Something Worth Watching?

Hey Everyone!! :-)

I'm back today with another video I wanted to share. I was listening to this podcast and they made an interesting point. Obviously, there will be exceptions, but the point they made in the podcast is that a lot of Trump supporters still support him because, to them, he is fighting "the elite" the way he said he would. Most rational people are talking about the economic elite -- millionaires and billionaires and multinational corporations -- when they say "the elite." That's certainly what Bernie is talking about when he says it. But Trump and his diehard supporters are talking about the cultural elite. They're people who honestly don't believe people of color should be treated with respect and granted the same rights as white people. Or that LGBTQ+ people aren't inherently evil and deserving of persecution. Or that women are actually people capable of thinking for themselves and making their own decisions. So they're thrilled with the racism, xenophobia, and Christian sharia Trump is promoting. And trying to appeal to their sense of decency is pointless because we don't share a common moral code.

Likewise, it's futile to try to point out the fact that Trump has done nothing but support the establishment with his tax cuts for the ultra-rich and attacks on civil rights because that's not the establishment his supporters have a problem with. The establishment elite they hate is the cultural establishment elite that promotes racial, gender, and religious equality, economic justice, intersectionalism, and tolerance towards those who don't conform to the cultural norms we each happen to be most familiar with. Which means everything we consider the biggest atrocities of Trump's presidency, his supporters consider its greatest achievements. We're dealing with fundamentally different worldviews and value systems.

It was a lightbulb moment for me because I've spent months trying to figure out how so many people could be blind and stupid enough to continue to buy into Trump's obvious bullshit and scam artistry. And hearing this point being made helped me realize that it's actually worse than that. I realized that, at least for some of his supporters, it isn't that they're willing to overlook the horrible things Trump and his swamp monsters are doing because they think he'll also do good things that will actually help regular people, it's that they actually like the horrible things that are being done. They want to see brown children locked in dog cages and unarmed people of color being gunned down in cold blood by police and LGBTQ+ people and women being deprived of basic human rights. Those things aren't the bug for some of his supporters, they're the feature.

I mean, I knew that some people supported Trump because of his bigotry, but I thought the number of people who thought that way was much smaller than it apparently is. Because if you listen to Trump supporters explain why they support Trump, a lot of them will say it's because he's against the elite. And I always thought the elite they were talking about was the economic elite who are making it almost impossible for regular people to survive in this country. And it seemed to me that at some point even the most willfully blind and self-deluded Trump supporters would have to finally realize that everything Trump has done has only strengthened the stranglehold the economic elite have on our society.

But listening to them talk about this issue in the podcast below, and hearing them discuss why so many of Trump's supporters still stubbornly maintain that he's against the elite after everything he has done, I realized my mistake. People who support Trump because he's against the elite won't suddenly realize that they've been wrong because the elite they're concerned with isn't the same elite I've been assuming they're concerned with. And that realization made my blood run cold.

Because how do you reason with the unreasonable? How do you explain to someone that other people should matter to them? How do you convince someone who hates others so deeply they're willing to suffer themselves just to make sure the people they hate suffer more that it's not necessary for anyone to suffer? That it is, in fact, possible for everyone to have the things they need?

I don't know the answers to these questions. The only bright side I can think of is that people who think that way are still in the minority. If the rest of us work together, we can use our superior numbers to take back control of our government and bring sanity back to the national discourse.

At any rate, if you'd like to hear the rest of the conversation where this point was made, go ahead and listen to the podcast below. It's an interesting discussion and several other good points were also made. Peace!