Trump’s base was vocally divided over the prospects of direct U.S. attacks up until the moment they happened.
The MAGA movement’s top influencers were divided over bombing Iran until Donald Trump did just that Saturday night.
Now, at least for the time being, the lay leaders in Trump’s base appear to be rallying around a position that spares Trump criticism: Direct attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities are justified, as long as American troops aren’t sent into a third full war halfway around the world in the last quarter of a century.
Not to praise MAGA or anything, but this is part of why the GOP wins more than it should: their voters swallow their misgivings and turn out for them. Dem voters will jettison all support on the merest wafting zephyr of news they don’t entirely like.
You don’t want sheep, but you want voters who can get on the bus when the election comes around. You want to fight to upgrade the party between cycles, but once primary season is over, get on the bus and vote.
Compartmentalizing and blindly following aggressive authority figures are the key traits of authoritarians (RWA). These are not desirable traits and RWA should be recognized as the dangerous mental illness it is.
I just saw another video of Theo Von clearly struggling with his support of Trump. I’ve seen so many others in that same position. On one hand, yeah, it’s easy to call them idiots for not seeing it sooner. But on the other, I get it. You go from being a comedian to suddenly part of this powerful inner circle, and that kind of validation is intoxicating, especially for someone with addiction issues who’s always chasing a high.
What frustrates me is how we, especially on the left, tend to fumble these moments. Instead of recognizing that some of these people might be waking up, we rush to humiliate them. We waste the opportunity to build something better just so we can rub their faces in it and get our own little high.
That’s something that really pisses me off about the left: the way we seize the worst possible opportunities and completely ignore the critical ones. Right now, yeah, some MAGA influencers are doubling down. But others? They’re starting to crack. And instead of isolating them even more, maybe we should be thinking about how to help them speak about their shift in perspective.
I agreed with everything you said except the show them mercy part. They are worthless animals not fit to be called humans and liberals again and again giving them chances is why we are here.
They don’t deserve chances. They deserve public mockery, shame, and if we can get things right again, exile.
They are worthless animals not fit to be called humans
That’s the kind of attitude towards fascists that leads to complacency and a belief that it couldn’t happen here or we’re better than that. The most important thing to understand about a fascist is that they’re a person like you. No one is immune to the risk of falling into it. All it takes is the right circumstances to incentivize a person, and there’s a decent chance they will take up fascism.
If we hold that Nazis were monsters, or subhumans, or some other kind of beast entirely unlike us, we will never dig deep to understand what makes fascism appealing or what needs it serves, and we will miss the warning signs in ourselves and those around us should we start sliding towards it. I think most Americans missed their own country’s capacity for fascism until it was right on top of them, because they had spent decades imagining the Nazis as some special kind of inhuman monster. That attitude is dangerous. Fascists are ordinary people like us.
You got it all wrong, pal. Tolerance is what lead to complacency. They need the same treatment thrown back at them ten fold.
If they lose a job, cheer. If they are homeless, tell them to ask daddy Trump for help. If they are isolated from family, play the small violin.
And why the fuck should we keep trying to understand them?
I’m not saying we should tolerate fascists, or expend all our energies trying to understand why a hateful person is hateful. But we have to recognize that they’re not monsters or subhumans, they’re people. Cruel and hateful people, but people like us. Those tendencies are in us all, but in some people they become totally dominant and in other people they shrink until they’re almost not there. But they’re there.
What frustrates me is how we, especially on the left, tend to fumble these moments. Instead of recognizing that some of these people might be waking up, we rush to humiliate them. We waste the opportunity to build something better just so we can rub their faces in it and get our own little high.
I’ll give a prime example of this: Liz Cheney.
Now don’t get me wrong. I disagree with 99.9% of her policy decisions. And yes, she helped create the beast. But we keep asking when Republicans are going to finally say “I’ve had enough of this.” and stand up to Trump. And she did. Again, say what you will about her policies but in the end, she literally put her career on the line and got excommunicated from her own party in order to expose Trump and attempt to hold him accountable.
And we responded to the courage it must have taken her to be the first prominent member of her party to break ranks with Trump by ostracizing her too. “HAHAHA now teh leopardz r eating ur face”. We laughed as she was basically run out of politics at warp speed. Rather than at least try to work with her and use her to build a bipartisan coalition against Trump, we decided to get a few kicks of our own in while she was down. And then we wonder why nobody else from the party has followed in her footsteps.
I’m not saying we should have thrown her a ticker-tape parade or anything like that. But we keep asking what it’s going to take for Republicans to break ranks and cross the aisle to stand up to Trump. How can we expect them to do that when that is how they’re going to be treated? If the best Democrats have to offer them is to make fun of them and kick them while they’re down, it shouldn’t be a surprise that they stick to the abusive relationship they’re already in. And I’m not saying that we needed to vote her back into office. But there was an opportunity to use the influence she had to at least try to build a bipartisan coalition against Trump and we squandered it because we have also allowed politics to get so tribal that anyone on the other side is always wrong no matter what and is always the enemy forever and ever and ever amen instead of ever admitting that they may actually have a point once in a while.
This is something that really bothered me about the recent election. It was clear that Cheney was only campaigning with Harris because she wanted to stop Trump not because she agreed with the policies of Harris. She was still a believer in “Republican” policies but understood the danger of Trump winning and did what she could to make him lose.
The left then said that because she was being put out there by the Harris campaign as someone who would help get people to vote for her that must have meant she agreed with all of Harris’s policies. Which means Harris must have been a Republican and had all Republican policies despite her having multiple rather progressive policies that the majority of people support.
Instead of having the completely rational thought that if a shitty Republican like Cheney refuses to vote for Trump and says we should all vote against him then that’s a positive and should help convince independents and non voters that this was such an important election, they ignored that and made BS assumptions and accusations about the entire Harris campaign. It fucking sucked.
The context was us asking for Palestinian or queer voices to be part of the campaign, and we got a neocon instead. We could have had “all of the above” but they were only interested in inviting those further on the right.
