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The responses by various commenters here reveal severe contradictions at the heart of “the case for Trump”. I think that this profoundly confused tweet by Martyr Made is illustrative.
In this framing, Trump is the champion of the weird, socially-unpopular kids - the ones shut out of bourgeois normal society. The jocks and the pretty girls snub and bully them, but by banding together in a coalition with disaffected members of the social elite who have become awoken to their plight, they can launch a liberatory strike against the privileged upper crust who have historically marginalized them.
This is textbook leftism! This is literally the ur-narrative of the cultural and political left. It’s also the opposite of reality. Blonde jocks and rich cheerleaders are one of the core voting constituencies for Donald Trump! The weird alienated kids who got bullied in school, meanwhile, are a core Democrat constituency! One bloc of Trump voters are now apparently attempting to re-brand themselves, or re-contextualize themselves, as oppressed victims - the marginalized Other.
However, this is blatantly at odds with the original core appeal of Trump, which is that he was a champion of normal, well-adjusted, classic and confident America, here to take the country back from the freaks and faggots and pencil-necks who have essentially usurped control through subterfuge and used that power to resentfully force their unpopular obsessions on the mass of normal popular people.
And of course, it is manifestly risible for Trump voters to claim to hate bullying. Whatever else you want to say about the Trump phenomenon in 2016, it clearly involved a substantial amount of bullying, derision, and even rough-housing/violence at some of the rallies. (I’m not absolving the Clinton campaign, which of course also involved a different type of bullying and derision.) Trump supporters have also ruthlessly mocked and derided “DeSantoids”, using classic nerd-bashing behavior; see Scott Greer’s (admittedly amusing) unflattering impression of DeSantis’ nasal voice and spergy affect.
Trump voters have no leg to stand on if they wish to wear the mask of the oppressed and marginalized. That sort of maudlin victimhood-signaling has never been what conservativism or right-wing values are about. If anything, Trump voters should be proud to be the jocks and cheerleaders rightly excluding the maladjusted weirdos; playing this “no, you’re not the underdog, I’m the underdog” game is just totally conceding the left’s frame.
If anything, Trump voters most closely resemble the oppositional culture cultivated by blacks. When they are a minority or are relatively disempowered, they cry victim and throw out accusations of cheating and unfair privilege. When they are a local majority or gain any sort of power, though, they ruthlessly bully whites and Asians; they also bully those within their own ranks who “act white” by refusing to wallow in victimhood and who aspire to earn a spot in the majority culture via self-betterment and the adoption of bourgeois values. Blacks as a cultural-political constituency would rather destroy the mainstream American establishment - supposedly for excluding and “othering” them - than try to prove worthy of being embraced by that establishment. And when they don’t get what they feel they’re owed, they riot.
I say this all as someone who voted for Trump in 2020 and who will vote for him again this November, assuming he’s the GOP nominee. I just hate liars and cope. The people in power in Washington DC and in the media and academia are certainly not Chads and Stacys. They were not jocks and cheerleaders. They see themselves as champions of the marginalized and disempowered, the same way that [the Trump who exists only the minds of his ardent supporters] does. Oppositional populism is a great way to drum up votes and guilt your way into power, but it’s also the sign of a catastrophically unwell society. Give me a candidate who is proud to represent normal, productive, intelligent people, and maybe then I’ll start getting excited. That’s what Ron DeSantis was supposed to be, and Trump supporters called him a fraud and a sellout for not going to bat hard enough for J6 rioters or agreeing that the 2020 election was stolen.
Our country is fucked.
The Trump-supporters-as-jocks framing does not match with my own reality or what I have observed. The guy who refreshes Drudge compulsively about the latest minutia in the Hunter Biden story, has an obsession UFOs or conspiracies, or reads Ayn Rand strikes me as more Asperger's or neuro-atypical, whereas normie liberals are more conformist or trusting. Rebellious left-wing youth not uncommonly grow up to be normie, conformist liberals. Conservatives go the opposite direction of becoming more distrustful of the system. Even someone like Rush Limbaugh was much more of a nerd than a jock, by being so obsessed with politics and broadcasting, despite his cigars and other props intended to convey a care-free masculinity.
My experience in youth politics is basically that more extreme people get in either direction, more likely they're to be a nerd or otherwise maladjusted. Normies tend to be centrists, though there are nerds of all stripes. Not a particularly mindblowing observation, I know.
