Some of the ones who are against him are all like: "He's so rude, he's going to ruin our country." But, then they turn around and tell me that the country has an illegal migrant problem and that we shouldn't try to take so many migrants into the country. It's almost like they want his policies but, they just don't like that he pushes them in such crass style. It's so much of the dynamic you see with the two parties, where one is the mask-off barbarism party and the other one is the "smart" and "civil" barbarism party. No matter how many times you explain this to these people, they always find themselves back to the beginning where they were traumatized by seeing Trump be rude in 2016, and allow that to be the pass the Democrats need to enact similar policies as the "civil" barbarism party. It's maddening to try to reason with these people and see it's all been a fruitless effort.
the most aggravating part is biden isn't even really civil, put a voter in front of him with a question he doesn't like and he'll get way more rude than trump ever did with voters
They probably don't see that because it's their team. I remember cheering on Biden as a lib in 2012 when he kept interrupting Paul Ryan.
I think it’s that Trump exposes that the type of people they think ought to run the world don’t conform to their vision of them. Like if this rhetoric was coming out of some used car salesman turned politician out of Iowa they’d just be “that’s the bumpkins for you.” But Trump is urban, private school and Ivy League educated, well to do businessman. It’s like a monarchist being confronted with the reality of their system of superior blood right breeding being a drooling Hapsburg jawed buffoon.
As a Boomer myself, I think this is it pretty much.
Had many arguments with my wife trying to point this out...Trump is pretty much the American Classic Liberal in every meaningful way in what he does, but is fairly unfiltered in the roiling sewer of liberal racism and classism that always lurks underneath the surface of any servant of American Capitalism out here in the wild whenever he opens his mouth. Put him in a powdered wig and he fits right in with the founding fathers.
It's the sympathetic resonance that liberals feel when subconsciously agreeing with what Trump says that really pisses them off...that ol' cognitive dissonance that he weaves so well
It seems pretty rare to see boomers here so if you could explain how you came to your political ideas I would be interested in reading.
Hmm...firstly, I don't see political ideology as some consumerist notion of shopping for pre-packaged belief system. I tend to pick and choose what feels like an articulation of my personal values as I feel strongly that going along to get along is only appropriate if you already feel that way, like choosing a concert to go to based on likeing the band and not just the social activity for its own sake.
My father was a part-time minister in the Church of God and career military and every now and then pro-union (though not around my Mom) and my Mom still goes to her Baptist Church at 91 years old (evidently my Dad's church just wasn't down-low racist enough ha ha) so the notion that there is one belief system I am locked into wasn't forced on me. They never insisted I choose a church I think because they would have to start a war with each other to force that on their kids, that left me in the rare position of being clear and free to go to church or not. They had agreements on values that their churches embodied on a personal level but left the protestant bickering out of it.
So then I stared to realize I was also generally clear and free to navigate institutional social groups of all kinds, which in my young mind translated over to politics. i didn't shop for ideologies, but instead dabbled in everything.
I had a friend that had the George Carlin vinyl records which was a mind blowing thing, I never heard anything like that at home. My friend then told me and another guy in 5th grade we didn't have to stand for the pledge of allegiance at the school assembly so we didn't. I remember a male teacher grabbing my ear and dragging me to my feet...but I remember the hatred and cruelty in his eyes. I've seen that same look when you try to talk about socialism or communism or the USSR. Hatred and cruelty and rage in the eyes of people that were otherwise ordinary American adults, even my parents. And it is so sudden, it's quite startling like Dr jekyll and Mr Hyde.
My first presidential election was Reagan's second term. I hated Reagan, but back then i couldn't articulate why i did, i would have said something like "you al voted for him because he is a charming movie star" which I think was a big motivator back then, now celebrity is pretty much a necessity to win the popular vote which explains the Don. Before Reagan, ordinary people viewed the President as a leader due to the post WW2 militarism but mostly like the guy doing the job and he better do it well or we'll vote him out (not that they would, just the everyday sentiment of ordinary folks).
I was very anti-war for a lot of reasons, mostly I think because it took my Dad away for years at a time when I was small, I didn't realize that at the time but full disclosure. Unfortunately I was still steeped in American Classical Liberalism so moving left was forbidden, my parents as well being products of WW2 propaganda and then the huge coup of the post FDR era including McCarthyism and anti-communism. My Mom could never say "asian" or "Viet Namese" but one of an assortment of colorful racial epithets
So I was was left voting for Libertarians as the only anti-war vote I would make. As time went on, and I entered the work force, I saw first hand how the boss never worked and we got peanuts in the post Reagan non-union factories that popped up like mushrooms in the eighties (they vanished the day NAFTA was signed, the one I worked at moved to Mexico). That's when I started to see that most folks ideologies around politics was blind social in-grouping and sating vulgar appetites and that real politics was brutal power. Bosses abusing us and keeping us poor and frightened.
