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.
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?
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.