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It really isn't. It will be ok if Biden wins and it will be ok if Trump wins and it will be ok if Haley or DeSantis wins. For the vast majority of people life will not change much in any of those cases. Taxes might rise or fall immigration might rise or fall, but the political fallout overall will be more theatre than anything else. For 95% of people in the country, the differences will be actually tiny.
agree it's not. people say this every four years and then lo and behold things go on. It is changing, no doubt, but this is not the same as its destruction. Metrics such as GDP and others remain strong.
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This would be more believable if we hadn't gone through the entire Covid debacle, where one side was utterly hellbent on following a set of barely-supported policy guidelines with large amounts of ideologically motivated reasoning and would have imposed these guidelines on the Federal level had they had the levers of power at the time.
And so, we have a clear, stark example of a situation where the leadership of the country can have direct impact on the lives of most of the population, where literal TRILLIONS of dollars can get flung around depending on who controls the pursestrings.
So yeah, its fair to think that the country could be made better or worse off depending on who won.
Now, CARING too much when you, individually, cannot impact the outcome is a different matter.
Except most of the lockdowns by governors happened while Trump was President. And was the one who signed the CARES act (2.2 trillion dollars and the largest stimulus package in US history), the Families First Coronavirus Response Act and another 900 billion in the December Appropriations act. When Biden passed his 1.9 trillion stimulus package in Feb 2021, Trump wanted bigger direct payments not smaller!
If you want to say that governors made a big difference, I would agree with you. But the actions taken by Trump and Biden were pretty similar overall. And the discussion we are having is the difference the president makes to the standard person.
Vaccine Mandates and penalties were one of the major flashpoints.
Biden tried imposing them nationally.
https://apnews.com/article/biden-lloyd-austin-e4047962b92087be278c6886e2e2d0c5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_Independent_Business_v._Occupational_Safety_and_Health_Administration
Biden also tried to pull the student loan forgiveness card a couple times.
https://www.ncsl.org/state-legislatures-news/details/supreme-court-strikes-down-student-loan-forgiveness-program
He used the Pandemic as the justification in that one:
Even if I grant that Biden and Trump's approaches were similar in many ways, the ways in which they were different are pretty damn salient.
Sure, but I'll note that you used the word tried multiple times there. My argument is not that Trump and Biden are the same, it's that the office of President is much more limited than people think. Biden trying and failing to do something, that Trump didn't even try to do has exactly the same outcome. The thing does not get done. So the difference in actuality was vaccine mandates for the military. Which the link says affected 8,400 servicemen/women.
If the Presidency gave you unlimited power then the differences between a Trump and Biden presidency would be huge, I agree. But it is highly constrained, so when it comes down to it, their differences of what they actually did was I maintain pretty small.
If you're the victim of an 'attempted' murder I think you still will have certain rational opinions about the perpetrator who tried to kill you but failed.
I just think it's odd to make the argument that it 'doesn't matter' when we've got a recent example of how much it can matter.
Which still subsumed by the point that one shouldn't worry too much about it because the factors we can control have little influence on that particular outcome.
Again, that is fine, I am not saying that having preferences between them is a problem. And it's absolutely fine to prefer the person who didn't even try to do X in the first place. That makes perfect sense!
My very narrow point is the system has built in rails, and those rails in general mean, that in practice, the difference presidents make to their citizens as opposed to the difference the legislatures, governors et al make is actually pretty small. And much, much smaller than most people think. A combination of the deep state, federalism, separation of powers and so on contributes to this.
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Many effects of the president are downstream. If the president pushes a trade deal, or energy policy, or whatever, you're not going to see new prices and changes in the economy the next day; it's going to take a while. Even something like picking Supreme Court justices isn't going to have an effect the next day.
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This is just demonstrably untrue. Have you considered that some of us believe that current levels of mass immigration are an existential threat to the future of this country? That whether or not DEI and affirmative action programs expand or retract will have a measurable and significant effect on the efficacy of our institutions and infrastructure? That one presidential candidate is more likely than another to create the conditions that will plunge the country into a large-scale war?
How exactly is immigration an existential threat to America?
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It can't be demonstrably untrue, because whether the country is fucked or not is not an objective question. It's a subjective one. You think it is, I do not.
I think it is better than it was 50 years ago. I think tomorrow will be better than today no matter who is president, because most of the changes have nothing to do with who is president. Who is president is downstream of cultural change, not upstream.
