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I’ve always seen that as a perception of social class. The left sees itself as the upper class ruling elites and the conservatives are seen as lower class. They’re “the help” the kind of people who fix your toilet, or install your new energy efficient air conditioner, or the ones who cook in restaurants or make stuff in factories or raise your food. They’ve called it Flyover country for decades because they see it as the places where the losers live.
I think at least half of the conspiracy theories started as jokes. They know that their ruling class sees them as idiots, and they might well choose to have a bit of fun pretending to believe in weird stuff just to annoy their betters. Jewish Space Lasers is certainly a joke — I know of no one anywhere who believes that the Jews have space lasers.
The left sees itself as a mix of hard-working urban middle class + discriminated minorities, while they see conservatives as a bunch of bigoted country club members.
I know an unfortunate number of people who think Obama is a secret Muslim, that the government is trying put them into camps or controls the weather, that the 2020 election was stolen with millions of fake votes. Let me be blunt: both parties have more than their share of cranky stupid people, but the major difference is that the Dems have (correctly) corralled their idiots and generally have more of a problem with the galaxy-brained wing of the party. The GOP, meanwhile, has been taken over by the morons and wishes they had enough smart people to have a galaxy-brained wing. Saying it's just an act is cope.
It’s a lot easier to “corral your radical elements” when you have a firm grasp on most institutions and are firmly in power. They essentially don’t need the votes and vocal support of the far left wing. They can tell them to sit down and shut up because even if that 3-5% of far left tankie communist group stays home on Election Day, democrats will still have substantial power, influence, and support. They will have 240 or so electoral votes in the can. They own the deep state, the university, the media, and so on. The GOP doesn’t have th3 luxury of telling the far right to bugger off. They lose if that faction stays home, and if they lose, a lot of the current project of trying to reconquer the institutions will be put off for another generation or two.
And I would consider Mises and Heritage foundation to be fairly galaxy brained institutions. They put out plenty of projects exploring how a conservative might go on to solve pressing issues in our society. There are also church institutions that give reasons for social conservative ideas.
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You are correct about the GOP, but dead wrong about the Democrats. Sheila Jackson Lee, who was until her death this year a long-serving Democratic congresswoman and a member of several important committees, was shockingly stupid. She recently claimed that the moon is made mostly of gases. She asked, at a 1997 visit to the Mars Pathfinder operations center, whether the Pathfinder rover had taken a picture of the flag planted by Neil Armstrong. In 2010 she asserted that North Vietnam and South Vietnam are still separate countries.
Meanwhile, Brandon Johnson, a police abolitionist and black racial chauvinist, is the elected Democratic mayor of Chicago. Maxine Waters, an extremely politically powerful Democratic congresswoman, is a long-time associate of Louis Farrakhan. The Democratic party is full of dim-witted and politically radical black officials, and is powerless to sideline them because of the stranglehold their constituencies wield over the party.
Don’t forget Georgia Representative Hank Johnson, who famously worried that the island of Guam might tip over and capsize.
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Look at the democrat ticket. Two mid wits. Very unimpressive people who are kind of dumb. Maybe even knuckleheads.
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