YOU'VE CERTAINLY SEEN it or heard it in person (how quaint, conversation), online, in the media. The most common assumption I've seen is that such People are stupid or ignorant but that's both too satisfyingly mean and too inspecific. LOTS, and I mean LOTS of People who support and vote for Trump are clearly not stupid and they're not ignorant. What they are is immoral. The support he has from those who graduated from the top universities, Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, etc. are clearly not stupid and many of them can't be believed to be ignorant of the consequences of someone like him having power. The goddamned six members of the majority of the Supreme Court who gave him dictatorial powers are the ultimate examples of that. All of them certainly did what they did knowingly and it's clear that all of them have a good idea of what will happen because of what they did. They are clearly immoral enough to LIKE WHAT WILL NOW COME. All of them are professed Christians, everyone from the perverted, Black People hating Clarence Thomas, up to the hypocritical Amy Coney Barrett and, clearly, none of them have much of a use for any of the Commandments of Jesus, though I'm sure Barrett might hold to the one on divorce in higher esteem - It's odd that none of them seem to take that Commandment which came straight from the mouth of Jesus seriously as they take what neither Jesus nor the Bible said against abortion seriously enough to get increasing numbers of Women killed.
But this isn't about the corrupt, jaded, decadent elites, this is about the "common People" and how we imagine how they could have done it. I have concentrated on the fact that few of them read much of anything. I doubt most of them -- really most people of any political persuasion - read more than headlines, at most and a lot of them don't read that much. America is in full post-literate mode. They will, I'm certain, listen to what TV or hate-talk radio or media hucksters and liars tell them, if it's packaged in an entertainment format as almost all of that is, now. We can listen to an excellent speech by Kamala Harris or another Democrat and wonder how their facts, their reasoning and their presentation can't persuade the reasonable among the "undecided" but it's clear such People are not vulnerable to reality or reasoning or even the most transparent honesty. I noted yesterday that they don't seem to like competence and even clear decency, nor do those have a very good track record in American politics. I noted that voters rejected among the most decent men to have ever gotten the nomination of a presidential party, George McGovern and Jimmy Carter in 1980. George McGovern lost to what was even in that election known to be a criminal, a war criminal with a record of genocide that makes Netanyahu's pale in comparison, Nixon and Jimmy Carter lost to the studio-system movie star, Ronald Reagan. One of the stupider prep to Ivy products holding the presidency in recent times, won over two far, far smarter and better policy wonks, Al Gore and John Kerry, John Kerry having been what Bush II wasn't, a decorated war hero while he was gotten out of going to the Vietnam war by his daddy, a war that both of them favored other boys getting killed and wounded in.
My latest guess takes where such common voters get everything they or their parents believe they know from, and it's mainly entertainment, internet, TV, radio, and the babble they hear from other such People who get what they mistakenly believe they know from it.
Given that you might ask, how is it that the experience of the past eight years, in which Trump destroyed the economy he was handed by Obama, got at least a million Americans killed and put the lives of many more millions at risk as he babbled on live TV about People injecting bleach and taking horse medicine even as those of the highest competence (Bless Dr. Fauci) said those didn't work and would be dangerous - even as those who believed him tried that and died. There were a million reasons right before their eyes why they should have rejected Trump and many of them did in the immediate aftermath of that experience, enough of them to make Joe Biden president. But then they turned on Joe Biden just as so many did on Barack Obama after they'd voted for him.
My best guess at that is such People, for whom the media replaced anything like an education in the old fashioned sense of that, have been trained by their viewing and listening habits into a stream-of semi-consciousness in which the last thing they hear swamps even the clearest of lived experience. I imagine that for a dangerously effective margin of them, even lived experience, never mind learned fact, falls to the next thing put into their minds by the media. I think entertainment and infotanement (in which the info is more ersatz than real) has rendered them vulnerable to that distraction. I don't have any idea how you can fix that in someone else who has those habits of non-thought baked into them by a steady diet of too much TV and movies and hate-talk radio, it's hard to avoid being sucked into it yourself. I think I was vulnerable to it when I was younger, TV is probably the most democracy destructive thing ever invented.
