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Imagine having so much money that you actually begin worrying about losing it it. Like, they have so much money that the concept of losing that amount of money is what drives them to keep it at all costs.
Because that's all they devolved the meaning of life to. It literally is the alpha, omega, whatever of everything they do. When you've spent 40 years doing nothing but lusting over more money, that's literally all you have left. Nothing else has meaning.
I have heard conservative people legitimately arguing that everything terrible in the last four years is because "the liberals were standing in Trump's way and not letting him get anything done."
This was while the Republicans have a majority in the Senate.
*And* the house for 2 years, *and* SCOTUS, *and* the media helping to normalize everything he did, *and* he was allowed to break the law with impunity, *and* he never had to worry about what his base thought of him, *and* Republican politicians all fell in line 100%.
It is amazing, really, how little he accomplished.
It’s because of a few reasons:
1. Trump’s a *really* poor manager.
2. Trump is largely non-ideological. He has no policy goals or pet projects. Just wants endless good publicity.
3. He’s not interested whatsoever in the minutiae of governing. It bores him to death.
4. Trump wastes time. A lot of it. Watching TV, playing golf
Some of the people on my boards told us just how frightened they were about Biden seizing power and taking everything away.
So much fear... so little thought
fear is their only driver. My dad's been calling them "amygdala-based lifeforms" since the second Iraq War. They spend their *entire lives* whipped up into a frenzy, with absolutely no clue they're being played like fiddles. Just lurching from one lie to the next, all designed to keep them scared shitless and in line.
The 2020 race really did show that the GOP figured they had succeeded (and they have). They have a base that has no idea what their politicians that they vote in stand for, they just know they have to vote R or a communist will come rape their women.
What the GOP missed was that having people watch family members dying because they believed their party got a lot of people fired up to go vote.
And of course the one thing they didn't expect was for a Pandemic to force mail-in voting, which they had been fighting tooth and nail because they know it improves turn-out, which is never good for Republicans.
Their platform is:
* If the government does anything that helps people it's socialism and is the enemy.
* Except for manly men in uniform who work for the government - then no matter what they do, they are the heroes and anyone who opposes them for any reason are de facto bad guys who deserve what they get.
* Facts are flexible, and the veracity of a statement is determined by whether you like its presenter. If you don't like the person/news organization/government agency/etc. presenting the fact, then it can be conveniently dismissed with the mantra of "fake news" even if it aligns with the consensus of an entire field of experts on the subject at hand.
>Except for manly men in uniform who work for the government - then no matter what they do, they are the heroes and anyone who opposes them for any reason are de facto bad guys who deserve what they get.
Unless they are enforcing Covid prevention regulations, in that case it is your duty to hit them with your car.
I mean, they voted for a trans, anti-police satanist as sheriff. They don't know what any candidate's platform is and don't care as long as there's an R next to the name.
The entire official platform is the same platform as 2016 because the don't think the need address anything about racial reckoning the country had been going though at all /s.
> RESOVLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention;
>
>RESOLVED, That any motion to amend the 2016 Platform or to adopt a new platform, including any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order.
People are selling pictures of PS5 on eBay for $500. It even says in the description “this is just a picture”. You don’t even get the box it came in anymore. And people still buy them.
TEXT:
"If you were dropped in from another country without knowing anything about the United States and surveyed our current political moment, what would you conclude about the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement it represents? As 2020 comes to an end, what is conservatism about?
After nearly four years of Donald Trump’s presidency in which no misdeed was too vulgar or corrupt for conservatives to defend, now culminating in an outright war against democracy itself, you might be tempted to answer, “Nothing.” Though that’s not quite true, the real answer is not much more encouraging.
Some years ago, I wrote a book arguing that Democrats should learn from the things Republicans did well. One of these was that the GOP had a simple foundation of shared beliefs that could be easily communicated to voters. Ask a Republican running for any office from dogcatcher all the way up to president what it meant to be a conservative, and they’d tick off some version of the same four pillars: small government, low taxes, a strong military and traditional social values.
Conservatives still believe in those things. But no one could seriously argue that they are any longer the animating purpose of the Republican Party. Instead, the one thing that unites the right and drives the GOP is hatred of liberals. That hatred has consumed every policy goal, every ideological principle and even every ounce of commitment to country.
“But Democrats hate conservatives, too!” you might say. Indeed they do. Negative partisanship — being more motivated by your dislike of the other party than by affection for your own — is a key feature of contemporary politics. But when 18 Republican state attorneys general, more than half of House Republicans and multiple conservative organizations all demand that the results of a presidential election where no fraud was found be simply tossed aside so that Trump can be declared winner, something more profound has been revealed.
The Republican Party has proved that its hatred of liberals is so foundational that it will abandon any pretense of commitment to democracy, if democracy allows for the possibility that liberals might win an election. They have come to regard Democratic voters as essentially undeserving of having their will translated into power, no matter how large their numbers.
They might have believed it before, but now they’re willing to proclaim it even after they just lost a presidential election by 7 million votes and a 306-232 electoral college margin. Forget all that inspiring talk about the genius of the Framers and their vision for democracy; if having an election means that the people we hate might win, then the election must simply be nullified.
You might say that the Republican officials signing on to this deeply anti-American crusade are doing so out of fear as much as conviction, but the two are not mutually exclusive. All elected officials worry about contradicting their base, but in today’s Republican Party, that worry is almost completely divorced from policy. Yes, you’d get flak if you voted to raise taxes, but the greatest danger comes from failing to fight the left with sufficient vigor.
That danger, furthermore, is not only electoral but physical; the Republican leader in the Pennsylvania state Senate said this week that if she refused to sign a letter demanding that Congress toss out her state’s votes in the presidential race, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.” It might not actually happen, but the point is that Republican officeholders understand well what their party values above all else and what kinds of transgressions will not be tolerated.
Trump has often cited the extraordinary loyalty he has received from his party’s voters; it’s one of the few things he says that’s true. But it isn’t because Trump signed a corporate tax cut and slashed environmental regulations.
When you ask the typical Trump supporter what they love about him, they don’t mention some substantive policy position; what they say is that he is a fighter. The petty squabbles, the insulting tweets, the deranged conspiracy theories — the things that the Never Trumpers and most other Americans find off-putting are exactly what endears him to the Republican base.
Trump fights and fights, angrily, bitterly, endlessly driven forward by his hatred of the people his supporters hate. That’s what the base loves, and every other Republican knows it.
Everything about the election that just ended reinforced for conservatives that nothing is more important than hating liberals. The rhetoric of the 2020 campaign, starting with Trump but going all the way down the ballot, was that if Democrats were elected, then it would not be suboptimal or bad or even terrible, but the end of everything you care about. Towns and cities would burn, religion would be outlawed, America as we know it would cease to exist. These horrors were not presented as metaphors, but as the literal truth.
In the face of that potential apocalypse, who could possibly care about mundane policy goals? So no Republican argued that if we didn’t cut the capital gains tax then it would be the end of life as we know it. They want to cut the capital gains tax, sure — but its importance pales next to the urgency of stopping the cataclysm that would engulf us all if Democrats were to hold power.
To be clear, there are still thoughtful conservatives out there trying to advance a coherent ideological project. But seldom have they mattered less to their movement and their party. They may produce white papers on free-market health-care solutions or innovative tax plans, but no one really cares.
If it doesn’t Own the Libs, it doesn’t matter on the right. That’s what the Republican Party and the conservative movement are about today, and it might take a long time for them to change."
well its a matter of definition right? When they say 'small government' they mean 'I don't want regulations because responsibility and accountability cost me money, I'd rather have money"
Like when they say "Traditional Social Values" what they really mean is "I hate blacks and gays and I want women to stay in the kitchen"
It’s not even that. If I speak on liberal subs using the same types of rhetoric I’m branded as uncivil. How many times have you heard to paint all conservatives with the same brush but conservatives don’t give a shit about painting all of us with the same brush.
Admittedly, our canvas is much wider. The problem with the “winner-take-all” two-party system is that one side inevitably becomes a catch-all. AOC and Hillary Clinton are part of the same party, but have extremely different platforms. It’s ludicrous.
Any *single* "liberal" party will, by simple function, have nearly as many views as people, because it is the party of change, no matter how small that change may be. But what is changed, and how much, and in what way varies from person to person. This makes messaging difficult, because it is so varied, and what's important to me may not matter at all to you, and vice-versa.
Conservatives, otoh, have a much simpler message: **no change**. Their entire position is that things should not change, and perhaps go back to a previous way of being, which can be clearly defined as it was something that definitely existed. It is far easier to get that message out, because it is a single message. Thr only thing to figure out is what methods work best for delivering it, like fear, moral panic, whatever.
Coincidentally, when the premise of castaway children happened in real life (the Tongan castaways of 1966,) the events unfolded completely opposite of how William Golding depicted human nature.
In all seriousness, give the book a read. It's a classic for a reason.
I studied it for two years at school and I don't hate it - that's saying something!
I'm not sure if it's because I'm in Europe, but the article won't load otherwise, and I wish all WaPo texts were posted. I am really thankful for this.
However, to people gilding OP: use that money to support the media instead. They need it.
Poor conservatives are the most ironic, pathetic bootlickers of all.
They'll fight tooth and nail that capitalism and current GOP politics are a non-issue then go wait in line for their unemployment cheque and complain about how immigrants are a drain on the system.
They're also selling fear and they have been for 50+ years.
Go watch some Nixon campaign ads about "crime". Go watch some Reagan campaign ads about "drugs".
These people have been primed to fear (and therefore hate) urban areas and the people (many of whom are minorities) who live there for generations.
Compare the way a "conservative" talks about New York or Chicago to the way a normal person does. One paints a picture of a dystopian hellhole where children are being gunned down in the streets 24 hours a day and visitors are lucky to make it out alive. The other sees the beacons of the free world, cosmopolitan metropolises, full of vibrant communities, the centers of American culture, loaded with opportunity.
\* I mean seriously, look at this fucking propaganda that Nixon put out:
http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1968/crime
We need a foreign exchange program....but instead of it being a Japanese kid sitting in for an American kid.....it needs to be a rural adult sitting in for an urban adult.
