I was going over the election results with a friend who’s one of the most politically astute people I know. She also lives in a deep red state, and most of the people around her are MAGAts.
She said people “need to get their heads out of their ass.” That Trump can’t get away with most of the things he’s promised, because the real people in charge — the billionaire donors and corporate chieftains – “won’t let them. “
“This is the same horseshit we see every time the right wing gets control, whether it’s the White House or the local school board. They overreach, the politicians start to panic because they can’t get reelected if the voters and the donors are unhappy, and they have to pull back. Then the Democrats win the next election and have to clean up their mess.”
And now that I’ve had time to digest the results, it sounds about right.
I actually don’t believe that voters supported most of what Trump says, because most of them don’t seem to know what he’s said — or they think he’s just performing. Voters in generally are poorly informed. The word I use a lot to describe typical voters is “stupid,” but I don’t actually believe they’re stupid. They’re ignorant. And they’re ignorant because they’re not people who read. If they read anything, it’s a headline and maybe the first sentence. Or the sports page. It’s what I think of as hyper skimming. People in general don’t read deeply. People like me are an aberration. Not only do I read all this online content, I read between three to five books a week. That is so foreign to most people, when I tell them, they accuse me of lying.
Superficial reading isn’t limited to right wingers. At the other site where I work, it’s a given that most people don’t read an entire blog post. But they loudly complain in the comments that the story didn’t include some specific piece of information — which was either already in the post, or easily accessed by clicking the link. (I might add here that a rather significant percentage of our readers have post graduate degrees.)
Life is hard, people are overwhelmed, I get it.
I have a story I like to tell about when I was a reporter. I was standing around with the attendees after a public meeting on flooding. I mentioned that a large factor was that the politicians won’t update the flood maps, because then developers would have to follow them and they wouldn’t get as many contributions from developers.
“You should write a story about that,” one of them said.
“I did.”
“Oh. Well, it should have been on the front page.”
“It was.”
People don’t make time to read unless they are already invested in an issue, and by then, it’s usually too late.
Don’t get me wrong, Trump will of course do these horrible, frightening things that make us sick, and he will unleash a wave of violence that will last. He will also have Chief Morals Enforcer Jimmy Don Vance whispering in his ear.
He will sign a national abortion ban, and even as I speak, his people are handing out contracts to build detention camps in Texas. But when meat packing plants are shutting down because they don’t have any more workers, the owners of these multinational companies will be screaming bloody murder.
And if history is any indication, Trump will eventually listen — at least, as much as Putin lets him. Because he hates it when other rich people are mad at him.
His “victory” (I have doubts about that, but that’s another story) is frightening, especially for women. At least some of these people who voted for him did vote for bigotry and fascism and oppression of women, but not all of them. Most of them are just idiots who have no fucking clue what they’ve done.
God help us.
On one hand, yes. I could see being so totally bored by figuring out who should run your life that you have the same attitude I have to tax forms. Forget all about them the second they’re done. Next year it’s all new again and what-the-hell-is-this.
But on the other hand, it feels like we’re getting kinda close to Good Germans territory. They don’t know, yes, but they also don’t believe it – call it a “joke” – call it “just talk” – call it less important than the price of eggs – because they want the benefits they were told they’d get. (Why isn’t that also “just talk” to them?)