Since the party of trump is a party of whiners, "what's in it for me", "ya'll owe me" , blah blah blah, they'll just continue to blame the other side for their mistakes. It'll be Biden's fault or Obama's fault or HRC' fault to the end of time. It's just too painful for them to admit they were wrong.
I subscribe to Letters From an American by Heather Cox Richardson, a historian. Today she wrote:
Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil.
There are also stories that voters who chose Trump to lower household expenses are unhappy to discover that their undocumented relatives are in danger of deportation. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Indiana Republican senator-elect Jim Banks if undocumented immigrants who had been here for a long time and integrated into the community would be deported, Banks answered that deportation should include “every illegal in this country that we can find.” Yesterday a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a policy established by the Biden administration that was designed to create an easier path to citizenship for about half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens.
Meanwhile, Trump’s advisors told Jim VandeHei and MIke Allen of Axios that Trump wasted valuable time at the beginning of his first term and that they will not make that mistake again. They plan to hit the ground running with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, deregulation, and increased gas and oil production. Trump is looking to fill the top ranks of the government with “billionaires, former CEOs, tech leaders and loyalists.”
After the election, the wealth of Trump-backer Elon Musk jumped about $13 billion, making him worth $300 billion. Musk, who has been in frequent contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin, joined a phone call today between President-elect Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.
In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump.
Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them. An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”
In The New Republic today, Michael Tomasky reinforced that voters chose Trump in 2024 not because of the economy or inflation, or anything else, but because of how they perceived those issues—which is not the same thing. Right-wing media “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win,” Tomasky wrote. Right-wing media has overtaken legacy media to set the country’s political agenda not only because it’s bigger, but because it speaks with one voice, “and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.”
Tomasky noted how the work of Matthew Gertz of Media Matters shows that nearly all the crazy memes that became central campaign issues—the pet-eating story, for example, or the idea that the booming economy was terrible—came from right-wing media. In those circles, Vice President Kamala Harris was a stupid, crazed extremist who orchestrated a coup against President Joe Biden and doesn’t care about ordinary Americans, while Trump is under assault and has been for years, and he’s “doing it all for you.”
Investigative reporter Miranda Green outlined how “pink slime” newspapers, which are AI generated from right-wing sites, turned voters to Trump in key swing state counties. Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, ‘What is an authoritarian?’”
In a social media post, Marcotte wrote: “A lot of voters are profoundly ignorant. More so than in the past.” That jumped out to me because there was, indeed, an earlier period in our history when voters were “pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”
Many Trumpers I know are profoundly ignorant. They don’t read, they don’t think, and they are easy pickings for misinformation spreaders. Interestingly, some of these people actually have college degrees, but I wouldn’t call them educated.
Thank you, Kent Cooper, for posting all I’ve not read. I know articles and books are written about why people “buy” the false narratives put forth. Not formally well-educated, my parents and public school teachers in the ‘50s & ‘60s taught me to be a conscientious consumer of goods and information albeit with a Dem bent in politics at home. What’s so odd to me is we had to go to a library’s card catalogue to find lots of books to learn. Is it that searches yield for one’s history the way the NPR reported robocalls you Black teens and adults targeted?
Education has been so restricted I fear there will be even less knowledge, curiosity to learn, and a greater acceptance that feeds what must be core beliefs.
Education has been reduced (in many places and cases) to a lowest common denominator linked to a computer access environment. Learning is so damned hampered by such reliance on 'Googling' a topic. False profits, I say.
Our motto needs to be, “It’s Education, Stupid!” The GOP pushes for vouchers, bankrupting local Public Schools, without telling poor parents (white and POC) that they’ll never be able to utilize those vouchers. You get to pay for books, supplies, transportation, extracurriculars, etc., etc. Another GOP bait and switch.
Agreed. U.S. public education is at the mercy of voters in any district. Of course, most people do not know that to be an informed voter means that you are knowledgeable about who is running for the local school board in your district. Many do not even know to vote for in that category and will often skip it or vote their "party". That is why down ballot elections are as important as electing top officials such as president, senators, or US house members. The down ballot is most important because it affects your children's education, the funding that education receives, and a whole host of expenditures related to public education and your community.
Project 2025 focuses on funding for private education - merely a term for propaganda. The goal is to create an entire generation of children that are literally brainwashed from an early age to be further propagandists for the party. It is also in the agenda that young people in public schools approaching the age of 18 years old will have mandatory registration for the military. Like the draft for going to VietNam of young men 18 years or older that I lived through with my boyfriend in 1971.
It's Lifelong Education Stupid - just because you are 30+ DOES NOT mean that you can stop educating yourselves!!!
I think in general their minds will not comprehend this, and they will have their propaganda machines going full tilt which will help them blame anyone else. Anyone here read Orwell’s 1984? The first most essential thing the Party does is teach you to believe the propaganda over what you see with your eyes. Really, this is not going to be a huge problem for most people.
What makes you think that the people who believed the lies leading up to this election, won’t be fooled again by the lies they will be told when the economy goes south and they are hit by actual hard times?
And what makes you think that the same media sources that promoted the lies leading up to the election won’t concoct and sell a new set of lies to the same people?
All available evidence suggests that new — but equally effective — lies will be created and believed.
Of course, I agree 100%, John, with everything you say; HOWEVER, I am convinced that Fox News, and all the crazy right wing ecosystem, will blame whatever happens on Democrats, or George Soros, or trans people or “woke” cancel culture, and the cult and cult adjacent will still believe it. Reality means nothing to 70+ million people now. There is a real and frightening fantasyland around us. Being angry and owning the libs and controlling people and hating people is all there is, the sum total of their existence……..we shall see, I pray you are right.