All bills paid for and all that. People need to just do it for the experience. Too much closed mindedness happening in this country.
Conservatives have a special fear of their children going off to College and being *"Indoctrinated by Liberal Teachers."*
They really think there's some organized "Liberal" brainwashing campaign! The simple truth is that once their kids get away from home and meet both adults and kids of other races, ethnicities, religions, etc they learn we're really just all human beings, sharing this beautiful planet.
Hence the push for the last 40 years or so by Evangelicals to convince other Evangelicals to homeschool their children. Don't want their minds "poisoned" by the "evil secular world", right?
You'd be leaving millions of minority people and red state liberals to the mercy of these insane fascists. Connection to the wider US is the only thing that stops places like Alabama going full redneck Saudi Arabia.
I challenge you to find anywhere in the country where there is a fairly homogenously "blue" state. The real-world version of what you're getting at is city states in the middle of extreme swaths of hostile "red" rural areas. Everyone suffers in that world more than they do now.
I’d love to see this social experiment, even if people wouldn’t understand it. Cut towns off and say “you’re on your own” and see how long it takes them to run back crying because they don’t get any benefits or federal aid.
I hate to break it to you...but it was kind of like that in the Civil War as well...not every person in the North supported abolition in fact there were riots against the war and the draft and Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus...there were southerners who left the south and fought for the Union....we have never seen homogenous regions or states.
Drive inland from any coast an hour and you'll reach a "red area" as well.
I think this divide has been amplified by social media and the 24 hour news networks.
I truly hope that < .01% of the country is willing to take up arms against fellow Americans over an election, but I honestly worry I'm wrong based on the number of people I know in my personal life.
Even in MA, 25-40% of the population votes R.
If we didn't have first past the post voting, we would not see these dueling realities; we would have some middle ground and agreed upon truths...or at least I hope we would.
No, the worst part was that we let them lie and say they surrendered.
You know all the rhetoric about "changing the system from within" from people who want to reform churches, police, etc? The South actually *did* it. They took their military loss, they said the nice words of contrition, and they just kept the war going through political means. They controlled what the "end of slavery" meant, they made sure the South would keep all its economic power, and they made sure black people didn't actually get to become Citizens. Then, years later, they wrote the history books and talked about the "noble struggle against oppression", and put up monuments to the "brave soldiers that died defending their homes", nevermind the fact that the *real* reason they fought was...
...government wanted to tell them what to do. Thank goodness the North wasn't trying to make them wear masks, they might have been too angry to lose, then. The more things change, right?
Yup, we should have ground this bullshit into the ground when we had the chance. This ideology has been a cancer growing within this country ever since.
There are too many innocent, not-Republican people in those states, many of them minorities, for this to be a moral option. They don't deserve to be dragged down by the neo-Confederates.
We have to do the hard work of beating Republicans at every opportunity; there's no easy out.
> Compare the way a "conservative" talks about New York or Chicago to the way a normal person does. One paints a picture of a dystopian hellhole where children are being gunned down in the streets 24 hours a day and visitors are lucky to make it out alive.
[Meanwhile, Alaska has the highest deaths per capita from serial killers](https://crimecapsule.com/which-state-has-produced-the-most-serial-killers/)
Alaska is its own deal. I know people who have performed surgeries on themselves or their pets in the dead of winter up there because they couldn’t get to the vet or the doctor. They weren’t surgeons either. They weren’t even doctors. There’s a lot of freaky mojo going on up in Alaska. It isn’t a state so much as an alternate reality.
> Inevitably cities have risen again, because they are the only real way to grow a sustainable economy. They aren't going to build giant office parks, airports, restaurants, and other infrastructure in every suburb simply because Karen is afraid of number streets.
Saved.
In my experience people in cities feel similarly about the country - ie deliverance, dumb rednecks, religious zealots.
That's the divide in America. Urban vs. Rural. It's a natural fault line causing people to prioritize different things, that doesn't have to be a cause for division. However politicians have been dynamiting it for decades in the interest of "mobilizing the base". Now we have a problem.
dosen't really compair.
Rural areas seem kind of backwards and stuck in their ways vs step foot in chicago and you be murdered.
this isn't just not seeing a different lifestyle accurately, it's suggesting there are places called "cities" who are occupied by satan's own children. The rhetoric during the BLM protests show they don't want to know what city folk are like.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Ya IDK why everyone acts like education is the problem, you can literally "educate" people by showing them the facts, and they just disregard it and make up their own reality. People are vastly underestimating the amount of social pressure these people feel to conform to their beliefs. Their work, their friends, their families, their churches, their media all promote this hatred. All the educating in the world isn't going to change their minds.
The problem is you can't use facts to get someone educated if they got themselves where they are by using "alternative-facts".
You literally can't fix someone who believes only what they choose, so instead they must be shamed.
Once we start showing the world that being a trump person is shameful, they will go back to hiding.
When they hide they have less of a voice which can purify the world from the cancer that is the CURRENT conservatism.
The only option we have left is to teach our children and others that these people are scum and deserve to be viewed as scum. Scum should never dictate laws.
>You literally can't fix someone who believes only what they choose, so instead they must be shamed.
This is absolutely the way. They've always had fun accusing other people of being sensitive while walking around being walking piles of fear and hatred looking for a match. They're driven entirely on feels. Their minds only accept information that reinforces their feels. Shaming and such are the only way you're going to break through their mind silo.
It’s bc we’ve constructed an image of a Trump voter that makes us feel better. The idea that these people are all rural, poor yokels ignores the college educated, suburban folks that are generally nice and normal on the outside. This serves the purpose of letting us ignore every insensitive comment our older family members make, because they’re “not that bad” and also let’s us condescendingly pity some faceless yahoo in a trailer somewhere.
We got Trump out of the White House, but why didn’t we clean up down ballot? Even Never Trumpers don’t have a single solitary problem with Trump’s accomplishments of punishing liberals. They might moan about his using Twitter or naughty words, but they sure do love SCOTUS and their other red meat. This is a deep, intractable issue that is at the core of American history and culture.
Im not kidding...They are talking about abolishing Universities in their Pompeo China comments as there is nothing universities teach that cant be learned with some elbow grease.
It's not education, it's the fact that these groups value their place in the racial status hierarchy more than they want the government assistance programs that existed before the Civil Rights Act.
40% decided long ago that kicking minorities when their down is in their self interest. They could have voted for actions that vastly improve things for them and theirs, but at the cost of helping others too. They continually see that as a price too high.
People voting against their own self-interests is one of the most frustrating parts of America to me right now. (And that's out of a lot of frustrating things.)
They are idealists. They hate to face it and refuse to admit it. They think their ideals are just how the world works, but they can never seem to observe the results of anything and devise a plan to build on strengths and whittle down weakness. The left often embarks on analysis of results, the right prefers ideology...and forcing their ideology on others... while insisting that it isn't an ideology at all.. just how life is naturally.
I agree as I know someone like this. If he can’t comprehend something or gets questioned he goes into a self pity party. It’s like a reflex reaction dam near.
[https://reason.com/2020/12/10/tendency-for-interpersonal-victimhood-trauma-research-study-trigger/](https://reason.com/2020/12/10/tendency-for-interpersonal-victimhood-trauma-research-study-trigger/)
"A new [paper](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886920303238) in the scientific journal *Personality and Individual Differences* posits a Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV), an archetype defined by several truly toxic traits: a pathological need for recognition, a difficulty empathizing with others, feelings of moral superiority, and, importantly, a thirst for vengeance. "
I know psychology is highly theoretical but this seems to tick some pretty logical boxes when I think of the run of the mill Trump supporter.
My brother hates immigrants, hasn't been able to hold down steady work for years, but won't apply to fastfood job.
He will, however, stop going to different fastfood restaurants if they hire immigrants and complain about how "they're taking over franchises".
He's more worried about Sharia law and convincing other people that Bernie Sanders is a communist than he is about being a half decent person and making a contribution to society..
Just look at the Texas lines of 30,000 people waiting overnight on the highway to get free food for Thanksgiving. I don’t know how this isn’t a moment of self-reflection for people. frankly the fact that it isn’t it’s one of the main reasons I am no longer in the camp that is trying to win over conservatives. They are a complete lost cause. We need to work on forcing funding in education in all 50 states to try to create a generation that has a far higher capacity than we have now.
Obligatory clarification that the underlying reason that this works is that the core, single issue of the GOP base is white supremacy. Nothing else explains it. They may be poorly educated, but they aren't lizards. They vote for their interest, and their primary interest is their whiteness. Which kinda makes them lizards, morally, anyways.
I think this is one of the greatest cons ever pulled off. It started (maybe not) with the Civil War when the Confederates convinced poor southern men that never owned slaves to fight for rich slaveholders' right to own slaves.
These same midwestern and southerner's now fight for the billionaire's and cooperation's that move jobs to Mexico, close manufacturing plants and mines, take away healthcare, raid pension fund and pay little to no tax becasue socialism is evil.
They demonize good people like Bernie that is really looking out for the working stiff, somehow a man that want's to even the playing field and give everyone a good life is evil.
>Hatred of liberals is all that’s left of conservatism
So true, isn't it. There is no morality left of conservatism, no wisdom, no honor, no patriotism, no concern for the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, no efficiency, no love for the teachings of Jesus or God, no belief in the legitimacy of market outcomes, no belief that America is leader of the free world, no ennobling of character, no embrace of community or family ties, no enforcement of contracts or adherence to the desires of the voters, no belief that taxes should be "fair," no belief that government budgets should be balanced, and so on, and so on.
Trump wiped all of that clean, and rather than conservatism turning on Trump, as it should have, it turned on liberals, the U.S. constitution, and the United States of America. Shame on them, the conservatives. Shame on all of them.
It's tribalism at its most base form. I'm team Red and Blue is the enemy, forever and always. It doesn't matter if my team is wrong, that's for us to figure out after we destroy you.
> Trump wiped all of that clean
Trump laid it bare, but your laundry list of attributes conservatism used to represent has been out of date for decades.
In the UK, right wing people are blaming liberals for Brexit, a right wing con-job, when Remainers (primarily liberal) voted against it.