In other words if people turn against DEI or AA in then it will go no matter who is elected president. The president is a figure head, a lightning rod, a symptom, not a cause.
I’m not saying it’s demonstrably true that the country is fucked. You’re of course correct that this is subjective.
I’m saying that it’s demonstrably untrue that 95% of Americans’ lives will not change at all depending on who is elected president. The president does obviously have the power to affect the day-to-day lives of citizens. The government’s response to COVID, for example, had very significant and tangible effects on the day-to-day lives of nearly every American. If you want to argue that any imaginable president would have handled the situation in exactly the same way, you have to explain why other countries’ COVID responses varied so significantly.
Americans have opposed AA in large numbers for decades now. Multiple states - including California - passed ballot measures and laws to ban it. This did not have a significant effect on its spread or its implementation, because the ban was trivially easy for institutions to skirt around by appealing to the logical extrapolation of the Civil Rights Act, and to the decisions of unelected judges, including ones nominated by past presidents. Very very few Americans support DEI, and yet it is ubiquitous in both the public and private spheres.
Woodrow Wilson was elected on a promise to keep Americans out of the First World War; less than six months later, American soldiers were dying in Europe. Ronald Reagan’s voter base largely opposed mass immigration, yet Reagan himself signed the largest amnesty of illegal immigrants in American history. Presidents can simply lie about their intentions, or change their mind after being elected. It’s simply not true that they are merely catspaws of public opinion.
Did the response vary much between Trump and Biden? I would argue not much. Trump championed the vaccine etc. etc. The fact that different countries react differently does not mean changing the president within the same country changes much! The difference is confounded by different government, different history, different "deep states" etc.
I think you are making my point for me. Regardless of who was elected in before WW1 Wilson or someone else, America would have almost certainly ended up at war. Who was president was largely not important. Do you think Wilson was lying about being isolationist? Or was it simply that the president is simply not that important? Even a man who promised to keep the US out, could not do so. And you want to argue the president really makes a difference?
Only once people are REALLY against something (not just wishy-washy against it, but still go on as normal) will the establishment change. Who the people vote for as president is a symptom of that feeling, but it doesn't mean it is enough in and of itself, it's just one signal. Reagan enacted the amnesty but tied it to making it illegal to hire illegal immigrants. He said he wanted to eliminate the incentive for illegal immigration. But that is similar to stances he took in 1980 before he was elected. Ergo, it seems his immigration stance did not dissuade voters from picking him. They may even have agreed with his stance that, spending money trying to get rid of current immigrants was a waste and only be disincentivizing future immigration could change happen.
Consider Macron moving to the right on immigration et al, because there have been more than just votes. Your president can stay the same and public feeling can be strong enough then so to will the president.
It's not just a symbol, it is one of the mechanisms holding people in check, a ritual people perform that has 'given them a say in how the country is run', enforcing acceptance of the legitimacy of the election process and also making them complicit. The shit will really hit the fan when the people give up on voting as worthless imo.
Sure, but as pointed out people still supported Reagan even if they were against illegal immigration, because in reality people care about more than one thing. It's only when one thing begins to be the reason why people vote or don't vote for someone does it actually realistically matter. If you heard Reagan speak about immigration in 1980 and voted for him anyway, then clearly illegal immigration is not really a big enough issue for you to switch your support. You have to make trade offs on which values are important to you. So, his supporters had other things they prioritized (primarily the economy).
If illegal immigration had really been a huge deal for people Reagan likely would not have been the nominee in 81 indeed both Reagan and Bush in 1980 advocated for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. If it had been the top issue, someone else with more hawkish immigration positions would have been the pick no?
Yeah man, no argument here - I was actually trying to build on what you were saying, not refute it. Just by engaging in the voting process people endorse it and implicitly accept that framing. When they are really against it I think they'll give up on the electoral process entirely.
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I'm sure you are aware that there are many other people in the government and adjacent to it besides the president. People that don't change much between term changes in USA, but are completely different in other countries. You're also aware that other countries operate under different arrangements of those people and different laws that take various lengths of time to change, when they can be changed at all.
You know all this, so why not skip to the point and explain why you believe the president has more influence on the covid response than all the rest of that?
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Excellent post and I really enjoy your point, but something I think you are missing in your overall argument: everyone who is heavily involved in politics, especially the extremely online and out of the Overton kind like MartyrMade, are categorically losers. Normies just don't get involved in that kind of thing. I've been to GOP fundraising lunches and ProgressiveCoalition fundraising dinners in the last year, and both were full of freaks and geeks.