I remember during Bush Sr starting the first Iraq war, my ex SIL came home with a "Desert Storm" t-shirt with a big eagle design and my brother talking about bombing those racial epithets into glassy craters hyuk hyuk. I remember how horrified I was for humanity and how I had to keep a straight face because I knew it was a losing battle.
I kind of gave up on politics after that like a depressive fugue until the internet got popular, because at that point it was easy to see that involvement in American politics was basically entertainment. But online, it was liberating to think and feel whatever i wanted without fear of reprisal for not conforming to the capitalist status quo (I didn't yet realize that was what it was)
The candidacy of Bernie Sanders was the first time I ever actually had spontaneous and sincere feelings about participating in politics, it had always been some boring perfunctory rehash of failed ideologies that hid the powerful from scrutiny. But Bernie captured my spirit and my imagination. I started to understand the gut feelings I had all along were about Capitalism and how it hurts us and I started seeing videoes and tweets form people who articulated my nascent left values and I just kept going from there.
Cool and interesting. I’m american but married overseas. When we moved back here to raise our kids (I was still a liberal at the time), my oldest ended up in elementary school here. During some ceremony in the gym everyone had to stand up for the flag, but because he was still new to the country he didn’t know what was going on and remained sitting. He was basically accidentally based. We ended up homeschooling our kids for the first three years of the pandemic (when we spent a lot of time reading leftwing theory and history). They wanted to go back to school last September so we let them. There’s massive liberal influences there but my kids are generally still pretty contemptuous of american society (they also keep getting betrayed by liberal teachers whom they initially looked up to) and I have high hopes for them.
Some of the ones who are against him are all like: "He's so rude, he's going to ruin our country." But, then they turn around and tell me that the country has an illegal migrant problem and that we shouldn't try to take so many migrants into the country. It's almost like they want his policies but, they just don't like that he pushes them in such crass style.
Democrats in a nutshell.
“I am the hero of the universe, I cannot be a bad person, and Trump is worse than me because of his crassness, so if I attack Trump, I am proving to the world how good I am (as if anyone could doubt this!), plus I get to enjoy the benefits of Trump’s racist counter-revolutionary policies via Biden, so it all works out.”
Lots of trump supporters are also not the rabid chuds we see online. They’re reluctant or quiet trump supporters and remarkably similar to biden’s huge boomer contingent in their class position and ideology. I’ve heard them say that they support trump, “if only he’d keep his mouth shut!” They were also pretty nervous about his troubles with the law and only supported him because biden/killary was worse, etc.
I think the labor aristocracy and petite bourgeoisie has a few different wings. Unproductive office/nonprofit workers exist to make capitalism seem more palatable and therefore tend to support Biden. Blue collar workers support Trump or RFK or have checked out of corporate politics. Airbnb landlords and restaurant owners are probably more on the lib side since they deal with a diverse customer base, while business owners who deal with resource extraction tend to be much more obviously conservative (since their businesses are clearly destroying the environment). Race, gender, and/or sexual orientation can complicate this picture.
There’s little reason for these people to change their minds since they belong to the global 1% and capitalism is still working for them. If they’d been really truly fucked hard by capitalism, convincing them would be a lot easier.
Regardless, as capitalism heads toward the singularity of revolution, the whole universe is concentrated into a single point of light behind it, one so small that the differences between liberals and conservatives become impossible to see.
Lots of trump supporters are also not the rabid chuds we see online. They’re reluctant or quiet trump supporters and remarkably similar to biden’s huge boomer contingent in their class position and ideology. I’ve heard them say that they support trump, “if only he’d keep his mouth shut!” They were also pretty nervous about his troubles with the law and only supported him because biden/killary was worse, etc.
I saw some people use this as their justification for voting for DeSantis before that petered out. Now they basically ignore how crass Trump is while every other word that comes out of their mouth is about "illegals." I try to talk to them about the push and pull cause of migration and how to mitigate that and their brain doesn't even register that "migrants" is another word for "illegal immigrants." Its stuff like this, the easy proliferation of old fashioned reflexive white people racism, that makes me lose a lot of faith in human progress. They don't want to listen to any solution other than the horrifying solutions barbarism offers.
I think most white americans (and sadly many non-white americans) have truly appalling political views, but these views only seem normal here in the USA, AKA Big Israel. Ultimately these people are probably not going to be convinced. They really will have to be fought violently.