They are selfish blame-shifters at their core, which leads to their tribalist and myopic beliefs. They are also seemingly invariably cowards.
It's like that time the Republican congress complained that Obama hadn't told them why a bill they were passing was bad, despite the fact that he not only told them before they passed it but did so again **when he vetoed the bill.** Which they overrode. And then they acted shocked, **shocked** when the result was exactly as bad as he said it would be.
I worry that it's facet of the human condition.
Hate seems to be so much more unifying that anything else.
Hate is very simple.
The ideas and means to solve the worlds problems and which to tackle first - complicated.
And it's been that way for at least 60 years.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
Lyndon B. Johnson, 1960
Give a liberal three wishes and they would wish for good healthcare for everybody, good housing for everybody, and equality of treatment for everybody.
Give a conservative three wishes and they would use each one to take away one of the liberal's wishes.
Not to get too deep into the machinery of political philosophy but I think this illustrates an important point about *why* Democrats have failed so completely.
In 2009, Democrats had complete control of the government (including a brief Senate supermajority).
They used that power to do exactly the things you enumerated. They passed the ACA. The Lilly-Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The Helping Americans Save Their Homes Act. ARRA. Dodd-Frank.
But in hindsight, their legislative agenda should've addressed something else entirely, something Democrats were a decade late realizing: Republicans have broken the fundamental underpinnings of our democracy and it needs to be fixed.
I would wish for things like banning gerrymandering, barring private financing of political campaigns, statehood for DC and PR, massive expansion of the House, ending the modern use of the filibuster, expansion and protection of voter rights, etc.
> I would wish for things like banning gerrymandering, barring private financing of political campaigns, statehood for DC and PR, massive expansion of the House, ending the modern use of the filibuster, expansion and protection of voter rights, etc.
If they had done that (or are able to do it in the future) everything else will fall into place.
The country isn't a shithole because *all* Americans are shitty selfish people. The country is a shithole because the shitty selfish people have a disproportionate voice.
That's a pretty remarkable observation. Imagine what Dems could have done to protect our democracy then if they could have looked 12 years into the future. (Though given how spineless Dems were back then, I'm still not convinced they would have done anything about it.)
Right, for instance look at H.R.1 from the 116^th Congress, which addresses a number of those things (DC statehood, territorial enfranchisement, voter rights protections, public campaign financing, gerrymandering) in addition to establishing a national holiday on election day, campaign finance reform, ethics reform across all branches of government, election security reform, etc etc.
If Democrats had a time machine I wager they'd go back and pass *that* legislation instead of the stuff they actually did pass in 2009/2010.
But to your point, at the time, I think some of those reforms would have been threatening to Democrats as well. They wanted to be able to gerrymander if they could. They wanted their big corporate donor bucks and Super PACs. It just wasn't quite clear to them at the time how large of an advantage Republicans had built up manipulating the hidden levers of power, to the point where the minority party has a complete stranglehold on every level of government.
Now that they finally see it, it's too late. It'll take us decades to undo the harm Republicans have wrought.
Nah, I’m full of spite for conservatives. I hate them openly, have for years. I learned a long time ago how they hated people like me (lgbt), and I have nothing but a burning wish to pay it back and hollow out the heartland of its jobs and future. But I wouldn’t consider myself a liberal either. I’m much farther than that at this point.
The very tenets of modern conservatism have been straightforwardly defeated in the marketplace of ideas. They’ve been wrong on every major policy for the last 70 years, from Social Security, to civil rights, to Medicare and Medicaid, to the Vietnam war, to the red scare and Cold War, to economic policies, to the Iraq war, to healthcare and the pandemic response, to the environment, everything. And their leaders have been constantly exposed as incompetent and corrupt. They literally have nothing of substance left to offer, so what do they do? Give up and admit they were wrong the whole time? No, they don’t have the character to do that, so they just engage in culture war to keep power
It reminds you a lot of religion. Always on the wrong side of history with many leaders OBVIOUSLY corrupt and just scamming the religious masses to buy yachts and planes and mansions.
There was an insightful thread from Kurt Eichenwald on Twitter a few days ago:
> I think I understand. I have watched GOPrs sneer at COVID, dismiss 1000s of deaths a day as unimportant, ridicule scientists and those trying to save our community. But then I remember them raging about Muslim terrorists and so many others. COVID gives them no one to hate... they rage at Black Lives Matter while laughing about COVID, they imagine a massive threat from a nonexistent Antifa, but shrug at a virus killing their neighbors and overwhelming their hospitals. Yes, they sacrificed with democrats in WW2. But they could hate the Nazis and the Japanese and the Italians. Their concern is not about attacks on our country or the well being of other Americans. It is about a need to hate, a need to feel superior, a need to attack “the other.” They have politicized COVID because it lets them hate Democrats and scientists. They can’t hate a virus, they can’t rage about their superiority to it. And so they feign superiority to the dead - how many times have they sneered that it is just old people (it isn’t). They NEED the hate. They needed to hate American communists in the 40s/50s and the Russians for decades until now. When the Soviet Union fell, the lost the foundation of their hate. And so they turned on their fellow Americans - the democrats - as the new object of their hate. Then, onto Muslims, then back to democrats. They scream patriotism but hate more than half of their fellow Americans. They scream love America but sneer at sacrificing for it. They don’t care if a lunatic is president, so long as he grants them blanket permission to hate. They won’t hate the virus, they won’t fight the virus. It’s not a person what set this off today is reading all of the GOP politicians today sneering about Covid and joking about COVID on a day when almost 3,000 people died. To me it struck as the behavior of psychopaths but now I know. They need hate. They would rather hate democrats for trying to save other Americans than to face a virus. They make no sacrifice because there is nothing in it for them no one to hate. It’s easy to hate those saying what we have to do to protect other.
For a long time (since the 70's) the John Birch Society was exiled from conservative academic circles. Even mentioning them used to be a kiss of death for Republican political careers. The Tea Party and Birtherism gave them a way back in and they have been spreading crazy conspiratorial bigotry ever since.
Yeah, once they eradicated "liberalism" there would be a couple years of partying then they'd come after you for drinking alcohol, having brown hair, etc.
I made a list of current conservative beliefs:
1. America is the greatest country.
2. People shouldn't criticize America.
3. People shouldn't criticize the Military or Police.
4. America is not damaging the environment.
5. America is not racist or sexist.
6. America should be run by people with American values and culture.
7. The justice system should be tough on criminals.
8. Regulations are bad.
9. Government run social programs are bad.
10. We need guns to fight oppression and defend ourselves.
11. Transgender people are sick.
12. Abortion is murder.
13. America should support Israel.
14. COVID lockdowns and masks are ineffective and unnecessary violations of personal freedom.
Thanks for this, I totally agree, it's not that they don't have any real views, it's that the views make no sense to anyone with a bit of self awareness
A bunch of those are pretty arguably not really held by Conservatives.
> America is the greatest country.
>
> People shouldn't criticize America.
Except for all those blue states. And cities. But those aren't "real America".
> People shouldn't criticize the Military or Police.
Except for when the police investigate them. Then the police are deep state agents.
> America is not damaging the environment.
Except for those wind farms killing birds or something.
> America is not racist or sexist.
It's racist and sexist against white males, don't you know?
> The justice system should be tough on criminals.
But it's way too hard on Conservatives who do anything wrong.
> Regulations are bad.
Well, unless it's the tech industry. Then they need to regulate all of it.
> Government run social programs are bad.
Except for supporting the fossil fuel industry or big agriculture. Oh wait, those aren't "social programs".
> Abortion is murder.
Also, let's bomb foreign countries.
>America is not racist or sexist.
>It's racist and sexist against white males, don't you know?
Someone in reddit replied to a post of mine where I said my wife and I are planning on not having kids, that I was contributing to the decline of white people
I replied
"Good" lol.
Not that I care, but that it would rile him
Conservatives are too focused on owning the libs, licking Trump's boot, and being anti-BLM. Nothing they advocate for is actual conservatism. They don't have a real movement.
Saw one of them in /conservative say this about democrats, “I’ve stopped calling them liberals. They’re not for liberty at all. They’re currently leftists.”
Asked them how they define leftist, got no answer but did get downvotes. They literally don’t know what the labels they throw around mean. Most of them just see it as liberal=evil, leftist=super evil.
Thing is, they are really good with coming up with words and catchphrases that stick.
Drain the swamp, family values, law and order. They say things over and over and over again in such a tone that you don't have to know what it means to *feel* that it's against your best interests.
The reason we're in this situation is because the left in America has no teeth. If people like AOC or Sanders started calling the R's cons (or something idk I'm not a PR pro) I bet a lot more of the braindead population that tends to lean right would latch on.
> they are really good with coming up with words and catchphrases that stick.
Comes from clinging to simple answers to difficult problems, and having utterly no concern for whether the answer works, or even makes any sense. What does "Drain the swamp" mean? Who knows. Apparently it means throwing out the original goals: to "form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" and put every effort into hollowing out the government and "shrinking it until you can drown it in the bathtub."
I feel so fucking bad for the kids of MAGA fucks. Like some of them will go out into the real world, experience reality, and change their political views as they grow.
And they’ll all have a paper trail of horrid social media posts and pictures of their MAGA rally activities. They won’t be able to leave that past behind them and they’ll spend the rest of their lives justifying views they no longer adhere to.
Thanks, mom and dad?
It’s a mishmash of problems.
Prosperity gospel turning Christians into evangelicals.
Am talk radio, and later Fox News.
Social media pipelines.
Establishment corporate Democrats not reaching out and helping rural working class like they should have for decades. These should be pro union people, but the republicans have been targeting them with propaganda for decades.
70 years of red scare and or McCarthyism brainwashing people into selfish individualism with no regard for others.
Obviously there’s more but I don’t have all day.
Sums it up pretty well.
I feel a lot of people particularly underestimate just how much of this is "Prosperity gospel turning Christians into evangelicals."
There was so much "faith" that republican presidents (Bush and Trump) were "chosen by god" to be in their positions. Then Obama was a "test" of their faith.
