Indeed. The (failed) impeachments aren’t a red flag or embarrassment for Trumpkins, they see it as proof that he is fulfilling their primary political goal of owning the libs.
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And even non-MAGA hat wearing, flag waving Republicans have not internalized Trump as a bad thing. To them, his problem was his tweets. My brother basically admitted that to me recently. I was kind of shocked and instantly depressed when he told me he voted for Trump.
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You expected him to vote for Socialist Joe Biden and ANTIFA Kamala Harris? Republicans just invent imaginary DEMONRATS to vote against if their own candidate is awful.
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Shocked was a bit strong. I always figured he did, but the real life confirmation was a blow that I wasn’t expecting to hit as hard as it did. Oddly it was real similar to when I got the call that my dad passed after a long struggle against ALS. I knew it was coming, had years to prepare for it, and it still upset me way more than I would have guessed.
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The part of this nobody saw coming was going full crazy drastically increasing GOP turnout.
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I think if they had gone Loony Conspiracy Fascist in 2008 it wouldn’t have worked. The crazy car doesn’t leave the garage without the Facebook fuel.
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This goes to show you can’t be friends with a Trump supporter Cuomo supporter Trump or Cuomo supporter.
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Trump will definitely be their complete undoing.
Unfortunately it is likely to take all of us down with it.
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I feel you. I was also highly disappointed to learn my younger brother was a strong Trump supporter.
Although he was estranged from my parents and my other brother for a really long time he grew up in a conservative Republican environment, just like me. Unlike me and more surprisingly my parents, he never moved past it. He remained stuck there.
Ironically (maybe not) me and him had a huge falling out a couple of years ago that was not due to Trump but perhaps influenced by competing ideologies and expectations. I don’t want to get into too much right now but there is some massive hypocrisy with his Trump support and Republican support in general and several major concerns/issues with his family. We finally started seeing each other more when my parents died five years ago, but that is over now, and is unlikely to ever change.
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My thinking, though, is a huge part of Trumpism is cult-like and may not be sustainable for a lot of current believers, long term.
At least that is what I tell myself when crying into my pillow.
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There may be something to this, the one exit door from cults is when the cult member has the epiphany that none of the cult leader’s promises are coming to fruition. But it can be a long, long road.
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The human brain is just hard wired towards resentment and anger as activating emotions. Mashing the racism button short circuits rational intellectual reactions.
This has always been a problem in politics but Facebook makes it so much worse. The doom loop of resentment-based “engagement” is never going away, either.
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There are few people on this board who are not also addicted to negative emotions. Myself included. I like to pretend I have awareness of it, though.
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Right, this is not exclusive to right-wingers. During election season I was legitimately spending like 12 hours per day online reading or posting about politics, mainly because I was terrified. People on the right are as scared as I was about Donald Trump winning a second term in October, 2020 every single day. Obviously they are idiots but they are real emotions.
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I think addicted to negative emotions might be the wrong way to put it although it’s close to reality for me wrt to politics. I’m 40 years old and the positive emotions I can remember from politics was Obama in 2008 and defeating Trump late last year. The rest of it has mostly been completely miserable. Maybe that’s just me rationalizing it but it’s pretty hard to not be negative when it feels like things have very little chance of getting better on issues like climate change, universal health care, race issues, etc.
The odd thing is in the rest of my life I am not a remotely negative person but I can’t be optimistic about good things happening politically here where on one hand we have a party led by Trump, Gaetz and MTG and on the other hand we have a party led by ancient fossils like Biden, Chuck and Nancy. How do you get excited about that?
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And fear too is a big way to drag people to the polls
Right, but my point is that you keep following this shit even though a second’s rational inquiry will show you that it can only ever make your life worse. You have your political opinions now, you are hardly going to change them with more information. You’re clearly not leading any revolutions and while I’m sure you do your bit in terms of work for the cause, not obsessively following politics doesn’t mean you can’t continue to do that. You don’t even need to know about current events for the purposes of arguing with others, because anyone who doesn’t already know that the GOP are terrible clearly has even less idea of what is going on than you do. There’s no rational reason at all for you to read another word of this shit, you continue to do it for the same reason that addicts continue to do things which they know ultimately make their lives worse.
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I think this is only partially true. I get a self-esteem boost from knowing stuff. It makes me feel smart to be informed. Yes, doom scrolling about GOP insanity is futile and not productive, granted, and of course I do that way more than I should, but it’s not all negative in the way that shooting heroin would be.
I think this relates to my previous post and the thread so I will post it here. I went on a long hike with one of my better friends yesterday. He was a big Joe Biden supporter even in the primaries although admits he needs to do better in some issues so far from a blind supporter.
He brought up to me that he is really enjoying the GOP imploding from within and thinks that will move the “reasonable Republicans” into the D column or have them voting 3rd party. Now I’m not real sure how anyone paying attention can actually think that. He was kind of taken aback when I went into my spiel about how there are no reasonable Republicans and basically what you are perceiving as reasonable was people who didn’t like the quiet parts out loud. Also all these people voted for Trump and would never in a million years vote for a commie like Biden. Also having a major political party going full fascist is bad.
Now was this being “addicted to negativity” or simply accepting our current political reality? On a macro level maybe Dems that I like to think of as evil are simply making the same mistake? My friend spends hours a day following politics and doesn’t think the world is ending. He supports neolib Dems. His end goals aren’t dissimilar from mine and I don’t think he is a moron. So what exactly is going on here?
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Fair enough. I think like you said earlier I am self aware of that enough to follow it less in recent months and post less than before for exactly that reason. Again maybe this is rationalizing, but as a white male I also think it is callous of me to just tune everything out even if it would obviously be better for me personally. I feel some kind of an obligation to follow this enough to knowledgably speak out about current political issues in my actual life and find decent causes to support.