For my brother, it let him openly be sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-trans, and hateful. I haven't spoke to him since 2017 when we got into a big fight and he said some pretty horrid things about my wife.
77I'll never understand the mind of those people. I mean granted I'm gay, so I guess I'm more empathic to minorities, but if I was a straight, white, cis man, what would I win with hating these groups or what would I lose by letting these groups exist?
8I'm a straight, white, cis man and I don't understand it either.
Like the lawn sign in front of my friends' house says: "More rights for others doesn't mean less for you. It's not a pie."
11Everyone likes to feel superior in some way. To a lot of people, they were born superior, especially those who feel like they are not important in any other way.
7
"Donald Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich man, a weak man’s idea of a strong man, and a dumb man’s idea of a smart man.”
76Authoritarianism in general has a certain appeal in how much it simplifies life. In a liberal society, life is more difficult and complicated, as each person bears a certain measure of responsibility for learning about and understanding a broad variety of issues, if they want to be a responsible voter.
Authoritarianism removes this complication. If you just want to live your life on a sort of auto-pilot, without having to wrestle with a constantly changing world, then you can just let some authoritarian take care of all of that for you. So long as they sound like you want your leader to sound, you can fall into their trap.
Works great for simplifying things. Everyone would probably be authoritarian if it actually produced good results. Except it just doesn't, history has pretty clearly demonstrated that it quickly runs out of steam, stagnates and then decays, where more liberal societies remain more competitive and innovative for much longer.
66This is exactly it and thank you for expaining it so well.
The desire for simple explanations, from an inability to understand complexity but also from fear of what seems like chaos, is also what underpins a lot of religious belief out there: life is a lot less scary and simpler if everything without an easy explanation is explained by being the will of a god or pantheon.
Hence why if you engage the populists (not just of the Right) in conversation pretty much everything boils down to a world view of black and white with no greys, "my side" vs "the other side", no subtlety, no empathic understanding and so on.
Mind you, in some countries with voting systems rigged to enforce a power duopoly like the US, this kind of thinking has been activelly promoted as normal since forever because it justifies the power duopoly in the eyes of most people (if you think human problems are two-sided, two-sided politics looks like a reasonable way of allocating power, rather than looking like an anti-democractic suppression of most options), so it's hardly unexpected that they're the most fertile fields for populists preaching simple "explanations" and simple "solutions".
7https://www.facebook.com/THEDiDiDelgado/photos/a.271621723285520/306669263114099/?type=3
Apologies. Couldn’t find an original link.
1
“If he can be rich and powerful by hating all these people, perhaps there’s a chance for me?”
42We live in a vast digital spectacle, but we don't participate in the spectacle -- we consume it. Since nothing is real anymore, since our entire reality only exists through digital media, and since we have absolutely no agency, why not vote for a shit-poster for president? It's fun as hell to watch him troll all those tedious snobs in DC. Fuck those guys.
Then enough people voted for him that something incredible happened. He won. That wasn't supposed to happen! For once, something changed, and everyone who voted for him was a part of that change.
Actually accomplishing something is fucking intoxicating. It's so easy to get hooked on that heady feeling of mattering at all for once in our pathetic, powerless, alienated existences as cogs in a giant wasteful plastic machine. We spend months, then years, then decades drifting without meaning, working jobs we hate, taking our kids to shitty day cares we can barely afford, waiting 19 month to see a doctor about that new weird lump, and so on.
For these people, reality has never been so real. They're actually in it now, doing things. They've chosen a new content-creator-in-chief, and they want his content to take over the whole spectacle.
39Well fuckin' said. It's all so tragic.
5
Back in the 2016 election when he had just announced his candidacy, I recall being semi-interested in him after the first GOP debate, based strictly on his performance. His policies already sounded like racist trash (building the wall), BUT the appeal I saw from him was his apparent independent nature. He was a billionaire that wasn’t beholden to anybody, he could potentially reshape how everything was done in Washington, which has become so dysfunctional. He could work with both Democrats and Republicans (he was friends with the Clintons after all), maybe he was just running Republican, but he’d veer to the center after getting elected.
Obviously none of that came to pass and he’s just a fucking grifter who tried to become a dictator, but at the time that was the potential he had. It was an election where everybody wanted somebody who would make a big change. Sanders was far and above the best candidate to “shake things up” in DC, but then Democrats went with the most establishment candidate they could find.
35I heard a lot of rhetoric (on Reddit) along the lines of "yeh, we've had politicians. What if we need a business man? Trump can run it like a business and make it efficient".
Seemed fairly logical to me. As a non-american I hadn't heard of him, wasn't hugely into politics (let alone American politics).
I remember chatting with mates, and it came up, so I mentioned that perspective. Thankfully, they called me an idiot, described the actual character of trump, and why that was a terrible idea.
It wasn't difficult to corroborate what they said, and suddenly the whole facade fell away in front of me. That coincided with t_d taking over Reddit, and it became painfully obvious none of it was in good faith nor organic.14Did no one pay attention to the news when he was just a real estate grifter? From a decade before, he was clearly without integrity, clearly skating across the line of legal, clearly not dealing fairly with those he did business with, clearly acting mostly in service to his own ego. I do see the appeal of a businessman to lead the country but not that approach to business
11
then Democrats went with the most establishment candidate they could find.
Yeah, I'm really hoping for some more interesting Dem options soon. Probably not going to happen in 2024, but I'm hopeful for 2028. Biden has gotten a lot done, and I'm really thankful he has brought some decency and normalcy to the WH, but I'm still looking forward to other options.