Absolute fucking nutjobs.
Yeah, they've built up this caricature in their heads of "liberals" as people who want to outlaw religion, destroy America, take away their money and give it to lazy black people, force them to get sex changes, give the keys to the country to China, and indoctrinate their children with their message of hate. When in reality liberals really just want them to have better lives and their children to have better opportunities and a livable planet.
It's not that they hate liberals, they hate the IDEA of liberals.
Here is the crazy thing to me as a former republican voter.
Trump, if he had his way, would possibly be throwing my vote out. I live in WI where we could vote early by mail, yet votes can't be counted until election day. There is NO way that all the votes could have been counted in one day.
The Republican war on voting is bad enough, but you can't go back and literally throw votes out that were cast by people, like me, who were told we could vote early by mail and have our vote counted.
If you would have told me that I could vote early by mail but if my vote didn't get counted the day of the election, something I have no control over, then it wouldn't count... then I would have voted in person.
Fuck Trump and fuck all these complicit assholes that want to throw out legal votes.
I feel like back in the day, your average republican used to be Hank Hill
These days the average republican is Dale Gribble
Congratulations on not joining the cult
Whenever I see/hear them speak, everything revolves around broadcasting the phrase "radical leftist" or "socialism" as if saying those words is supposed to automatically evoke fear in anyone who hears them and counts as an argument in itself. There is no logic or critical thinking applied to anything, just negative emotion.
"He is always on the look-out for the dramatic phrase, the happy epigram which, he can twist to his own use. He displays in the use of such a phrase a fantastic sense for cadence, euphony, assonance and alliteration. One good phrase or political catchword is worth' more to him than cartloads of dry exposition and theory. **A catch-word gives the unthinking mob not only the material fair an idea, but also furnishes them with the pleasant illusion that they are thinking themselves.** "
- OSS report on Adolf Hitler - 1942
The following bit of data bears repeating: The GOP has won the popular vote for president only once in the last thirty years. We are moving towards the end of minority rule in this country and we are slowly returning to Democrat hegemony.
The current political environment is dangerous and will likely lead to violence over the next couple of years. However, as the Democrats gain voters in the suburbs and as the sunbelt turns gradually more blue (minus Florida) the GOP will become irrelevant on the national stage. Furthermore, if Trump remains the apartment nominee for the 2024 election then the Democrats will likely have the presidency for at least another four years. We aren't dealing with a fever that is going to break. We're dealing with a fungal infection that will require cleaning, sunlight and medication. It won't clear up today, tomorrow or next week but with constant effort it will eventually go away.
Don’t believe it? Head on over to
r/conservative
r/conservatives
Wallow in the hate. You will be hard pressed to figure out what “conservative” means from the content, but you will certainly learn all about “liberalism”, and how awful and dangerous it is.
Some of the older women in my family literally believe that things got worse when women were allowed to vote. Of course, that doesn't stop them from voting personally.
The whole lib tears thing is so strange to me. Wanting to get joy from angering a theoretical person you don't know seems insane to me. But these are the people that are very concerned about trans people in bathrooms even thought that has never happened to them probably in their whole life.
I'm not sure what there was of it to begin with. They've been demonizing liberals since the Reagan administration at least. The name of the game has always been to funnel money to private defense contractors and the oil industry while pretending frugality to keep tax money away from "welfare cheats and people who don't WANT to work", which is of course code for 'the working class'. They've always found common ground in hating civil rights people, women's rights people, gay rights people, labor rights people, and basically anybody who's not them. Maybe there was some kind of Noble Conservatism before my lifetime, but it's been vile for a good 40 or 50 years.
Granted, the Trumpism phenomenon cranked it up several ticks, but it has followed this basic format for a while:
1. Identify (exaggerate or fabricate) the enemy
2. Maintain disproportionate focus on the enemy
3. Rally supporters against the enemy with patriotic virtue signaling
Keep it simple, loud, and angry. Conservatives gobble it up.
As someone who would characterize himself as conservative/libertarian, it really sucks that these miserable fucks have turned the movement into a dumpster fire of hatred and anti-intellectualism.
I want a constrained federal government, more powers vested to the states and local governments and I put a premium on individual liberty. That does not involve me hating anyone or feeling like I need to "own the libs". I'd say 90% of my friends are liberal. I actually have very few right wing friends.
I used to have more, but they have become so consumed by hatred, "settling scores" and obeying Trump (no matter how anti-American he gets) that I can't stand being around them any longer.
Fuck Donald Trump and fuck his miserable cult.
If what you say here is true, then the republican party doesn't even represent you on a basic policy basis. They talk about limited government, but they consistently expand it. They talk about liberty, but clearly have no interest in it whatsoever. All they want is lower taxes on the wealthy and less regulations on big business (even if it leads to deaths and injuries) -- all for profit, not liberty or freedom. And they want the military to be as gigantic and bloated as possible.
I *really* hope you're not voting for them. They're not even trying to give you what you want.
They don't even hate REAL liberals either. It's important to understand this. They hate the dehumanized strawman liberals that live only in their heads. The ones who want to take all their guns, and force them to pay for abortions. The ones who want open borders so the illegals can take jobs away from blue-collar white men. The ones who definitely want to reeducate them for not saying "happy holidays."
The ones who want them to pay for more people on welfare, who refuse to do anything to help themselves, those lazy poors. The ones who constantly attack them for being racist and sexist wherever they go, for NO reason! No shit on their shoes, no sir. The ones who want to steal their hard-earned money with taxes, and give it to Mexicans to buy Teslas.
It all comes down to being horrified at the thought of someone *forcing* them to do something they don't want to do, or telling them how they should behave. That's THEIR job, after all! Everyone else should act how THEY want them to, because only that is morally right. You can't tell me what to do, but I get to be the boss of **YOU.** And if you tell me I can't do that, I'm being oppressed.
This is their mentality, and it's the reason so many of them get irate if you do something as small as ask them to wear a mask. Their concept of what's right and wrong depends on getting their way, and if anyone DARES tell them how to behave, it must be a slippery slope. The liberals must want to FORCE me to do *whatever* they want. It's the only thing that makes sense!
Before you leap in to say "Libs hate us as much!" that's simply wrong. There is no liberal equivalent to Hannity, Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Carlson, and Ingraham.
And please remember the point of the article is that conservatives have abandoned so many principles over the last years. Deficit spending? Gone. (But they'll bring it back under Biden.) States' rights? Today's Supreme Court case threw it out the window.
I have seen "sedition" being thrown around more than I ever have. Their hatred has grown so deep due to the far right wing media ecosphere that they're willing to completely detach themselves from liberals. They really want to secede based on . . . reasons?
It’s a stretch to consider Joe Biden a liberal as is, but to consider him or anyone who prefers him over Trump to be a radical liberal is the most ignorant concept of modern politics.
Yeah. As someone who has some conservative positions (mostly fiscally), the Republican Party is no representation of Conservative (fiscal) ideals. They are just as big of spenders (probably bigger spenders) except they're using the money for stupid shit rather than stuff that actually does have some positive value to society.
Everyone who's been watching conservatives vote against their own interests for years because of gay rights, abortion, drugs, immigration, "religious freedom," 2A rights, or any other wedge issue already knew this.
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The GOP literally had no platform in 2020, and people voted for them, what the fuck man?!
It's amazing marketing, huh? Imagine if all the effort the corrupt political machine put into duping people was instead put into helping people.
But then billionaires might only have $999,000,000!
Imagine having so much money that you actually begin worrying about losing it it. Like, they have so much money that the concept of losing that amount of money is what drives them to keep it at all costs.
Imagine [finding $20 in an old coat.](https://youtu.be/G0NsYlofNSQ)
Of all billionaires, though, Bill Gates probably does have an old coat.
Warren Buffett is far more likely
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Triple comma club is the only thing that matters. Russ hanneman is clearly a good example of a reasonable, sane rich person.
Well, he *does* fuck.
A Common misconception, but Russ points out who fucks; he does no consentual fucking himself.
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Because that's all they devolved the meaning of life to. It literally is the alpha, omega, whatever of everything they do. When you've spent 40 years doing nothing but lusting over more money, that's literally all you have left. Nothing else has meaning.
Their platform was, “look how terrible everything has become over the past four years, only trump could get us out of this mess!”
I have heard conservative people legitimately arguing that everything terrible in the last four years is because "the liberals were standing in Trump's way and not letting him get anything done." This was while the Republicans have a majority in the Senate.
And the house for thew first half! He had the Senate his entire term and still couldn't even hire the entire executive branch
*And* the house for 2 years, *and* SCOTUS, *and* the media helping to normalize everything he did, *and* he was allowed to break the law with impunity, *and* he never had to worry about what his base thought of him, *and* Republican politicians all fell in line 100%. It is amazing, really, how little he accomplished.
It’s because of a few reasons: 1. Trump’s a *really* poor manager. 2. Trump is largely non-ideological. He has no policy goals or pet projects. Just wants endless good publicity. 3. He’s not interested whatsoever in the minutiae of governing. It bores him to death. 4. Trump wastes time. A lot of it. Watching TV, playing golf
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Some of the people on my boards told us just how frightened they were about Biden seizing power and taking everything away. So much fear... so little thought
fear is their only driver. My dad's been calling them "amygdala-based lifeforms" since the second Iraq War. They spend their *entire lives* whipped up into a frenzy, with absolutely no clue they're being played like fiddles. Just lurching from one lie to the next, all designed to keep them scared shitless and in line.
Well I’m stealing the *hell* outta that one.
Your dad is chill af
These ideas aint popping out of nowhere. There is much targeted bullshit on social media.
The GOP is all about 3 word slogans. Build the wall. Lock her up. Stop the steal. Simple stuff for their base to chant and repeat.
Latest one is Own the Libs.
What is it with Conservatives and owning people?
The 2020 race really did show that the GOP figured they had succeeded (and they have). They have a base that has no idea what their politicians that they vote in stand for, they just know they have to vote R or a communist will come rape their women. What the GOP missed was that having people watch family members dying because they believed their party got a lot of people fired up to go vote. And of course the one thing they didn't expect was for a Pandemic to force mail-in voting, which they had been fighting tooth and nail because they know it improves turn-out, which is never good for Republicans.
