In a Christmas message to his followers Monday, former President Donald Trump said he hopes supporters of “Electric Car Lunacy” would “ROT IN HELL.”
Trump’s Monday afternoon Truth Social post continued a theme he had been developing with several other posts since Christmas Eve, attacking Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is prosecuting two criminal cases against him.
The frontrunner of the 2024 presidential race for the Republican Party nomination added a missive against “THUGS,” which he said were more “evil” and “sick” than all world leaders. In the grammatically confusing post, Trump also appeared to attack Israel, which Trump lumped in with Iran, as well as both Russia and Ukraine.
Why do Americans love so much to divide its people for the most arbitrary reasons?
*Conservatives.
It’s the conservatives doing it. It always has been, it always will be. No need for enlightened centrism here. And don’t pretend they don’t do it outside the US because I follow world news.
You’re 100% right. The conservative groups always try to attract two types of people: nostalgic idiots pining for a past that never existed and braindead idiots who are easy to convince that one or more minority groups are responsible taking one or more things away from them. Sometimes these idiots overlap.
It’s a side effect of the different circling mentalities. The right circle the wagons, the last form a circular firing squad.
The right defaults to defending the in group at all costs. The worst thing you can do to persuade someone on the right is to attack their core beliefs.
The left swings the other way. The left wing is a swarm of loosely aligned smaller groups. When attacked, they attempt to purge the issue. Unfortunately this can quickly turn into an internal witch hunt. In moderation, it makes the left’s ideas better, and improves the group. Unfortunately, the right have found it great fun to prod and abuse.
Hey, remember compassionate conservatism?
We have a two party system.
We have the right, which is gradually shifting further and further conservative (really, let’s be honest now, at this point they aren’t conserving shit, they want regression). They market their platform primarily through fear.
Then there is the left. It’s the big tent party and has also gradually been shifting right to the point where the critical mass of the party appears slightly right of center on the global scale. They market their platform primarily through empathy.
I’m not saying which way is right, but I do have a good feeling of which approach is more beneficial to society and humanity as a whole.
Statistically, there are significantly more people who place themselves on the left. Which makes sense, they are the big tent party after all. But that doesn’t matter in our federal elections, because most of them congregate in smaller population centers (and this helps with the empathy angle, they are regularly exposed to people of all walks of life, while primarily rural conservatives interact very little outside their comparatively small social sphere). The voting system gives two votes to every state, plus a share of the 435 that gets divided up based on the states population. Then most states give all of their votes to whoever won the popular vote in their state.
Because of how the states tally their votes and break up their voting districts (because the party in charge gets to draw the maps), even a majority of people voting for one party can, and does, result in the state determining that the candidate with fewer total votes wins because they had won more districts. CGP Grey had a great video on this years ago, but using anthropomorphized animals as the presidential candidates, and talked about the strengths and weaknesses of our first-past-the-post voting system and on gerrymandering (the term for advantageously manipulating voting district maps).
You seem to be conflating “the left” with the Democrats. The Democrats are not particularly leftist. The political compass doesn’t move just because the Democrats do that is like saying “The car drives East so North becomes East.” It’s wiser to treat the political compass is more of a fixed set of cardinal directions. Leftists and Right Wingers exist outside of parties.
Neither right nor left are parties. So when describing parties stances it’s way more accurate to use the party names.
There are a lot of leftists in America, you just don’t have a leftist centric party because the way things are established running one would likely cause a spoiler vote. It’s something of a sore point amongst leftists that the First past the post system keeps them from voting their hearts or running a candidate so representing the “slightly more left but actually still right wing” candidates as “left” isn’t exactly great.
Regression is conservatism, always has been. They haven’t changed into regressives, its always been a core goal. When conservatism fails to maintain (conserve) an important social or economic hierarchy, they work to restore it (or regress). It’s why nothing is ever settled with them.
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Divide and Conquer.