zinfamous
No Lifer
- Jul 12, 2006
- 110,605
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And we (country) let him go through an entire year and a half campaign cycle without having to explain himself on the issues.
Oh look, a tweet! This country (almost) deserves what it gets for stooping the election process so low.
No, no we didn't. A rather small minority of people (which strangely mattered) allowed him to do that. But yeah, I agree that it isn't that simple. He was called out innumerable times for his nonsense proposals, but none of that got through the wall of dedicated ignorance that shrouds the type of people that support this guy.
I honestly don't know what to do, when you are trying to penetrate a fortified anti-fact, dishonest, conspiracy-based community that has been thoroughly primed to interpret any honest and fair challenge to core belief as evidence and grand conspiracy against that belief, and thus is illegitimate. How do you reach such people? Because, even when Trump fails tremendously, it will not be a reflection of their value system, it will be outsiders that wanted him to fail and succeeded in doing so.
Thing is, this really isn't new, but like the anti-vaccine types, these people tend to thrive when they are totally removed from the generation(s) that experienced and learned from the challenges and horrors that resulted in the new paradigms (plagues of smallpox and influenza --> vaccination; rise of fascism--(but during real economic depression)--WW2, UN, globalism, NATO, open borders, trade, EU, etc).
The institutions that were created to preserve peace, expand economic movement and freedom, empower the middle classes of the world, etc, and are still extremely necessary to do so, are under threat because today's snowflakes see the approach of inevitable egalitarianism as some sort of existential threat to their own preserved freedoms. Grab this fear, explain it to such people through the lens of some intangible enemy: "liberals of the world, scary religions, freedom-haters," and without any experience of real strife within their lifetimes of comfortable suburban depression, such people will believe that they are under attack. That their world is disappearing. Capture those small minds and give them the enemy that they have longed for. The enemy doesn't have to exist, but they desperately need one to explain away the comfortable misery of their relatively boring life of bed-to-cubicle-to-home existence, and so elect the strong man to lead them, and to crush this enemy!