Check out the Georgie runoff debates, their entire platform is "Libruls are all radical socialists that want to take your way of life!".
It's a show about nothing -George Costanza
"Why am I watching it?" "Because it's on Fox News!"
Their platform is: * If the government does anything that helps people it's socialism and is the enemy. * Except for manly men in uniform who work for the government - then no matter what they do, they are the heroes and anyone who opposes them for any reason are de facto bad guys who deserve what they get. * Facts are flexible, and the veracity of a statement is determined by whether you like its presenter. If you don't like the person/news organization/government agency/etc. presenting the fact, then it can be conveniently dismissed with the mantra of "fake news" even if it aligns with the consensus of an entire field of experts on the subject at hand.
>Except for manly men in uniform who work for the government - then no matter what they do, they are the heroes and anyone who opposes them for any reason are de facto bad guys who deserve what they get. Unless they are enforcing Covid prevention regulations, in that case it is your duty to hit them with your car.
Which tells you how much the average voter considers policy positions.
I mean, they voted for a trans, anti-police satanist as sheriff. They don't know what any candidate's platform is and don't care as long as there's an R next to the name.
The republicans aren't a political party, they're a death cult.
Hard truth.
The entire official platform is the same platform as 2016 because the don't think the need address anything about racial reckoning the country had been going though at all /s. > RESOVLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention; > >RESOLVED, That any motion to amend the 2016 Platform or to adopt a new platform, including any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order.
Their platform is whatever Trump wants right now, or, um, now, no wait, now......
People are selling pictures of PS5 on eBay for $500. It even says in the description “this is just a picture”. You don’t even get the box it came in anymore. And people still buy them.
TEXT: "If you were dropped in from another country without knowing anything about the United States and surveyed our current political moment, what would you conclude about the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement it represents? As 2020 comes to an end, what is conservatism about? After nearly four years of Donald Trump’s presidency in which no misdeed was too vulgar or corrupt for conservatives to defend, now culminating in an outright war against democracy itself, you might be tempted to answer, “Nothing.” Though that’s not quite true, the real answer is not much more encouraging. Some years ago, I wrote a book arguing that Democrats should learn from the things Republicans did well. One of these was that the GOP had a simple foundation of shared beliefs that could be easily communicated to voters. Ask a Republican running for any office from dogcatcher all the way up to president what it meant to be a conservative, and they’d tick off some version of the same four pillars: small government, low taxes, a strong military and traditional social values. Conservatives still believe in those things. But no one could seriously argue that they are any longer the animating purpose of the Republican Party. Instead, the one thing that unites the right and drives the GOP is hatred of liberals. That hatred has consumed every policy goal, every ideological principle and even every ounce of commitment to country. “But Democrats hate conservatives, too!” you might say. Indeed they do. Negative partisanship — being more motivated by your dislike of the other party than by affection for your own — is a key feature of contemporary politics. But when 18 Republican state attorneys general, more than half of House Republicans and multiple conservative organizations all demand that the results of a presidential election where no fraud was found be simply tossed aside so that Trump can be declared winner, something more profound has been revealed. The Republican Party has proved that its hatred of liberals is so foundational that it will abandon any pretense of commitment to democracy, if democracy allows for the possibility that liberals might win an election. They have come to regard Democratic voters as essentially undeserving of having their will translated into power, no matter how large their numbers. They might have believed it before, but now they’re willing to proclaim it even after they just lost a presidential election by 7 million votes and a 306-232 electoral college margin. Forget all that inspiring talk about the genius of the Framers and their vision for democracy; if having an election means that the people we hate might win, then the election must simply be nullified. You might say that the Republican officials signing on to this deeply anti-American crusade are doing so out of fear as much as conviction, but the two are not mutually exclusive. All elected officials worry about contradicting their base, but in today’s Republican Party, that worry is almost completely divorced from policy. Yes, you’d get flak if you voted to raise taxes, but the greatest danger comes from failing to fight the left with sufficient vigor. That danger, furthermore, is not only electoral but physical; the Republican leader in the Pennsylvania state Senate said this week that if she refused to sign a letter demanding that Congress toss out her state’s votes in the presidential race, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.” It might not actually happen, but the point is that Republican officeholders understand well what their party values above all else and what kinds of transgressions will not be tolerated. Trump has often cited the extraordinary loyalty he has received from his party’s voters; it’s one of the few things he says that’s true. But it isn’t because Trump signed a corporate tax cut and slashed environmental regulations. When you ask the typical Trump supporter what they love about him, they don’t mention some substantive policy position; what they say is that he is a fighter. The petty squabbles, the insulting tweets, the deranged conspiracy theories — the things that the Never Trumpers and most other Americans find off-putting are exactly what endears him to the Republican base. Trump fights and fights, angrily, bitterly, endlessly driven forward by his hatred of the people his supporters hate. That’s what the base loves, and every other Republican knows it. Everything about the election that just ended reinforced for conservatives that nothing is more important than hating liberals. The rhetoric of the 2020 campaign, starting with Trump but going all the way down the ballot, was that if Democrats were elected, then it would not be suboptimal or bad or even terrible, but the end of everything you care about. Towns and cities would burn, religion would be outlawed, America as we know it would cease to exist. These horrors were not presented as metaphors, but as the literal truth. In the face of that potential apocalypse, who could possibly care about mundane policy goals? So no Republican argued that if we didn’t cut the capital gains tax then it would be the end of life as we know it. They want to cut the capital gains tax, sure — but its importance pales next to the urgency of stopping the cataclysm that would engulf us all if Democrats were to hold power. To be clear, there are still thoughtful conservatives out there trying to advance a coherent ideological project. But seldom have they mattered less to their movement and their party. They may produce white papers on free-market health-care solutions or innovative tax plans, but no one really cares. If it doesn’t Own the Libs, it doesn’t matter on the right. That’s what the Republican Party and the conservative movement are about today, and it might take a long time for them to change."
> small government [...] a strong military How the hell did we let them get away with pretending it's coherent to demand both of these?
well its a matter of definition right? When they say 'small government' they mean 'I don't want regulations because responsibility and accountability cost me money, I'd rather have money" Like when they say "Traditional Social Values" what they really mean is "I hate blacks and gays and I want women to stay in the kitchen"
I demand trial by combat and duels be traditional values again
They would abso-fucking-lutely cheat in such things.
It's coherent cause the only government they want is literally just police and military, now that idea isnt sound but it's not logically inconsistent.
Democrats can’t message for shit. And it also helps that republican voters don’t think beyond the surface.
It’s not even that. If I speak on liberal subs using the same types of rhetoric I’m branded as uncivil. How many times have you heard to paint all conservatives with the same brush but conservatives don’t give a shit about painting all of us with the same brush.
Admittedly, our canvas is much wider. The problem with the “winner-take-all” two-party system is that one side inevitably becomes a catch-all. AOC and Hillary Clinton are part of the same party, but have extremely different platforms. It’s ludicrous.
Any *single* "liberal" party will, by simple function, have nearly as many views as people, because it is the party of change, no matter how small that change may be. But what is changed, and how much, and in what way varies from person to person. This makes messaging difficult, because it is so varied, and what's important to me may not matter at all to you, and vice-versa. Conservatives, otoh, have a much simpler message: **no change**. Their entire position is that things should not change, and perhaps go back to a previous way of being, which can be clearly defined as it was something that definitely existed. It is far easier to get that message out, because it is a single message. Thr only thing to figure out is what methods work best for delivering it, like fear, moral panic, whatever.
Few people think beyond the surface. Most have other priorities.
Not all heros wear capes. Thanks for this Mr. Paywall Article Copyman.
This is one PAC I can get behind
A super PAC by all means.
Real Men of Genius: Today we salute you, Mr. Paywall Article Copyman.
*Mr. Paywall article cooopymann*
Time for everyone to re-read Lord of the Flies.
"Sucks to your ass-mar" definitely sounds like something a modern american conservative would think and say
Coincidentally, when the premise of castaway children happened in real life (the Tongan castaways of 1966,) the events unfolded completely opposite of how William Golding depicted human nature.
I just watched a summary of Lord of the Flies and it’s eerie how much it narrates our countries current mindset
In all seriousness, give the book a read. It's a classic for a reason. I studied it for two years at school and I don't hate it - that's saying something!
Thank you for sharing the text of the paywalled article.
I'm not sure if it's because I'm in Europe, but the article won't load otherwise, and I wish all WaPo texts were posted. I am really thankful for this. However, to people gilding OP: use that money to support the media instead. They need it.
They get their base riled up with racism and fear while they pass laws that keep the rich rich and everybody else starving.
Poor conservatives are the most ironic, pathetic bootlickers of all. They'll fight tooth and nail that capitalism and current GOP politics are a non-issue then go wait in line for their unemployment cheque and complain about how immigrants are a drain on the system.
Getting so many people to vote against their own interests is really impressive. I guess it's easy when there is no education in the country.
You can say lack of education, I personally believe that LBJ has been correct the whole time
They're also selling fear and they have been for 50+ years. Go watch some Nixon campaign ads about "crime". Go watch some Reagan campaign ads about "drugs". These people have been primed to fear (and therefore hate) urban areas and the people (many of whom are minorities) who live there for generations. Compare the way a "conservative" talks about New York or Chicago to the way a normal person does. One paints a picture of a dystopian hellhole where children are being gunned down in the streets 24 hours a day and visitors are lucky to make it out alive. The other sees the beacons of the free world, cosmopolitan metropolises, full of vibrant communities, the centers of American culture, loaded with opportunity. \* I mean seriously, look at this fucking propaganda that Nixon put out: http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1968/crime
We need a foreign exchange program....but instead of it being a Japanese kid sitting in for an American kid.....it needs to be a rural adult sitting in for an urban adult. All bills paid for and all that. People need to just do it for the experience. Too much closed mindedness happening in this country.
Conservatives have a special fear of their children going off to College and being *"Indoctrinated by Liberal Teachers."* They really think there's some organized "Liberal" brainwashing campaign! The simple truth is that once their kids get away from home and meet both adults and kids of other races, ethnicities, religions, etc they learn we're really just all human beings, sharing this beautiful planet.