To move out of high school movies and to Tolstoy instead. Fat bastard Pierre Bezukhov is political, nerdy, reading, questioning everything around him. Legitimately born young nobles and military officers Prince Andrei and Nikolai engage in none of those activities, they merely do what they are told to do, their politics are their parents' politics or their teachers' politics or their classes' politics. Your political types are going to identify with Pierre, the weirdo, the nerd. Whether they are right wing or left wing, that's the archetype of the vast majority of political writers/commenters/tweeters/bloggers.
MartyrMade's Darryl is, affectionately, a weirdo. There's something delightful about listening to him talk to Jocko when they podcast together, the contrast between Darryl who has every weird conspiracy bullshit theory on tap and Jocko who's like "really bro no fucking way I didn't know that!" His perception of society is still anchored in that high school identity as a nerd/loser.
But so was any leftist hack podcaster! They were both the dorks in the back of the classroom! The class of people who write about politics all perceive themselves as primarily dorks.
Sorry to hijack a little.
One of the miracles of my life was becoming aware that I was a weird nerd at the end of High School, realizing it was a life sentence of neurosis, and very deliberately Chad-ing it up in college (Frat, did a sport). Fuck "be true to yourself" nonsense. I had leaned into maladaptive behavior for all of my adolescence and it didn't make me feel good. So, I changed it.
What's jarring to me in professional life now is seeing people who did something similar (albeit with maybe less conscious direction) flip their persona like a light switch based on the immediate social context. Product Managers in Big Tech, generally speaking, are much, much more likely to be MBA Chad/Stacey types. Yet, the second they don't get their way or face some sort of adverse group dynamic, they start sperging out with statements like "I know I don't "get it" like all of you do, I'm just trying to do my best here with what's a really awkward situation for me!" Contrast this with one of the better PMs I've ever worked with - a literal ex college football quarterback - who would often wrap up meetings with "Cool, cool! Computer dudes get after it!" And they would. Happily. Because he was being honest.
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Please give the following article a read. I don't think you've got an accurate picture or understanding of Trump and the forces animating his campaign. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/
Specifically, please pay attention to the part where he outlines the salary/wage class and the distinctions between them. It neatly answers and resolves the quandaries you've posted.
For those interested, the "managerial revolution" expands this a lot further. A dash of "elite theory" spices it up.
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In the class framework of that article (which is a valuable one), Trump's best demographics are small business owners and retirees - the groups which together make up the vast majority of the investor class. He clearly does better with the wage class than the salary class, but the idea that the wage class is his core vote is incorrect, unless you skew the numbers by insisting that non-white members of the wage class don't count. Considered in the round, the wage class are still swing voters.
The thing that both the MAGA right and movement conservatism have in common (to the point that it is no longer easy to tell them apart) is that they are the "country party" in the classic court-vs-country dynamic - their core constituency is local elites in unfashionable places who think the national elite is dissing them. The woman who waits tables at an Arby's in Peoria thinks she is getting the short end of the stick. Whether she ends up blaming her asshole boss or the smug librulelites on TV more is the meat and drink of court vs country politics.
The nature of the American culture war is that there is a large-enough-to-matter minority of white men who are not local elites but who see themselves as local elites because they are white and male - they are mostly "wage class" and make up the noisiest subset of Trump supporters. (They are also the reason why "country party" right-wing politics works better in the US than in other countries even pre-Trump). But the core Trump voter is rich enough to own a boat.
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I was skeptical of this but it really was well worth the click.
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The Trump phenomenon does not have a single rationale, but many, some of which are contradictory.
They want law and order but also to tear down the establishment. Some support Trump because he's not Hillary/Biden etc. Some see Trump as bringing fresh air to politics and an alternative to politics as usual. Some support him because he exudes coolness or owns the libs. There is no particular clique that maps to trump.
These are not contradictory goals at all.
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To echo Fruck, I think you've unfortunately got twisted round the axle on the specifics of the analogy and it makes it hard to engage with the rest of your post as a consequence.
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It's an analogy man. Do you understand why the dorks and losers would cheer for the linebacker? Then you understand why people cheer for Trump. You are reading far too much into it. And you are demonstrating a problem I have mentioned before - high school is forever now. You have so firmly and readily mapped your old high school cliques onto the political demographics that an analogy using an opposite framing agitates you. Also you are a Trump voter by your own admission. Trump voters are people like you.