As you, no doubt, know, all of that assumption is based in my major theme of the fatal danger of allowing the media to lie with impunity, which the Courts, especially the Supreme Court, staffed by the supposedly best and brightest did. Earl Warren and his colleagues did so out of the world of illusion that the law so often is, I am thinking of the lawyering racket as an intellectual exercise in sophism in which you come up with babblage to arrive at the result you want. Walter Brueggemann noted that the "textualists" of the law, Scalia was his example, never, ever seem to come to a "textualist" or "originalist" meaning for the Constitution or laws that disagree with what they wanted it to mean to start with. I think those who adopted the Sullivan Decision wanted to stick it to the racist who brought the suit so they let the liberally respected great gray lady print whatever lie the Sulzbergers and their hired hands wanted to. I don't remember thinking much about that decision at the time but I'm sure I'd have liked that result at the time. It was only on trying to understand how things went to hell after that that I realized that at the base of it was lies told in the media, starting with how I tried to understand the 1968 election that brought Nixon, who everyone in my family knew was rotten, to power. I was aware that the media was all-in for Nixon that year. It was the contrast to how all of the media in 1980 and 1981, especially the media I listened to which was mostly NPR and PBS by that time, turned from clear hostility toward Jimmy Carter to its fawning genuflection On Bended Knee* to the racist, Hollywood product of little brain, Ronald Reagan.
Anyway, those are some of my thoughts on how Trump voters in this election and many of the non-voters are so invulnerable to even the hard experience of the disaster that Trump I was and are so willing to take another chance on the even more pathological, clearly senile, convicted criminal, Trump this week. Though he is the most officially criminal and obviously senile, that's not novel in American presidential politics and how the media covers for them, Nixon and Reagan were obviously criminals by the time of their reelection races and Reagan was clearly at some stage of dementia, which was widely known in DC by 1984.
What is new now is a small majority of Americans who voted, voted for a man who dementedly danced on stage for more than half an hour and simulated oral sex before a crowd on live camera. Many of them supposedly voting for him out of religious principle. Clearly many an "evangelical" and even many who aren't in the "trad Catholic" cult among Catholics are OK with both of those.
That is along with those who did it out of their misogyny, either unadmitted or, in so many cases, plainly stated, even those who weren't motivated, as well, by racism. I think that misogyny - and a lot of such misogynists are Women - is the main factor in this. Much as I wished with all my heart as I supported Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris for president, I think it's clear that I, as clearly Joe Biden was, were wrong to think we have made that kind of progress in the United States. I think our presidential system has a lot to do with that impossibility, most of the examples of Women in that position in other countries have parliamentary systems in which the chief executive is chosen by a party and not by the voters. I wonder if she had to be chosen by the British voters as such if Thatcher would have ever become Prime Minister. But there's no way to know that. The British media might have been able to pull it off for her, I don't think they're any better on that than American media and I don't think British voters are any more sophisticated or rational than American voters are, their system just tends to not go for the stupidest and crudest of the criminals. Though they did get Boris Johnson and put up with him longer than any rational electorate should have. Come to think of it, I remember having to tell a young woman at the University of Maine who was happy about Thatcher becoming PM that she should be careful what she wished for because she was going to be a terrible leader. They kept her on even under the brutality of her economic policy for everyone but the upper class. American voters aren't that much stupider than the ones there if at all.
* The title of a still excellent book about the corruption that flourishes in our "free press" which has always, on balance, been supportive of everything from the bad to the worst in our politics, our culture and our society. It's always been that way. The media learns nothing, nothing at all and under the Supreme Court made law of the land, they aren't required to learn anything. That's what "freedom of the press" means in post-Christian America.
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