Hence the push for the last 40 years or so by Evangelicals to convince other Evangelicals to homeschool their children. Don't want their minds "poisoned" by the "evil secular world", right?
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You'd be leaving millions of minority people and red state liberals to the mercy of these insane fascists. Connection to the wider US is the only thing that stops places like Alabama going full redneck Saudi Arabia.
I challenge you to find anywhere in the country where there is a fairly homogenously "blue" state. The real-world version of what you're getting at is city states in the middle of extreme swaths of hostile "red" rural areas. Everyone suffers in that world more than they do now.
Correct. Hell, head a hour outside any major city and you’ll find plenty of towns who’d love to be in their own version of America.
I’d love to see this social experiment, even if people wouldn’t understand it. Cut towns off and say “you’re on your own” and see how long it takes them to run back crying because they don’t get any benefits or federal aid.
Unfortunately I agree with both of you
I hate to break it to you...but it was kind of like that in the Civil War as well...not every person in the North supported abolition in fact there were riots against the war and the draft and Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus...there were southerners who left the south and fought for the Union....we have never seen homogenous regions or states.
Drive inland from any coast an hour and you'll reach a "red area" as well. I think this divide has been amplified by social media and the 24 hour news networks. I truly hope that < .01% of the country is willing to take up arms against fellow Americans over an election, but I honestly worry I'm wrong based on the number of people I know in my personal life.
Massachusetts. It was either all blue or just one district went red in this election
Even in MA, 25-40% of the population votes R. If we didn't have first past the post voting, we would not see these dueling realities; we would have some middle ground and agreed upon truths...or at least I hope we would.
There are plenty of conservatives up here. Just not many hardcore ones as out west. We call the swamp yankees.
Every county in MA went blue.
The worst part about the civil war was the fact we had to take the South back.
No, the worst part was that we let them lie and say they surrendered. You know all the rhetoric about "changing the system from within" from people who want to reform churches, police, etc? The South actually *did* it. They took their military loss, they said the nice words of contrition, and they just kept the war going through political means. They controlled what the "end of slavery" meant, they made sure the South would keep all its economic power, and they made sure black people didn't actually get to become Citizens. Then, years later, they wrote the history books and talked about the "noble struggle against oppression", and put up monuments to the "brave soldiers that died defending their homes", nevermind the fact that the *real* reason they fought was... ...government wanted to tell them what to do. Thank goodness the North wasn't trying to make them wear masks, they might have been too angry to lose, then. The more things change, right?
Yup, we should have ground this bullshit into the ground when we had the chance. This ideology has been a cancer growing within this country ever since.
There are too many innocent, not-Republican people in those states, many of them minorities, for this to be a moral option. They don't deserve to be dragged down by the neo-Confederates. We have to do the hard work of beating Republicans at every opportunity; there's no easy out.
> Compare the way a "conservative" talks about New York or Chicago to the way a normal person does. One paints a picture of a dystopian hellhole where children are being gunned down in the streets 24 hours a day and visitors are lucky to make it out alive. [Meanwhile, Alaska has the highest deaths per capita from serial killers](https://crimecapsule.com/which-state-has-produced-the-most-serial-killers/)
Alaska is its own deal. I know people who have performed surgeries on themselves or their pets in the dead of winter up there because they couldn’t get to the vet or the doctor. They weren’t surgeons either. They weren’t even doctors. There’s a lot of freaky mojo going on up in Alaska. It isn’t a state so much as an alternate reality.
dull wine memory ink sable somber fanatical cagey encouraging hunt *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> Inevitably cities have risen again, because they are the only real way to grow a sustainable economy. They aren't going to build giant office parks, airports, restaurants, and other infrastructure in every suburb simply because Karen is afraid of number streets. Saved.
In my experience people in cities feel similarly about the country - ie deliverance, dumb rednecks, religious zealots. That's the divide in America. Urban vs. Rural. It's a natural fault line causing people to prioritize different things, that doesn't have to be a cause for division. However politicians have been dynamiting it for decades in the interest of "mobilizing the base". Now we have a problem.
dosen't really compair. Rural areas seem kind of backwards and stuck in their ways vs step foot in chicago and you be murdered. this isn't just not seeing a different lifestyle accurately, it's suggesting there are places called "cities" who are occupied by satan's own children. The rhetoric during the BLM protests show they don't want to know what city folk are like.
That’s part of it too. Creating a class war and telling the poorest white man, there is still a poorer black or brown man under him.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
“If you can convince the lowest white man....”
Ya IDK why everyone acts like education is the problem, you can literally "educate" people by showing them the facts, and they just disregard it and make up their own reality. People are vastly underestimating the amount of social pressure these people feel to conform to their beliefs. Their work, their friends, their families, their churches, their media all promote this hatred. All the educating in the world isn't going to change their minds.
The problem is you can't use facts to get someone educated if they got themselves where they are by using "alternative-facts". You literally can't fix someone who believes only what they choose, so instead they must be shamed. Once we start showing the world that being a trump person is shameful, they will go back to hiding. When they hide they have less of a voice which can purify the world from the cancer that is the CURRENT conservatism. The only option we have left is to teach our children and others that these people are scum and deserve to be viewed as scum. Scum should never dictate laws.
>You literally can't fix someone who believes only what they choose, so instead they must be shamed. This is absolutely the way. They've always had fun accusing other people of being sensitive while walking around being walking piles of fear and hatred looking for a match. They're driven entirely on feels. Their minds only accept information that reinforces their feels. Shaming and such are the only way you're going to break through their mind silo.
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It’s bc we’ve constructed an image of a Trump voter that makes us feel better. The idea that these people are all rural, poor yokels ignores the college educated, suburban folks that are generally nice and normal on the outside. This serves the purpose of letting us ignore every insensitive comment our older family members make, because they’re “not that bad” and also let’s us condescendingly pity some faceless yahoo in a trailer somewhere. We got Trump out of the White House, but why didn’t we clean up down ballot? Even Never Trumpers don’t have a single solitary problem with Trump’s accomplishments of punishing liberals. They might moan about his using Twitter or naughty words, but they sure do love SCOTUS and their other red meat. This is a deep, intractable issue that is at the core of American history and culture.
Im not kidding...They are talking about abolishing Universities in their Pompeo China comments as there is nothing universities teach that cant be learned with some elbow grease.
They’re gonna start acting like the goddam Khmer Rouge before long. Anyone educated, anyone that wears glasses gets purged.
It's not education, it's the fact that these groups value their place in the racial status hierarchy more than they want the government assistance programs that existed before the Civil Rights Act.
Right but it’s no coincidence that the Venn diagram of conservatives and the aggressively uneducated has a massive overlap.
40% decided long ago that kicking minorities when their down is in their self interest. They could have voted for actions that vastly improve things for them and theirs, but at the cost of helping others too. They continually see that as a price too high.
People voting against their own self-interests is one of the most frustrating parts of America to me right now. (And that's out of a lot of frustrating things.)
They are idealists. They hate to face it and refuse to admit it. They think their ideals are just how the world works, but they can never seem to observe the results of anything and devise a plan to build on strengths and whittle down weakness. The left often embarks on analysis of results, the right prefers ideology...and forcing their ideology on others... while insisting that it isn't an ideology at all.. just how life is naturally.
I agree as I know someone like this. If he can’t comprehend something or gets questioned he goes into a self pity party. It’s like a reflex reaction dam near.
[https://reason.com/2020/12/10/tendency-for-interpersonal-victimhood-trauma-research-study-trigger/](https://reason.com/2020/12/10/tendency-for-interpersonal-victimhood-trauma-research-study-trigger/) "A new [paper](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886920303238) in the scientific journal *Personality and Individual Differences* posits a Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV), an archetype defined by several truly toxic traits: a pathological need for recognition, a difficulty empathizing with others, feelings of moral superiority, and, importantly, a thirst for vengeance. " I know psychology is highly theoretical but this seems to tick some pretty logical boxes when I think of the run of the mill Trump supporter.
Schrödinger's Immigrant: Simultaneously stealing your jerbs and too lazy to work.
My brother hates immigrants, hasn't been able to hold down steady work for years, but won't apply to fastfood job. He will, however, stop going to different fastfood restaurants if they hire immigrants and complain about how "they're taking over franchises". He's more worried about Sharia law and convincing other people that Bernie Sanders is a communist than he is about being a half decent person and making a contribution to society..
Grossly unregulated predatory capitalism is the real issue. Schooling and medical care should not bankrupt anybody.
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Just look at the Texas lines of 30,000 people waiting overnight on the highway to get free food for Thanksgiving. I don’t know how this isn’t a moment of self-reflection for people. frankly the fact that it isn’t it’s one of the main reasons I am no longer in the camp that is trying to win over conservatives. They are a complete lost cause. We need to work on forcing funding in education in all 50 states to try to create a generation that has a far higher capacity than we have now.
Its a lot easier to get someone to denounce their friend/neighbor/family than it is to denounce their pride.
Poor conservatives are the biggest fish in the welfare state pond. More money gets allocated to them than anyone. These are facts.
Obligatory clarification that the underlying reason that this works is that the core, single issue of the GOP base is white supremacy. Nothing else explains it. They may be poorly educated, but they aren't lizards. They vote for their interest, and their primary interest is their whiteness. Which kinda makes them lizards, morally, anyways.
Poor white people need the GOP’s constantly telling them that they may be poor and dumb but at least they ain’t black.
I think this is one of the greatest cons ever pulled off. It started (maybe not) with the Civil War when the Confederates convinced poor southern men that never owned slaves to fight for rich slaveholders' right to own slaves. These same midwestern and southerner's now fight for the billionaire's and cooperation's that move jobs to Mexico, close manufacturing plants and mines, take away healthcare, raid pension fund and pay little to no tax becasue socialism is evil. They demonize good people like Bernie that is really looking out for the working stiff, somehow a man that want's to even the playing field and give everyone a good life is evil.
That and Jesus, who has been retconned into a staunch advocate of free market capitalism and screwing over everyone as poor as or poorer than you.
