Materially, it makes little sense for blue-collar workers to vote for Modi, Orban, or Trump, a billionaire whose platform is to cut taxes for the rich. Hitler and Mussolini had their share of support from the poor too.
What are some of the theories of why this happens?
I know scapegoating foreigners for poverty is part of it. Wilhelm Reich wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism but I haven't read it.
have you heard Matt talk about how the only thing politics has left to offer is hurting people you don't like
few believe that a system fully captured by markets can have a positive impact on their lives but you can punish your enemies
that being said I think the vast majority of poor people disengage from politics instead of becoming right wing
I think it's also easy to dislike someone who can be perceived as 1) self-important and 2) not doing useful work. For example, if you see someone who works in marketing who complains about a lack of vegetarian options, you can arouse the ire of an ill-tempered person who works with their hands for absurd hours (is being exploited)*. Couple that with the ease with which you can hate libs and you get someone galvanized towards the right wing and susceptible to calling the COVID vaccine a clot shot.
*whose reverence of a honest and hard day's work is admirable and whose work is important to a functioning, civil society
I'd also add that there's a contingent of people who don't necessarily do it to hurt people they don't like, but things have always been shit and the political parties they have to choose between have never made it better, so they'd rather feeling like they're part of a winning team.
When life kicks the shit out of you either way, why spend your time being invested in the often losing side instead of the getting to celebrate with the winning ones?
Obviously I think that's bullshit reasoning even if I do understand some aspect of the sentiment, but it's one I come across a fair bit.
In 2016 Trump was up there saying he was going to change things, make things better.
In 2016 Clinton was up there saying things were already great.
If your material conditions are in decline, your life opportunities are diminishing, who are you going to go with?
While I'm sure this correct and plays a part to a degree, I don't think this was such a major factor. Bernie Sanders was saying he would change things massively, and I know PAC nonsense, but he still didn't get enough support to get in.
Agreed, so it feels like that is a bigger factor in people's opinions.
MSNBC brought Harvey Weinstein on one of their shows, didn't introduce him as a Clinton surrogate and allowed him to say that Sanders is sexist without any pushback.
Bernie got 2/3 of the media coverage Hillary got and Trump was all the mainstream media could talk about. If you weren't listening to alt-media sources you probably never heard of Bernie Sanders until 2020.
I was thinking about folks only paying attention to the general election.
You don't need theory for this. There is no left in existence in most of these places, and in all of these places the bourgeoisie have ideological dominance and control the means of information dissemination.
As a poor person, if you're not a well-read academic, you have two competing theories to explain why you're so poor: The bourgeois are nicking all the cash, or foreigners and 'bad' poor people are nicking all the cash.
All your means of checking are deliberately obfuscated. You're taught that the people who say it's the former (commies) are basically just fascists. Successful people who you're taught to admire, and every news outlet and every source of authority is telling you almost every single day that it's the latter.
If the latter is true, then you get to feel you have a chance to be a richo, and you just need to :vote: the right people in and all foreigners and 'bad' poor people will be crushed. If it's the former, you have crushingly little hope of ever achieving meaningful change and you don't even get to dream of not having to worry about money.
The real question is, absent a more questioning environment, what reason is there for people to consider that the latter isn't true?
what reason is there for people to consider that the latter isn’t true?
If the "bad poors" are nicking all the cash then where's the fucking cash? Their lives suck too.
I think part of it is the genuinely incomprehensible amount of wealth held by the bourgeois. It looks like those "bad poors" are holding a lot of wealth simply by virtue of the fact that you see a lot of people each holding a comprehensible amount of wealth. "Billion" and "trillion" literally don't parse as "money," they parse as "economy," which is something that happens out there while actual people live our lives out here with 3-digit "money." When it's hard to even wrap our ape brains around individuals hoarding such a vast amount of wealth, it's also hard to really internalize the idea that there's enough for everyone if we just fucking took it from them.
They literally quip about "if you want free healthcare and stuff, just cross the border illegally cause the stupid libs will give you whatever you want"
I think in their mind, they are poor cause all the taxes they pay go to supporting illegal immigrants. It's obviously not very well thought out.
