1980s. Similarly with respect to:
"I am tired of having my country's policies influenced by people who don't believe in evolution, who think the world is flat, who think the moon landing was faked, who think that the U.S. government is hiding secret technologies it received from aliens after they crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, who think that Noah's flood really happened, who think that vaccines are a threat but prayer heals, and on and on and on. And, I am tired of the nut jobs like Tucker Carlson and Evangelical Christian clergy who perpetuate these absurdities."
There is no one alive who can remember contemporaneous news reports from the Scopes Monkey trial or seeing it first hand. Plenty of older people literally saw man land on the Moon and their view of Earth from space. The date attributed to the Roswell crash is 1947, when Biden was five years old and Trump was one year old, and Tucker Carlson's parents hadn't even met yet.
There has always been some trickle of batshit crazy out there, but the craziness is not a holdover from the old days that older Americans lived through. Its has been amplified far more recently.
"With respect to why so many US folks (even some of my rural relatives) are willing to support Trump... that one my all-seeing-eyes fail me on."
Mysterious and yet very important. A bad combination.
Hum... "Media outlets that actively and willfully spew false information as Fox News does are likewise not what old people living today grew up with. Media commitment to at least trying to be truthful was the norm from WWII into the 1980s". This would imply that my generation still believes the news somehow. We're told they can't be trusted, but the person in the box in living room is still Walter Cronkite deep down. So the question could be rephrased "Why don't you realize your being scammed old fart?" But there are so many voices, so loud, so fast, so... incomprehensible. It's just too damn hard to try to keep up. And in particular, leading edge liberal thought is so complex/post-modern that it can't easily be communicated, and the simplified first grade versions fail the smell test. So in answer: Yes. No. It's complicated.
ReplyDelete"Why don't you realize your being scammed old fart?"
ReplyDeleteNot being scammed and know it due to a bullshit detector and a grounding in the big picture and little realities of life.
"leading edge liberal thought is so complex/post-modern"
I'm not a big fan of post-modernism and the like. I was viewed as a conservative at my very liberal undergraduate college, Oberlin College, because of that. But this strain is not foundational to liberal ideas, and neither is outright Marxism.
"that it can't easily be communicated, and the simplified first grade versions fail the smell test."
Maybe seeing is believing that the right hasn't seen enough. Certainly that's the case with immigration, where people in places with the most immigrants are the most pro-immigration and people with the least immigrants are most xenophobic. Live in a place where lots of gay men and lesbians are out, and it isn't that big of a deal. Experience what someone who is trangender is like an it all becomes more obvious that it is real and natural.
Interestingly enough... Gay and Lesbian are not hot buttons for my rural kin, and they can point to folks they know, even in the most isolated areas. Some aspects of Trans will drive them to distraction, pretty much the entire female bathroom and women's sports things. (But they have never encountered this directly.) But not being Trans as such. In small town Texas and Missouri (my stomping grounds) the integration of Hispanic immigrants is, from what I hear from my kin, an accepted fact of life. It's rarely noted and I don't detect a deep layer of hidden resentment. It's like the TV view of illegals flooding across the border is decoupled from the day-2-day interactions with their Hispanic neighbors. So strange. I guess it goes back to the observation that TV is a high bandwidth channel that can be used to reprogram individuals, even if they think they are running good anti-malware.
ReplyDeleteInteresting observations.
ReplyDelete"I guess it goes back to the observation that TV is a high bandwidth channel that can be used to reprogram individuals, even if they think they are running good anti-malware."
And yet, anyone, anywhere in the U.S. can access Fox News and conservative sites and social media on the Internet, country western music and culture, and to the extent that it is still a thing, in most places, conservative talk radio and Christian radio stations. But political identity and leanings are heavily driven by people's lived environments.
Conservatives are concentrated in rural and small town America, in exurbs, and in the Rust Belt. Liberals are concentrated in cities and especially large metropolitan areas, and in tourism centers where most people live in densely populated towns and resorts even though these places seem like they are sparsely populated at a less fine grained level.
Swing voters are in the liminal places: first ring suburbs, medium sized cities in the rust belt and urban states, retirement communities.
In something of a reversal of recent U.S. history (but in line with global tendencies) conservatives tend to be less educated, less affluent, and even if they aren't poor, less economically secure (e.g. farmers and self-employed people who have less predictable incomes).
This isn't the entire story. But race and religion and age mostly explain the outliers from these trends.
Mormons tend to be conservative despite being more educated and more urban than other conservatives. Kansas is conservative leaning despite being reasonably well educated, even outside rural areas and farmers, in part, because it is very religious.
Florida and Arizona teeter between the right and left because they have so many retirees and people from older generations are more conservative than people from younger generations, but as non-Evangelical Christian northerners from urban areas are less conservative than southerners for their age.
People who aren't white or aren't Christian lean left because white Christians don't welcome them, are at best indifferent towards their concerns and sensitivities, and are at worst openly malicious towards them and fear them. If New Mexico didn't have so many Hispanics and Native Americans, it would be a red state. Working class whites and working class blacks have lots of shared interests, but for some reason the right longs for a race war instead of helping them to unite and find common cause.