6I think this is the most logical argument I've heard about him in a while. Thanks for the perspective. I've hated him from the beginning, but this does explain a lot.
3
Rural people bitter at their lack of cultural influence in mainstream culture think he's their ticket to social control
19The Trump supporter I know thinks the government is run by tall white alien Democrats that rape children and drink theri adrenal fluid to stay young and that Trump has been arresting all of said tall white alien Democrats for crimes against children.
Or at least that's what he told me when last I was still on speaking terms with him.
If you want more insight into how Trump appeals to some people, I can recommend Ian Danskin's work about the alt-right. This is a good video to start with.
17The Trump supporter I know is a store manager at a Home Depot and raped an underaged cashier. HR and Corporate protected him.
6
My guitar instructor first voted for Obama and then for trump. I think it came down to guns, increasing cost of living and generally just growing to hate democrats? He doesn't hate me (knows I'm pretty liberal, but also I'll bitch about democrats in a heartbeat). Spoke with his wife (much more level headed) and it seems... A tone of defeat? Cost of living is high, hard to raise a family on a set income, and for them Trump represented someone who would change things instead of the usual status quo represented by the democrats and the usual GOP. I think it is that, guns, and he is not really wanted by either party so they like him. He's not a politician.
17Not a bad assessment. I voted for him in 2016, and given the current situation, I'd probably do it again if he was the chosen candidate. That said, I think he's done what was needed as a disruption to the system, and I would rather have somebody with less of an ego to stroke, and ideally less involvement with the financial elite.
Edit: Bring on the downvotes, I guess. I simply provided an honest perspective to help answer the posted question.
-22The only disruption a rich, white, old, NYC real-estate mogul provided to the system was saying the quiet parts out loud and forcing establishment R's to choose between embracing his bullshit or alienating their bigoted base.
30I can understand desperation, but it seems like the primary disruption has been a weakening of our democratic system and the ability for anything to get done at all, I don’t understand how this is seen as a positive even if life is expensive.
I also don’t understand how things like tax cuts that roll themselves back for normal people and not for the rich are seen as helpful.
12Not all disruptions are the same. If you're constipated you want to change the status quo, but that doesn't mean shooting yourself in the dick is going to make anything better. So I think "we needed a change" is some combination of incomplete, dishonest, or thoughtless.
Also conservatives have bad takes on every issue so voting for one is not great.
6Sad to see that our voting here is just as messed up as it was on Reddit. People will downvote a sensible cogent reply because they don't like the politics of the poster. Then they'll go and upvote a braindead 2 word comment like "fuck Trump". Lemmings indeed.
3No one likes bootlickers. What a shock.
1You're not going to get anyone not connected to the financial elites. They didn't foresee Trump winning, and now they're doing everything in their power to see that someone even slightly outside the system will never get elected again. You could fill 100 filing cabinets with all the crimes committed by all the presidents in the last century, yet he's the only one thats actually having charges levied against him. The people prosecuting him don't give a crap about justice, or whatever they think he did. They just want him out of the way. They've looked the other way at crimes 100X worse by others because they play the game.
I didn't vote for him because I just got tired of voting for the lesser of two evils. The binary election system is a farce. People arguing between Democrats and Republicans are just useful idiots. I shall continue to be an unuseful idiot.
-4
As ever, the appeal behind fascists is pussy bitches blaming "others" for their miserable failures in life.
12I say this as someone who hates the man: At the time of the 2016 election, he was the most energetic politician of my lifetime. You could see that he excited his audience, people got caught up. And this was the party that usually has the less charismatic politicians.
It was also that Americans were sick of politics as usual. That's also what drove Bernie Sanders' momentum.
9I think one of the major thoughts goes like this, somewhere deep inside, "If he's an obvious idiot and a criminal, and he's still a wealthy person and president, that means I COULD BE PRESIDENT PROBABLY IF I WANTED TO!!! I just don't want to, I want to eat these Cheetos... but good to know I have the option."
Also, just straight racism/sexism. Having an avatar to allow you to not feel guilt/shame for the parts of your personality that you know are rotten and wrong.
8People are stupid and terrible, so he gives them someone they can relate to.
6Permanently Deleted
4I'm an European, so american politics are quite alien to me, but back in 2016 when the whole pre-election period was happening, there constantly were posts by the media and just people in general on reddit saying how Trump is bad, how he's going to ruin US, how he'll never win against Hillary, I couldn't help but root for him as he was the clear underdog.
Couldn't help but root for him due to that, I guess, though I don't think this applies to the present day, as the whole meme is over.
3I'm pretty sure you could help but root for him. It seems a simple decision not to root for a blithering, hateful idiot. I'm pretty sure no one was forcing you to cheer on a dumpster fire like that guy. Just because someone's an underdog doesn't mean they're deserving of your consideration. Remember kids, fascism isn't a meme.
10As I said, I'm an European so I only had a surface level understanding of the candidates back in 2016. I was kind of young too, so Trump to me appeared like some funny guy from the TV, not competent enough to be a president. A person who only got rich because of their parents.
As for him being a fascist, really? He doesn't strike me as being able to hold any kind of Authority besides being a keyboard warrior on Twitter.
3
I couldn't help but root for him as he was the clear underdog.
With everything that has happened since, are you still rooting for him? If so, why?
4
He might collapse the country. 🫡
2If you have to ask this, after him being in the public spotlight for nearly a decade, you should seriously consider the narrowness of your media sources.
Like, anyone who’s not being brainwashed should know the arguments for the other side of the political aisle.
1The policies and personality some Americans like.
0Lol policies
3Next week! It'll all be revealed next week!
3