But it’s a poor analogy precisely because it doesn’t actually resemble observable reality. Analogizing Democrats to jocks and cheerleaders, and Republicans to freaks and geeks, only works if the actual ground-level reality isn’t the opposite of that. Literal (white) jocks and cheerleaders, in real life, are in fact Trump voters. The kids who are the most likely to be bullied in school are future Democrat voters who despise Trump - in many cases precisely because they see him as the guy who will help jocks and cheerleaders persecute the losers!
The linked tweet could have chosen to analogize Trump voters to any number of different things or groups, but instead he chose the one group which is least like Trump voters.
Who are the cool kids after say, 30 years old? Writers at the NYT, Hollywood folks, tech titans. Almost universally liberals, almost universally wouldn't desire to be surrounded by deplorables.
The analogy is about group dynamics, not specifically mapping political group A to high school clique Y.
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I think it depends on how you’re thinking about the bullies vs bullied. I’ll concede that the jocks/nerds version of the story isn’t a good fit. On the other hand, the social acceptance and power dynamics do absolutely fit. Liberals are not classical jocks. They don’t do competitive sports or things along those lines. What they are, though, are the cool kids and the empowered kids. They’re the ones “normies” want to impress. They’re the ones who can define what good and bad taste are. They’re the ones that marketing campaigns want to appeal to. And MAGA tend to attract those who don’t fit in. Being a smug, highly educated (or certified as such) agnostic who works in socially conscious companies “making a difference” is cool. Being a religious person who works in a conventional job with no overt social mission is not.
If you were to map this onto Breakfast Club, think of the DC elites as the princess girl. Always dressed in expensive and fashionable clothes, eating the hip new thing (which in the 1980s was sushi apparently), always trying to make sure she fit in. That’s the DC elite — including the snobbish attitude. The MAGAs would be perhaps Bender or the Jock. The dork is too busy on hobbies and interests to care. And I suppose the artists are just hanging out making art and being weird.
Why the heck would I want to do that? The whole point of the Breakfast Club is that all the kids in detention are outcasts, some of them more obviously than others. It is a movie about how generation X was (as Strauss and Howe put it) the most aborted, most abandoned, most latchkey generation in history, or how (as Tyler Durden put it) our Great Depression is our lives. Claire (the "princess girl") is going off the rails because she is collateral damage in her parent's acrimonious big-money divorce. Andrew (the "popular jock") is beclowning himself with performative toxic masculinity because he thinks he won't be respected by his father if he doesn't.
Politics isn't like that. None of the Breakfast Club characters (probably not even Vice Principal Vernon) would be a serious political candidate in adulthood. There is a reason why Generation X is underrepresented in Congress and America keeps electing borderline-senile Boomer Presidents rather than letting an Xer into the White House.
All 5 students plus the janitor in the Breakfast Club are more likely than not to be Trump voters in adulthood simply because they are white and live in the Chicago suburbs. Vernon would as well if he weren't a union teacher. Claire is unhappily married to a man who owns a car dealership (or divorced from him, in which case she votes Dem like Julia) and Andrew is a corn ethanol salesman at ADM.
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Let's accept at face value that White jocks / cheerleaders support Trump. Then I still think there's a category confusion hiding in the insistence that analogies should "resemble observable reality."
I'll give an example. Say my friend were deciding between studying Russian and studying Hindi. Now say I tell him he should study Hindi because, per Wayne Gretzky, great hockey players "skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been."
Would it really undermine my argument to learn that more great hockey players study Russian than Hindi?
No, because you are not making any claims about any intrinsic qualities of hockey players in particular. You’re using “skate to where the puck has been” in a metaphorical sense to refer to the geopolitical future of India vis-a-vis Russia.
In the analogy made by Martyr Made, though, he is claiming that there are specific intrinsic qualities of Trump supporters: marginalized, unpopular, needing to be “rescued” by a defecting member of the well-adjusted mainstream. He is also claiming that there are intrinsic qualities of Trump’s enemies: popular, privileged, good-looking and well-adjusted.
However, the observable reality is that the relative distribution of these qualities is actually reversed. Trump supporters are, in fact, more likely to be popular and socially-well-adjusted members of their local communities. Meanwhile, a massive part of the Democrats’ coalition is people who are outside of the core American mainstream: racial/sexual minorities, neurotic middle-aged women, childless adults. These people may be feted by the media, and affirmative action has allowed them to carve out patronage networks within certain PMC industries, but they are in fact still the people who got bullied, and still the people who feel alienated by the American culture that existed at any time before the election of Barack Obama.