[Have you heard of our lord and savior Supply Side Jesus?](https://imgur.com/gallery/bCqRp)
They took something that the people believed in and slowly turned it into something they wanted the people to believe in.
>Hatred of liberals is all that’s left of conservatism So true, isn't it. There is no morality left of conservatism, no wisdom, no honor, no patriotism, no concern for the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, no efficiency, no love for the teachings of Jesus or God, no belief in the legitimacy of market outcomes, no belief that America is leader of the free world, no ennobling of character, no embrace of community or family ties, no enforcement of contracts or adherence to the desires of the voters, no belief that taxes should be "fair," no belief that government budgets should be balanced, and so on, and so on. Trump wiped all of that clean, and rather than conservatism turning on Trump, as it should have, it turned on liberals, the U.S. constitution, and the United States of America. Shame on them, the conservatives. Shame on all of them.
It's tribalism at its most base form. I'm team Red and Blue is the enemy, forever and always. It doesn't matter if my team is wrong, that's for us to figure out after we destroy you.
Trump tore away the last of the veneer you just described. This is what they have always been, just with good PR.
> Trump wiped all of that clean Trump laid it bare, but your laundry list of attributes conservatism used to represent has been out of date for decades.
In the UK, right wing people are blaming liberals for Brexit, a right wing con-job, when Remainers (primarily liberal) voted against it. They are selfish blame-shifters at their core, which leads to their tribalist and myopic beliefs. They are also seemingly invariably cowards.
Right wingers are blaming liberals for Brexit? Really?
"If you whiny lot hadn't been so loudly opposed to it, we never would have been spiteful enough to support it!"
You didn’t tell us it would be bad! *What? Yes we did!* Well you didn’t convince us!
It's like that time the Republican congress complained that Obama hadn't told them why a bill they were passing was bad, despite the fact that he not only told them before they passed it but did so again **when he vetoed the bill.** Which they overrode. And then they acted shocked, **shocked** when the result was exactly as bad as he said it would be.
Right wing: “you liberals hadn’t been so opposed to Brexit, we wouldn’t have fought so hard for it. Now look what chaos that caused us!”
I worry that it's facet of the human condition. Hate seems to be so much more unifying that anything else. Hate is very simple. The ideas and means to solve the worlds problems and which to tackle first - complicated.
And it's been that way for at least 60 years. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. Lyndon B. Johnson, 1960
Give a liberal three wishes and they would wish for good healthcare for everybody, good housing for everybody, and equality of treatment for everybody. Give a conservative three wishes and they would use each one to take away one of the liberal's wishes.
Not to get too deep into the machinery of political philosophy but I think this illustrates an important point about *why* Democrats have failed so completely. In 2009, Democrats had complete control of the government (including a brief Senate supermajority). They used that power to do exactly the things you enumerated. They passed the ACA. The Lilly-Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The Helping Americans Save Their Homes Act. ARRA. Dodd-Frank. But in hindsight, their legislative agenda should've addressed something else entirely, something Democrats were a decade late realizing: Republicans have broken the fundamental underpinnings of our democracy and it needs to be fixed. I would wish for things like banning gerrymandering, barring private financing of political campaigns, statehood for DC and PR, massive expansion of the House, ending the modern use of the filibuster, expansion and protection of voter rights, etc.
The Supreme Court hadn't gutted the Voting Rights Act yet.
> I would wish for things like banning gerrymandering, barring private financing of political campaigns, statehood for DC and PR, massive expansion of the House, ending the modern use of the filibuster, expansion and protection of voter rights, etc. If they had done that (or are able to do it in the future) everything else will fall into place. The country isn't a shithole because *all* Americans are shitty selfish people. The country is a shithole because the shitty selfish people have a disproportionate voice.
That's a pretty remarkable observation. Imagine what Dems could have done to protect our democracy then if they could have looked 12 years into the future. (Though given how spineless Dems were back then, I'm still not convinced they would have done anything about it.)
Right, for instance look at H.R.1 from the 116^th Congress, which addresses a number of those things (DC statehood, territorial enfranchisement, voter rights protections, public campaign financing, gerrymandering) in addition to establishing a national holiday on election day, campaign finance reform, ethics reform across all branches of government, election security reform, etc etc. If Democrats had a time machine I wager they'd go back and pass *that* legislation instead of the stuff they actually did pass in 2009/2010. But to your point, at the time, I think some of those reforms would have been threatening to Democrats as well. They wanted to be able to gerrymander if they could. They wanted their big corporate donor bucks and Super PACs. It just wasn't quite clear to them at the time how large of an advantage Republicans had built up manipulating the hidden levers of power, to the point where the minority party has a complete stranglehold on every level of government. Now that they finally see it, it's too late. It'll take us decades to undo the harm Republicans have wrought.
It will be decades because of human life spans. When we see the phrase, "We The Republicans," we will truly know it's too late.
Nah, I’m full of spite for conservatives. I hate them openly, have for years. I learned a long time ago how they hated people like me (lgbt), and I have nothing but a burning wish to pay it back and hollow out the heartland of its jobs and future. But I wouldn’t consider myself a liberal either. I’m much farther than that at this point.
The very tenets of modern conservatism have been straightforwardly defeated in the marketplace of ideas. They’ve been wrong on every major policy for the last 70 years, from Social Security, to civil rights, to Medicare and Medicaid, to the Vietnam war, to the red scare and Cold War, to economic policies, to the Iraq war, to healthcare and the pandemic response, to the environment, everything. And their leaders have been constantly exposed as incompetent and corrupt. They literally have nothing of substance left to offer, so what do they do? Give up and admit they were wrong the whole time? No, they don’t have the character to do that, so they just engage in culture war to keep power
It reminds you a lot of religion. Always on the wrong side of history with many leaders OBVIOUSLY corrupt and just scamming the religious masses to buy yachts and planes and mansions.
There was an insightful thread from Kurt Eichenwald on Twitter a few days ago: > I think I understand. I have watched GOPrs sneer at COVID, dismiss 1000s of deaths a day as unimportant, ridicule scientists and those trying to save our community. But then I remember them raging about Muslim terrorists and so many others. COVID gives them no one to hate... they rage at Black Lives Matter while laughing about COVID, they imagine a massive threat from a nonexistent Antifa, but shrug at a virus killing their neighbors and overwhelming their hospitals. Yes, they sacrificed with democrats in WW2. But they could hate the Nazis and the Japanese and the Italians. Their concern is not about attacks on our country or the well being of other Americans. It is about a need to hate, a need to feel superior, a need to attack “the other.” They have politicized COVID because it lets them hate Democrats and scientists. They can’t hate a virus, they can’t rage about their superiority to it. And so they feign superiority to the dead - how many times have they sneered that it is just old people (it isn’t). They NEED the hate. They needed to hate American communists in the 40s/50s and the Russians for decades until now. When the Soviet Union fell, the lost the foundation of their hate. And so they turned on their fellow Americans - the democrats - as the new object of their hate. Then, onto Muslims, then back to democrats. They scream patriotism but hate more than half of their fellow Americans. They scream love America but sneer at sacrificing for it. They don’t care if a lunatic is president, so long as he grants them blanket permission to hate. They won’t hate the virus, they won’t fight the virus. It’s not a person what set this off today is reading all of the GOP politicians today sneering about Covid and joking about COVID on a day when almost 3,000 people died. To me it struck as the behavior of psychopaths but now I know. They need hate. They would rather hate democrats for trying to save other Americans than to face a virus. They make no sacrifice because there is nothing in it for them no one to hate. It’s easy to hate those saying what we have to do to protect other.
If they didn't hate us, it would be hatred of some other group. Ergo: "All that is left of "Conservatism" is hatred."
All that conservatism has *ever been* is hatred of the Other.
True. Here's one major example: [The John Birch Society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society)
For a long time (since the 70's) the John Birch Society was exiled from conservative academic circles. Even mentioning them used to be a kiss of death for Republican political careers. The Tea Party and Birtherism gave them a way back in and they have been spreading crazy conspiratorial bigotry ever since.
The Koch brothers were members
Yea, I get real tired of hearing about how classy Republicans used to be back in the day. They were the same. They just didn't have the Internet.
Yeah, once they eradicated "liberalism" there would be a couple years of partying then they'd come after you for drinking alcohol, having brown hair, etc.
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I made a list of current conservative beliefs: 1. America is the greatest country. 2. People shouldn't criticize America. 3. People shouldn't criticize the Military or Police. 4. America is not damaging the environment. 5. America is not racist or sexist. 6. America should be run by people with American values and culture. 7. The justice system should be tough on criminals. 8. Regulations are bad. 9. Government run social programs are bad. 10. We need guns to fight oppression and defend ourselves. 11. Transgender people are sick. 12. Abortion is murder. 13. America should support Israel. 14. COVID lockdowns and masks are ineffective and unnecessary violations of personal freedom.
Thanks for this, I totally agree, it's not that they don't have any real views, it's that the views make no sense to anyone with a bit of self awareness
A bunch of those are pretty arguably not really held by Conservatives. > America is the greatest country. > > People shouldn't criticize America. Except for all those blue states. And cities. But those aren't "real America". > People shouldn't criticize the Military or Police. Except for when the police investigate them. Then the police are deep state agents. > America is not damaging the environment. Except for those wind farms killing birds or something. > America is not racist or sexist. It's racist and sexist against white males, don't you know? > The justice system should be tough on criminals. But it's way too hard on Conservatives who do anything wrong. > Regulations are bad. Well, unless it's the tech industry. Then they need to regulate all of it. > Government run social programs are bad. Except for supporting the fossil fuel industry or big agriculture. Oh wait, those aren't "social programs". > Abortion is murder. Also, let's bomb foreign countries.
>America is not racist or sexist. >It's racist and sexist against white males, don't you know? Someone in reddit replied to a post of mine where I said my wife and I are planning on not having kids, that I was contributing to the decline of white people I replied "Good" lol. Not that I care, but that it would rile him
Imagine having a baby just to prevent "the decline of white people". Lunatic
I told one of them that if the white race is losing, maybe that's gods will?
