Beaver [he/him]
Master of Reality
This shit’s seriously dark
He’s going to live another 20 years in perfect blissful retirement
(ツ)
I’ve asked the Trump voters in my life about “why”, and they’ve all talked about his vision for a better the future. People do have an actual, concrete hope in him to improve their lives in specific ways.
It’s definitely possible that there are ulterior motives at play. All these people know I’m a “liberal” from the city, so I don’t expect them to just open up to me. But it kinda reminds me of starry-eyed libs voting for Obama: they weren’t being cynical, they believed in hope and change. And I think there’s a fair amount of earnest hope in Trump voters. Liberals complain a lot about what a fucking vicious asshole Trump is… but I think we’ve been seeing how vicious libs are too, they just don’t let their id hang out in the open all the time like Trump does. It’s a perplexing thing, I think all Americans really do want a better future, and are actually willing to believe in someone who promises it. But they’re also deeply brain broken, uncurious, and cruel - everyone in the country is just a scratched liberal in the end, especially Trump voters.
I think a good point was made on Hasan’s stream during election night: what was the point of picking Walz, if you were then going to force him to do right wing messaging that he wouldn’t deliver convincingly? For a second there, it almost seemed like the campaign was about to pivot into a more progressive messaging campaign… but then they just ran as if they had Shapiro as VP.
It was a slow burn for me.
The first major turning point was Obama’s assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, and the way that liberals just accepted it and moved on. I had an understanding of liberalism as fundamentally being the good guy protagonists of the story of America, and I could not square the circle in my head. It was the beginning of a major reorientation in my mind about whether the actions of the Obama administration really matched up with the professed values on the liberal movement.
The second major turning point was working in a really heavy industry factory job during the late Obama and early Trump years. I worked with a lot of people from very different backgrounds from me, and it really made me face my own internalized bigotries about people from rural areas, and those with a lot less education than I had. I think it finally helped me exorcise the remnants of shitty techbro libertarianism in my soul and actually try to become a better, more compassionate person.
If you are compassionate, and you are curious, you inevitably end up discovering certain things about the world
Paul Krugman will bravely continue to do exactly what he’s been doing the whole time and being payed handsomely for.
I think what’s really striking is how close the “blue wall” states are, we’re talking under 400k votes in the states that are winning Trump the EC. Harris could have performed way worse than Biden 2020, and still won a comfortable margin. But instead of performing way worse, she performed catastrophically worse.
