I think it can be easy and tempting to simply say, "They're stupid" or "They're evil", or some other sort of dismissive or exclusionary statement. We tend to do that with people who commit acts of violence. We say, "That person is crazy" or "He's deranged", and yes people who commit acts of violence are falling outside the typical range of behavior in society. They do somewhat separate themselves from what the average person does.
Here is how I see it, and this in no way excuses or condones the damage people are doing by even entertaining the idea of putting someone like Trump back into ANY position with power.
A lot of people have been sold an idea of America that is both toxic and mythological. While our foundational documents talk about "All" and often discuss "We the People", there has always been a faction of people, typically the wealthy White people who benefit most from the products of the labor of everyone else, who have limited WHO has the rights and privileges of America.
Wealthy people have used this idea of "the Real America" or "Making America Great" to divide people, typically by race and often by gender so that the real divide, the divide between people who have money and power, and those who do not; is never the focus. Black people aren't "real Americans". Feminists aren't "real Americans". Immigrants are "invading" and trying to destroy America. Liberals want to destroy America. They set up these artificial divides to hide the true divide. Being on a particular team becomes more important than being part of a functioning society.
Economically, those of us who aren't earning high six figure salaries and who own properties that give us passive income; struggle. We feel the pinch. We know emotionally and practically that the system isn't working for us. We look for answers and we (at least those of us on the Liberal and further left side of the political spectrum) realize that it isn't a matter of "not enough resources to go around" but it is the distribution of resources. People at the top of the wealth distribution have all kinds of benefits and privileges that we do not. In finance, in law, in social power they move through society with impunity paying a lower percentage of their income in taxes, saving on fees, being able to afford attorneys with more time and expertise to solve legal problems, etc... They typically acheive these advantages by ownership of the resources we all need to make our living. Many if not most, did not work for these advantages from zero, but there is a mythology that they got to where they are because they are simply "better".
What separates us from our Conservative fellow citizens is how we attribute the problems in our country and the solutions. We all feel there is something wrong, but the causes and solutions are fundamentally different Liberals and those further left will tend to see greed and systemic corruption as causes of problems. Some people have way too much and are "hoarding" wealth. They use their wealth to influence the laws and the lawmakers to keep things as they are, to allow the wealth to accumulate disproportionally at the top. If the distribution of wealth and opportunity was more equitable then people would have enough and the wealthy would likely still be very rich, just not insanely wealthy. But of course, that is not enough for the insanely wealthy. They want ALL the money and ALL the power to dictate to the rest of us.
Conservatives are being told, and believe that the problems in society are caused not by the accumulation of wealth into very few hands at the top leading to false scarcity for the rest of us, but because they believe that "undeserving" people (Black people, Immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, etc...) get "special" privileges that take scarce resources from the "hardworking real Americans" that happen to look and think just like they do. They buy into the idea that you are rich because you are special and you deserve to be able to take all the resources for yourself and leave the rest of us to fight for the scraps. They think that Black and Brown people, that women, that LGBTQ people all game the system and that there is some nefarious plot to "destroy Western Civilization", and many of them attribute said "nefarious plot" to Cultural Marxism, which is just a way to say that "Jews are controlling it". They are susceptible, because of this mindset, to demagogues like Trump, who come in and actually say the horrible things out in the open.
We, Liberals and more left people talk about systems and inequalities and people like Trump and Greene come out and say, "Black people are lazy and criminal" "Brown people are simultaneously lazy and all on welfare AND they are stealing all the jobs". "Gay and Trans people are turning your kids into deviants" and all these lies are the actual cause of your problems. It isn't that 400 families in the US control more than half the wealth in the country. It isn't that 10% of the population of this country have almost 90% of the income and assets leaving the other 90% of us to try to live off of 10% to 20% of what we all produce. No. It's women, gays, Blacks, Browns, and immigrants.
The pain is real and has a real cause. The people on the other side have just bought into the lie. They have bought into the less logical, less factual, and more pernicious attribution to our problems. That is why citizens of a democracy would vote for such a person. They are not operating under the same reality and set of facts that the rest of us are.
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