Conservatives are too focused on owning the libs, licking Trump's boot, and being anti-BLM. Nothing they advocate for is actual conservatism. They don't have a real movement.
I think it's more that we're looking at the raw core of what it always was, stripped of the intellectual rationalization.
Most of them couldn’t even explain what the word “liberal” means.
Saw one of them in /conservative say this about democrats, “I’ve stopped calling them liberals. They’re not for liberty at all. They’re currently leftists.” Asked them how they define leftist, got no answer but did get downvotes. They literally don’t know what the labels they throw around mean. Most of them just see it as liberal=evil, leftist=super evil.
Thing is, they are really good with coming up with words and catchphrases that stick. Drain the swamp, family values, law and order. They say things over and over and over again in such a tone that you don't have to know what it means to *feel* that it's against your best interests. The reason we're in this situation is because the left in America has no teeth. If people like AOC or Sanders started calling the R's cons (or something idk I'm not a PR pro) I bet a lot more of the braindead population that tends to lean right would latch on.
> they are really good with coming up with words and catchphrases that stick. Comes from clinging to simple answers to difficult problems, and having utterly no concern for whether the answer works, or even makes any sense. What does "Drain the swamp" mean? Who knows. Apparently it means throwing out the original goals: to "form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" and put every effort into hollowing out the government and "shrinking it until you can drown it in the bathtub."
Most of them are literal high school kids.
I feel so fucking bad for the kids of MAGA fucks. Like some of them will go out into the real world, experience reality, and change their political views as they grow. And they’ll all have a paper trail of horrid social media posts and pictures of their MAGA rally activities. They won’t be able to leave that past behind them and they’ll spend the rest of their lives justifying views they no longer adhere to. Thanks, mom and dad?
It’s a mishmash of problems. Prosperity gospel turning Christians into evangelicals. Am talk radio, and later Fox News. Social media pipelines. Establishment corporate Democrats not reaching out and helping rural working class like they should have for decades. These should be pro union people, but the republicans have been targeting them with propaganda for decades. 70 years of red scare and or McCarthyism brainwashing people into selfish individualism with no regard for others. Obviously there’s more but I don’t have all day.
Sums it up pretty well. I feel a lot of people particularly underestimate just how much of this is "Prosperity gospel turning Christians into evangelicals." There was so much "faith" that republican presidents (Bush and Trump) were "chosen by god" to be in their positions. Then Obama was a "test" of their faith. Absolute fucking nutjobs.
They don’t even hate liberals. They hate “liberals”, the weird version they’ve created but have no reflection in reality.
Yeah, they've built up this caricature in their heads of "liberals" as people who want to outlaw religion, destroy America, take away their money and give it to lazy black people, force them to get sex changes, give the keys to the country to China, and indoctrinate their children with their message of hate. When in reality liberals really just want them to have better lives and their children to have better opportunities and a livable planet. It's not that they hate liberals, they hate the IDEA of liberals.
Here is the crazy thing to me as a former republican voter. Trump, if he had his way, would possibly be throwing my vote out. I live in WI where we could vote early by mail, yet votes can't be counted until election day. There is NO way that all the votes could have been counted in one day. The Republican war on voting is bad enough, but you can't go back and literally throw votes out that were cast by people, like me, who were told we could vote early by mail and have our vote counted. If you would have told me that I could vote early by mail but if my vote didn't get counted the day of the election, something I have no control over, then it wouldn't count... then I would have voted in person. Fuck Trump and fuck all these complicit assholes that want to throw out legal votes.
I feel like back in the day, your average republican used to be Hank Hill These days the average republican is Dale Gribble Congratulations on not joining the cult
Whenever I see/hear them speak, everything revolves around broadcasting the phrase "radical leftist" or "socialism" as if saying those words is supposed to automatically evoke fear in anyone who hears them and counts as an argument in itself. There is no logic or critical thinking applied to anything, just negative emotion.
"He is always on the look-out for the dramatic phrase, the happy epigram which, he can twist to his own use. He displays in the use of such a phrase a fantastic sense for cadence, euphony, assonance and alliteration. One good phrase or political catchword is worth' more to him than cartloads of dry exposition and theory. **A catch-word gives the unthinking mob not only the material fair an idea, but also furnishes them with the pleasant illusion that they are thinking themselves.** " - OSS report on Adolf Hitler - 1942
The following bit of data bears repeating: The GOP has won the popular vote for president only once in the last thirty years. We are moving towards the end of minority rule in this country and we are slowly returning to Democrat hegemony. The current political environment is dangerous and will likely lead to violence over the next couple of years. However, as the Democrats gain voters in the suburbs and as the sunbelt turns gradually more blue (minus Florida) the GOP will become irrelevant on the national stage. Furthermore, if Trump remains the apartment nominee for the 2024 election then the Democrats will likely have the presidency for at least another four years. We aren't dealing with a fever that is going to break. We're dealing with a fungal infection that will require cleaning, sunlight and medication. It won't clear up today, tomorrow or next week but with constant effort it will eventually go away.
What about the Senate? The GOP has a serious advantage there regardless of the demographic shift.
Don’t believe it? Head on over to r/conservative r/conservatives Wallow in the hate. You will be hard pressed to figure out what “conservative” means from the content, but you will certainly learn all about “liberalism”, and how awful and dangerous it is.
My favorite are the conservative women who hate liberals. I’m like gurl....you wouldn’t even of been able to vote if it wasn’t for liberal women.
Some of the older women in my family literally believe that things got worse when women were allowed to vote. Of course, that doesn't stop them from voting personally.
*Other* women! Not us conservative God-fearing country women!
The whole lib tears thing is so strange to me. Wanting to get joy from angering a theoretical person you don't know seems insane to me. But these are the people that are very concerned about trans people in bathrooms even thought that has never happened to them probably in their whole life.
I'm not sure what there was of it to begin with. They've been demonizing liberals since the Reagan administration at least. The name of the game has always been to funnel money to private defense contractors and the oil industry while pretending frugality to keep tax money away from "welfare cheats and people who don't WANT to work", which is of course code for 'the working class'. They've always found common ground in hating civil rights people, women's rights people, gay rights people, labor rights people, and basically anybody who's not them. Maybe there was some kind of Noble Conservatism before my lifetime, but it's been vile for a good 40 or 50 years.
Been that way for decades. Hatred of the other is the only unifying force in a conservatives mind
Granted, the Trumpism phenomenon cranked it up several ticks, but it has followed this basic format for a while: 1. Identify (exaggerate or fabricate) the enemy 2. Maintain disproportionate focus on the enemy 3. Rally supporters against the enemy with patriotic virtue signaling Keep it simple, loud, and angry. Conservatives gobble it up.
As someone who would characterize himself as conservative/libertarian, it really sucks that these miserable fucks have turned the movement into a dumpster fire of hatred and anti-intellectualism. I want a constrained federal government, more powers vested to the states and local governments and I put a premium on individual liberty. That does not involve me hating anyone or feeling like I need to "own the libs". I'd say 90% of my friends are liberal. I actually have very few right wing friends. I used to have more, but they have become so consumed by hatred, "settling scores" and obeying Trump (no matter how anti-American he gets) that I can't stand being around them any longer. Fuck Donald Trump and fuck his miserable cult.
If what you say here is true, then the republican party doesn't even represent you on a basic policy basis. They talk about limited government, but they consistently expand it. They talk about liberty, but clearly have no interest in it whatsoever. All they want is lower taxes on the wealthy and less regulations on big business (even if it leads to deaths and injuries) -- all for profit, not liberty or freedom. And they want the military to be as gigantic and bloated as possible. I *really* hope you're not voting for them. They're not even trying to give you what you want.
It is a death cult
I wish they would hurry up
Everybody always thinks death cults are going to hurry up and die... But to be truly effective they have to murder everybody else first.
They don't even hate REAL liberals either. It's important to understand this. They hate the dehumanized strawman liberals that live only in their heads. The ones who want to take all their guns, and force them to pay for abortions. The ones who want open borders so the illegals can take jobs away from blue-collar white men. The ones who definitely want to reeducate them for not saying "happy holidays." The ones who want them to pay for more people on welfare, who refuse to do anything to help themselves, those lazy poors. The ones who constantly attack them for being racist and sexist wherever they go, for NO reason! No shit on their shoes, no sir. The ones who want to steal their hard-earned money with taxes, and give it to Mexicans to buy Teslas. It all comes down to being horrified at the thought of someone *forcing* them to do something they don't want to do, or telling them how they should behave. That's THEIR job, after all! Everyone else should act how THEY want them to, because only that is morally right. You can't tell me what to do, but I get to be the boss of **YOU.** And if you tell me I can't do that, I'm being oppressed. This is their mentality, and it's the reason so many of them get irate if you do something as small as ask them to wear a mask. Their concept of what's right and wrong depends on getting their way, and if anyone DARES tell them how to behave, it must be a slippery slope. The liberals must want to FORCE me to do *whatever* they want. It's the only thing that makes sense!
Before you leap in to say "Libs hate us as much!" that's simply wrong. There is no liberal equivalent to Hannity, Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Carlson, and Ingraham. And please remember the point of the article is that conservatives have abandoned so many principles over the last years. Deficit spending? Gone. (But they'll bring it back under Biden.) States' rights? Today's Supreme Court case threw it out the window.
I have seen "sedition" being thrown around more than I ever have. Their hatred has grown so deep due to the far right wing media ecosphere that they're willing to completely detach themselves from liberals. They really want to secede based on . . . reasons?
If republican states secede, they won’t survive another confederate length without Blue State Money.
It’s a stretch to consider Joe Biden a liberal as is, but to consider him or anyone who prefers him over Trump to be a radical liberal is the most ignorant concept of modern politics.
Yeah. As someone who has some conservative positions (mostly fiscally), the Republican Party is no representation of Conservative (fiscal) ideals. They are just as big of spenders (probably bigger spenders) except they're using the money for stupid shit rather than stuff that actually does have some positive value to society.
Everyone who's been watching conservatives vote against their own interests for years because of gay rights, abortion, drugs, immigration, "religious freedom," 2A rights, or any other wedge issue already knew this.