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No dude, literal white jocks and cheerleaders are both. They are democrats and republicans. The denizens of Madison Ave aren't geeks right? Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansen aren't dorks are they? But they are all democrats! I realise now my last two sentences in my previous post might have appeared to be a slam on you, but I meant it the opposite way - you were a nerdy theatre guy right? And you are a Trump voter! Are you the only freak?
There's something weird to me when people draw a line from "high school jock" to "Hollywood actor". The future hollywood actor during high school is a drama class geek. The jock, if he is highly successful, does not become Chris Evans - he becomes Tom Brady.
The line I draw is from the envied in high school to the envied in popular culture.
Are pro athletes not envied in popular culture?
They are, yes. As are celebrities. Both are considered lucky and not deserving their success by the envious. I think whether they play football or superheroes is just a distraction.
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My sense is that the partisan split among white adults who are former football players or cheerleaders leans heavily Republican, although you’re correct that there would still be millions of Democrat voters who fit this demographic profile. As a total percentage of Trump’s versus Biden’s constituency, though, I would say that white “former popular kids” are a much larger part of the former than of the latter.
As Hollywood actors, they’re highly atypical of their general demographic profile. (Johansson is also Jewish, so it should actually be very unsurprising that she’s not a Trump fan.) The incentives pushing Hollywood actors toward expressing liberal views are so strong that it’s nearly impossible to get a sense of what these people truly believe in their heart of hearts.
I am extremely atypical. The percentage of American adults with theatre arts degrees who voted for Trump has to be less than 10%.
Scarlett Johansen and Chris Evans are highly atypical of the stereotype of jocks and cheerleaders as conceived by millenials, absolutely. But they literally are the Hollywood actors today. Nerd culture has been In so long it's passe, coolness no longer has any tie to intelligence - or if it does, it's a positive association.
I'm not saying stereotypes aren't real, or that jocks are Democrats and nerds are Republican now, and I bet that a lot of republicans and democrats would agree with your assessments of the demographics, but that is the map, not the territory. The democrats hate outcasts and love the elite just as much as republicans, the only difference is how they spin it.
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Yeah, it makes perfect sense for Jews to be prejudiced against the guy with a Jewish son-in-law who moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jeruselam.
I believe the line "this, but unironically"? I think it's safe to say many people are unhappy when people take active steps to fulfill a prophecy when a popular version of that prophecy includes, among other undesirable effects, the destruction of their faith:
A lot of the Christians beliefs of what the "second coming" will look like are not great for the Jews. Or, really, any non-Christians, but the Jews in particular get used as pawns and then screwed over.
Aren't we talking about the really insanely pro-Semitic Christians here? The ones who go and provide free labour in Israel? The annotated Scofield bible preaches Zionism and Israeli sycophancy: https://www.wrmea.org/2015-october/the-scofield-bible-the-book-that-made-zionists-of-americas-evangelical-christians.html
Evangelicals love Jews, Jews hate Evangelicals: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/03/15/americans-feel-more-positive-than-negative-about-jews-mainline-protestants-catholics/pf_2023-03-15_religion-favorability_00-08/
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You know why several of us think you're putting on an act? Posts like this.
I'm not even sure what you (and whoever "several of us" is?) are accusing me of.
I've been posting here since the /r/SSC days (mods here theoretically know what username I was using back then) without ever drawing the attention of the mods and try to keep to citable facts / widely held (within the left) opinions.
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It’s a common progressive talking point. Is the author of the article he cited also putting on an act?
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Once you've decided that support for Israel is anti-semitic, you might want to reconsider the rabbit hole you've dived into.
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I’m not arguing whether or not Jews’ antipathy toward Trump makes sense or not. It’s just a fact that Jews voted overwhelmingly (I believe it was 80-20) in favor of both Clinton and Biden.
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The thing is, what is your notion of "normal, productive people"? Is it the guy in a white collar job writing code for some big company? Is it a farmer? (and there's a huge difference between the notion of the 'Ma and Pa Kent' style farmstead and modern agribusiness). Is it the guy who would have worked on the old style union assembly line job, which is now pretty much outsourced where it's not union-busted (for good or ill depending on your view of the unions)? Is it the Rust Belt and flyover state small towns dying on their feet because all the young people move away?
