It was heartening to see a couple of polls come out recently showing that, for the first time in a long time, Americans trust the Democrats more than the Republicans on the economy. It’s insane that this can come as a surprise, and that these two parties are even running as close to one another as they are is absurd. Trusting the Republicans more on the economy at this point is like trusting Sean Combs to be your babysitter.
For decades now, the Republican Party has built its electoral success on myths and lies. Ronald Reagan was the last Republican president who your average person would say left the country better off than he found it. I wouldn’t say that, for a range of ideological reasons, but I’m a liberal. I’m ready to admit, however, that your average person would say that about him.
But that’s a long, long time ago now. You have to be in your fifties at least to have any memory of it. But the last three Republican presidents—Bush, Bush, and Trump—have been disasters.
I’m skeptical. That ~33-36% of remaining hard right voters are so into the weeds with their emotional investment that I doubt they will ever reach a moral or pragmatic epiphany. They have proven time and again they will do Olympic-level mental gymnastics to avoid “their side” taking any blame. And no amount of heinous acts from their cult leaders will sway them.
But even if, by some miracle, a few % of them do wake the fuck up to reality, it’s a sad statement that it took this much to do it. It will have taken the economy tanking, cost of living trauma, turning on our allies, idiotic tariff recriminations, a pointless war and the murders/losses therein, environmental catastrophe, the imprisonment or deportation of their own friends/loved ones, countless new sex scandals from their leaders, incessant dodging of existing leadership sex scandals (cough The Epstein Files! cough), children dying domestically in various tragic ways (school shootings, preventable diseases, etc), police/ICE brutality of innocent people, tainted food fiascos, etc etc etc… to open their eyes.
And the country (and world) in chaos is a fucking hard price to pay for a small proportion of loyal hardcore GOP voters finally smelling the roses.
They frequently drone on about the ‘woke mind virus’. Yet again it’s just projection. The real ‘mind virus’ is the one fucking up their heads, and by extension fucking up the world.
My parents have moved from defending Trump to saying “I don’t want to talk about it”. They still have some bullshit ill-defined excuses not to vote Democrat, though.
They don’t yet understand that the word for Germans who didn’t like Hitler but couldn’t bring themselves to support the opposition was still " Nazi."
They are great at projection because they blathered on and on about conservatives being canceled. Canceled, where? And I have yet to see any good example of any of them being actually canceled.
Meanwhile, they actively seek to not only “cancel” everyone they don’t like via the power of the government (see: Colbert for instance), but also fire them, imprison them, deport them, put them in camps, and even murder them on the streets.
This is taken down nearly perfectly in this video, by the way. Everyone should watch this, since David Brooks spreads this kind of stuff all the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46tpqFxfomI
I’m convinced that they’ve met the edge of their biological intellect and asking anything more of them is akin to asking an ant to solve 2+2. Its just not going to happen.
I would not be surprised to find that a lot of people with various mental disorders vote conservative, too.
Dark triad traits, etc…not sure what traits tend to track along with being a RWA (right wing authoritarian), but it would not surprise me to find a bias toward being a Republican, since that is essentially their platform.
I think people with mental disorders are more likely to be victimized by Republicans. Republicans aren’t mentally ill, don’t let them off the hook, they’re motivated towards self-interest, and know exactly what they’re doing: being greedy assholes.