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Tim Walz gets that you need to humiliate fascists engaging in bad faith and promote progressive policies to engage populist leftist support, hopefully the rest get the message for midterms
It isn't simply wanting to destroy that which excludes you. They want to destroy what they fear. They fear exclusion. They fear those different from them. They fear having to change. They fear losing what they have.
Conservative media and politicians stole these fears and create new ones. Migrant caravans, CRT, FEMA camps, Antifa. These people will run to anyone who indulges their fear and says they can fix it.
This is the lesson that the political left needs to learn. Relying on our "better nature" is not an effective strategy. People remain vulnerable, now more than ever, to the tactics of propaganda. If we want to create a better future, we need to accept that we need to wield those tactics better than our enemies.
If we want a fair and just society, the idea needs to be sold to the populace. Collectively, we cannot be trusted to independently choose a better future for ourselves.
I'm not at all convinced, because the poor aren't the ones who elected Trump. Both the rich and the poor voted for Harris. Here's the data:
Edit: This is not the most up-to date poll, although it is substantially correct. See my post below.
Ordinary people don't keep track of billionaires. Almost no one even knows how many billionaires there are, or how many billions they have. I don't know and I bet that even most people who blame billionaires for everything don't know. If there are twice as many now as there were before and each one has twice as much money, the public won't even notice.
IMO Trump support is due to envy and resentment, but it's not the resentment of the rich by the poor. It's the resentment of the middle class by the working class. Look at the results by college education:
(Note that while income and education are correlated, my first plot shows that the people without a college education who are voting for Trump aren't voting for him simply because they're poor.)
It used to be the case that mass media was controlled largely by people with middle class values. The people who opposed vaccination and supported renaming the Gulf of Mexico were called crackpots and they wouldn't appear in most mainstream newspapers or TV news. Neither the Democrat nor the Republican candidate for President would agree with them.
Now, thanks to the internet, these people have been able to organize into a mass movement and they want to smash the institutions built by the middle class that looks down on them. They voted for Trump because he's culturally one of them, despite the fact that he's a college-educated billionaire.
Do experts say Trump is a fascist? Do experts say vaccination is essential for public health? Do experts say tariffs will wreck the economy? Now Trump will make those experts cry delicious liberal tears...
This isn't how Presidents are elected either. Even though Trump narrowly won the popular vote, at the state level you might see a different picture. We're all Americans but the concerns of a Floridian aren't the same as the concerns of a Californian.
The first chart is from August 2023.
My apologies. Here's CNN's exit poll. The results are substantially similar. I added a note to my original post.
Note that CNN also has a chart of this data with the "less than $30k" and "$30k to $50k" categories merged, which conceals this phenomenon. I think that can give people the wrong idea.
Thanks for the research
I don't need to grasp some "truth" about "human nature".
I just want a non-genocidal candidate. Murdering people is really the worst form of inequality.
That's the actual problem at the heart of this fascism.
He's not wrong.
We're still a bunch of greedy monkeys, and no amount of education or "proper parenting" can fully override the base biology all the time for every person.
As much as it would be great to be better, we aren't even close.
Yeah, he raises a good point.
The question then becomes: how do we make the people who feel excluded (and hence want to burn everything down) feel included?
By stopping austerity. Tax the wealthy and reinstate everything that's been torn down since the new deal. Shift taxes from taxing labour to taxing assets.
Are you a fan?
Yeah, I do follow him. I'm actually surprised he's not mentioned in the column, you'd think Monbiot would be aware of him by now.
Offer them universal healthcare, make daycare actually affordable so that peole can afford to uave a family and work. Go after slumlords who are buying uo property to rent out. Breakup monopolies that are price gouging at every step of the supply chain. Require that any factory/firm that is outsourcing give the employees the right to first refusal so that they can keep important businesses in their community.
The problem is that all of this is anti-market, so liberal parties will nevwr accept them. But those are the sort of policies that immediately benefit people. It becomes a lot harder to say minorities are ruining your life if your life has become noticablly better
Why does everyone want dual-parent working households?
Why not let parents raise their own kids?
You have to pay enough that one full time job funds an entire family's expenses.
So? What's the problem with that being the goal?
Because sometimes shit happens and single parents still need to be able to work. I'm all for forcing minimum wage to be enough to support a family of 4 in your area, but that's a much mor fundamental change than the things i listed.
There are options for letting even single parents raise their own children that do not require that parent to work.
Id argue that everything you as an improvement would be pro-market but anti-capital since monopolies generally flatten out and suppress competition. There's a reason why the disappearance of butchers, bakers, and small general goods stores coincides with the expansion of companies like Walmart, K-mart, and Albertsons.
I thought facts didn’t care about their feelings.
How about helping the people who are genuinely being excluded?
Wasn't it better in the 90's already, and it got worse in the last 20 years?
Better? Define better...
There was still plenty of poverty in the 90s, and the violence situation was actually worse than it is currently.
We’re still a bunch of greedy monkeys
Lol no. This is beyond pseudo-science. Not even accurate for monkeys much less humans.
Are you saying that Monkeys aren't monkeys? Or that we aren't greedy? Or that Monkeys aren't greedy?
It's absolutely accurate, go walk through a mall, see how many people buying shit they don't need just to show off to their friends.
Fucking depressing, and totally accurate
Humans just aren't actually good. We're capable of amazing things, and also great cruelty
We're right in the middle. The scales tip in whatever direction circumstances dictate. It's quite something, especially because we all want to b the the "good guy". We're just not wired that way
Humans are selfish. It just depends on what they’re selfish with. Me? I’m selfish with my time. Others, money, or labor, or any number or combination of things. Humans are good, we just can’t agree on what ‘good’ is.
brutal, blunt and true.