Imagine if instead of taxes withheld, your paycheck had to list surplus value withheld.
I guess that's generally where news channels say it's going to 'PC nonsense' and 'people who dared to have fifteen kids at taxpayer's expense' and generally 'woke nonsense' and being spent on drugs or something.
I obviously agree with whatcha say, and I think you're right about the confounding factors when it comes to comprehending money.
Oh yeah, the machine works 24/7/365 to convince people their eyes are lying to them.
Democrats don’t even pretend to give a shit about the poor anymore. You either have the choice of coastal elites who don’t care about you, or coastal elites who don’t care about you but mention you in their speeches and are racist
Demonisation of Communism and Leftists. Liberals being fucking morons and useless. Fascists promote something like a bourgeoisie-proletariat alliance, in the sense they are all one people. In reality the workers gets fucked over and the bourgeoisie gets richer.
Also, there is no left-wing in the USA. At least no left-wing with a chance at getting in power.
It's kind of ingenious how there's hardly any path to becoming a leftist in America outside of being a disaffected weirdo who got bored one day and read theory. That seems to be the main pipeline, although maybe that's changing with podcasts and YouTube, but I'm not holding my breath. That all seems very surface level aesthetics.
You either end up simply a liberal by ingraining yourself in the process, or you become a right winger because you fell into something like being a small business dipshit and your only social sphere all go to the same mega church. There's no material base of leftism, no community, nothing much outside of increasingly less powerful labor unions. That's part of why places like Minnesota swing weirdly far left on some things, prevalence of unions.
I do have hope though. I think a lot of people in America still believe they'll be rich someday if they keep their head down and work hard. That illusion can't last much longer. I'm optimistic and everyone here should be too. Don't get cynical.
Poor people, like most other people, get their political education from oligarch-owned social media platforms and oligarch-owned TV stations. Here they are presented with a binary political spectrum consisting of rainbow capitalist liberal centrists at the one end and fascists at the other. These are the options you get. There is no left to present a real alternative.
Social conditioning. They're told very explicitly that there is no alternative and attempting to seek one will just cause you misery and make you an outcast. American citizenry have no political power, voice, or will. The status quo is violently enforced by state agents largely free of accountability. and the rich are freely permitted to prey on the poor. Our entire society is monstrous, and it has a tendency to weed out those who are not and also do not have the means to care for themselves. So they become monstrous enough to fit in. They want to fit in, after all :bateman-ontological:
Or they just fucking die. Not all at once, it's usually long and slow and miserable, but it comes.
There's a few, but one is atomisation. Blue collar workers have a better deal but have been atomised from wider struggle either at the factory or industry level. So what they do have is entirely focused on self interest. Sympathy strikes being made illegal was a key component of shutting down mass organisation.
As for service workers, isolation and small workplace numbers along with long and irregular hours mean that they've always had trouble organising. Maids and Serving staff were one of the few groups to fail to get real workplace protections in the late 19th/early 20th century. This may be changing, but currently the ruling class sees no reason to change the usual tactics of keeping them atomised at the individual level.
If there's no solidarity between groups of workers, those workers will turn reactionary to protect their own station. And practical solidarity these days almost always means risking your jobs and breaking the law, for someone else's fight that probably wont succeed. That's a hard sell.
Most of the radical leftists I know are also poor. I think there is just something about living in the margins that pushes you to the extremes, and outside of the four years you potentially go to college you are going to get far more exposure to the far right than even the most milquetoast leftist positions.
A large part of it is that the white terror makes sure that there are no viable alternatives
There's not a real "left wing" option is one short explanation.
When your only percieved options are "blue or red and you must pick it's your duty to pick" then it's not hard to side with red over blue.
We're going to put kids in cages either way, the only choice is between whether we hide it (blue) or whether we own it (red). It's easier for a poor person to choose the "right wing" option in this scenario because, in reality, they're both right wing options.
Right. It's why Bernie was still pretty popular across the spectrum for quite a while.
Last I checked FOX news is the most popular news network in the United States, by viewership. You're just way more likely to encounter conservative thought than leftist thought in general.
All education and mass information is shared from right wing sources, and poor people don't have the time or money to look into it more, so they draw right wing conclusions.