Everybody is appealing to the 'squeezed middle', the middle-class vote. The people on the margins, who speaks up for them? The Democrats, or a section of them, have gone for the minorities, but who is taking the side (even in appearance only) of the blue collar lower class guys (and gals)? That's Trump. Not DeSantis, though that's who he was supposed to be. Maybe he'll pull it out yet. I sort of like Nikki Haley, but she does need to get a position on something and stick to it because right now she's looking like Hillary Part II with "just tell me what opinion you want me to have" and getting in a stupid slap-fight with Ramaswamy, who is not impressing me and is certainly not 'blue collar rubes' material (honestly, if he reminds me of anyone, it's Andrew Yang).
Trump, for all his crassness and vulgarity, indeed because of it, does seem to be the guy who's "hey, you in the back there, who would have been one of the normal, productive, people had the economy not moved on, yeah wanna make America great again?" more than any of the rest of them.
This a funny and true observation. Politicians are always suck in a certain time (e.g. 1930s or 2008) or track in which the majority of Americans are struggling, but most Americans have a rather good standard of living, for all SES-levels.
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I think many Trump supporters really do see themselves as the underdogs being picked on by Chads and Stacies, and that is a common perception even here: many, many posts are devoted to how the "Elites" (whether that means liberals, Democrats, Jews, the media, all of the above, whoever) are the popular kids picking on the losers.
Thank you for an example of an acceptable use of slurs, since recently a number of people have been claiming not to understand when they can and cannot use words like "faggot." If you were directly calling Democrats, or the "Elite," or whoever, "faggots," I would mod that as being inflammatory and boo outgroup. It would be little more than namecalling: "My enemies are faggots." Not because we don't allow people to use "faggot" or other slurs, but because we don't allow namecalling and unnecessary antagonism. However, using it to represent what other (hypothetical) people think isn't going to get a warning for using "no-no words."
This would be an interesting use of Chat GPT to see if it can tell the difference between a slur used for rhetorical effect or pejoratively
Dollars to donut holes says that ChatGPT understands the use-mention distinction but has been explicitly programmed not to apply it to racial slurs.
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"I imagine my outgroup would use slurs" really should be prohibited. It at least violates "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be", "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument", and "Don't be egregiously obnoxious". But since it's put in the mouth of Trump supporters, it's okay.
Because "faggot" is considered to be an extremely bad slur to use, accusing someone of using it without a direct quote is likewise extremely bad. If using it directly is so bad that you can ban people for it, using it indirectly by putting it in the mouths of your outgroup should lead to a ban too. The fact that such things are permissible is a double standard. (Which is enabled by the fact that many slurs that leftists use such as "racist" are considered acceptable, so the right can't accuse the left in the way that the left can accuse the right.)
"Racist" is not a slur. It may be an insult or an unwarranted accusation. Saying "You're a racist" would probably get a warning. Saying "That's racist" would generally be an allowable expression of opinion.
The comparison isn't calling someone a racist, it's saying "those leftists call people racists". Which is the right-wing version of "Trump supporters call people faggots". Except that it's acceptable for progressives to call people racists, so the accusation is useless.
There obviously are leftists who call people racists, and Trump supporters who call people faggots. Whether or not the two statements are equivalent (I don't personally believe they are), in themselves, I would not find reason to mod either one.
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No it’s not. It’s offensive to some people but most think it’s rather crass.
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I feel like there's a large range in how bad this word is depending on where you are in the US, in contrast to the other double-g word which is more dependent on in which race you belong in the US. Where I grew up, this word was barely a hair beneath "nigger" in terms of how unacceptable they were, but as an adult, I learned that there are entire communities of people elsewhere in the US who use the term as freely as any other slur. Which is bad IMHO, but doesn't make it an extremely bad slur to use. So I think depicting someone as using the slur could reflect just a different culture around the term rather than some judgment about the people throwing about the term.
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I’m not criticizing my outgroup; I am involved in multiple group chats where people, including myself, use that word without feeling bad about it. I wouldn’t call somebody that on the Motte, because I respect the norms of this community. But I want to be very clear that I don’t think it reflects particularly poorly on Trump voters (or anybody else) if they use that word.
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This honestly doesn't seem like a good use. If they weren't signalling that they were on the same side, it would read exactly like putting some very antagonistic words in the outgroup's mouth.
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