What scares me the most about the US election is the tribalism. The fact that people have stopped caring about what politicians do or say, because it all comes down to “our candidate good, their candidate bad”.
This way of thinking is what has opened the door to dictators throughout history. And the problem is, people do not regret their vote until the dictator wins and starts taking away their freedoms — THEN they suddenly complain, THEN they “never supported the guy”, and then it is too late.
You have to understand ... what looks like weird shifting justifications for voting for the racist guy is actually just common knowledge among racists that you aren't supposed to say aloud the real reason why you support the racist guy.
If you go by what they say, you might think that they will regret their vote later on when the racist guy goes against what they said they wanted. But in truth, they won't regret it. They never believed what they said in the first place.
@isaackuo @randahl I was just going to post a similar reply. DJT has subsumed the GOP, which is mostly authoritarian personalities. Even the weakest supporters of DJT go along because he's still their current authority figure.
But DJT the man and machine are patriarchal white supremacy made manifest. Its followers subscribed to some if not all of patriarchal white supremacy. Call it a tribe if it's easier to identify them.
They only peel away when DJT's authority fails them in some way. 1/2
@isaackuo @randahl 2/2 The opposition has been more fragile because it is composed not of authoritarians who unite under a single authority, but smaller factions which are driven by single issues. This has been the topic of books like Crashing the Gate (2005) by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsos. It's been easy for the right-wing wing and foreign adversaries to fragment this "big tent" by working on schisms between factions.
Until now, when the largest voting blocs are unified.
Randahl Fink
Isaac Ji Kuo
Femme Malheureuse