Maga men will remain their pitiful, lonely, angry selves because any woman who pays attention will never be attracted to that kind of loser. No woman is deserving of that kind of relationship. Girls, we have great toys and each other for positive human contact. They have their hand.......
I want to believe the MAGAs have enough bandwidth to understand who did this to them. But his machine has already introduced the 'enemy within' riff, which they can convert to scapegoating with just a few slurry drunk uncle speeches and a chorus of screamers on Fox. It took years, millions of lives, and U.S. military and industrial support, plus the Soviet Union on the Eastern front, the UK military, and the French resistance, for the Nazi's destructive policies to catch up with them. We can't count on any of those. The breakdown of the middle class that started with Reagan could be their final undoing. If the concept that the middle class is a bulwark against revolution is true, then maybe, as the French discovered, you can't take it ALL away without paying a price. But first and predictably, they turned to the right, where Trump & Co. and sophisticated psychological manipulation were waiting to meet them.
~I beg to differ with you on this, John...trump's cult members will always blame the democrats/liberals for everything bad that happens to them...I honestly don't believe they will ever stray from their beliefs of his "goodness"...and i'm sure that trump will be telling them that it is Biden's fault that they're suffering in the years to come.....................(thanks for all your great articles, btw--i consider you a calm voice in this time of chaos)...
The only thing I didn't agree with is when you said their wives, daughters, nieces, ( and don't forget their mistresses or granddaughters they raped ) will bleed out from not being able to get reproductive healthcare. No those rich bastards will get healthcare from their Gilead bretheran
The rich always have gotten, and always will get, the best healthcare, including reproductive care, that their money can buy. For everyone else, ‘Let Them Eat Cake’.
I've realized over I've the last few days that this is exactly the same as dealing with my abusive ex-husband (ironically, he is liberal) with whom I still have to co-parent our 9&11 year old children. My life is devoted to doing everything possible to take care of things for them in a less than ideal coparenting environment and make sure they're getting the things they need, but making sure I don't say things the wrong way so that he yells at me in front of them and upsets them.... and sharing as much information with him as I can because that's what is best for the kids and what a good coparent does, but then if I say too much I'm lecturing and trying to control him... and if I try to have a conversation to understand where he's coming from so we can coparent better because that's what the kids need, then I also get yelled at because "I don't really want to listen and we'll just do what I want anyway"... etc etc etc. No matter how much I try to adjust because what I care about is the health of our coparenting whole (the kids), it can't work because he is driven by individualism and anything he perceives as "being told what to do."
It clicked that the gaslighting triple reverse of an abusive relationship that makes you question your reality and sense of self is where we are now, and us being more accommodating or understanding isn't going to change anything. In fact, that's part of the gaslighting - most of us do see and understand the lack of education, or the trauma, or any of the many things we are trying to make very in society, and we let that be an excuse to stay in an abusive relationship for too long. We're not only spending all our energy seeing and empathizing with and doing three work on these things, but then we're being told we're NOT doing them and being punished for it. People can be manipulated with disinformation through no fault of their own, AND when they are presented with new information and perspectives they have a choice. If we provide voters with accurate information, if we beg them to consider that these things affect them and that they're being fed lies by the other side and they still choose to not listen or examine their assumptions, it's not on us.
With my ex I needed to accept that I don't have control over what he does. Like with voters, I thought that in the end he would prioritize collaborating for the good of our kids over his own "freedom," and I was wrong. I thought that I just needed to understand him better, to say things a different way, to not trigger him, to not make him feel like I was controlling him... whatever. Nothing will make him change his mindset and I needed to let that go. We still have to raise kids together, so I just have to do whatever is needed to get them through it for the next ten years. Post-election we can't just stop working, because we live in our society too, but I'm done trying to understand or convince MAGA a-holes about anything. We be our best selves and live and fight for our Democratic values and focus on the things around us that we need to do to keep our people safe. That's what we can control right now. Seeing the twisted, abusive haze of how we're being portrayed is a big step.
Thanks Pam ❤️ but I feel we're living in a fractal where every pattern is the same - when we're aligned with the right purpose, as I feel we are, you really can't do anything but live your life considering the whole. Despite all the misery of dealing with him, I can't give up because the whole (my kids) is too important - but I can let go of my desire for him to understand and want the same thing. When I have to deal with him, I try to instead use my energy toward the goal of getting what I can that helps my kids, and not trying to get him to understand me (it's hard). The parallel I see for us, at least as an individual at a hyperlocal level, in the next 4 years is just letting go of reaching out, educating, doing the work and fixing broken MAGA crap unless it's something we need to keep our people safe (which granted is a lot). Be completely ourselves and don't pander at all to them or care if they understand us. They won't if they're not ready to. No matter what we do they'll blame us, say we're lying, misrepresent us, even as we do the work that would lift us all up.
In the end I think it's about the mental power we give them - I think a lot can shift by taking that away as a start. It seems completely crazy and pointless, but I/we know that we're living the right values, and when you live out the right values as a collective, things will fall into place even if we can't imagine what it looks like yet. We haven't gotten the right "how" yet, so maybe we just start with what we DO know it's right, which is WHO and WHAT we are and be that and see what happens. 💙
A sobering analysis. My husband and I have been saying the same thing. It will be a moment of bitter irony when they realize that, now that they've elected him, he no longer needs them.
But will they actually realize this? It’s so distressing to see the alternative reality from where they get their information… How can facts get through this?
I agree with everything you said, except they WILL find a way to blame us, even if it's just "you should have run a better campaign" or "you picked the wrong candidate...it's all the Dems fault."
I have no doubt WE will be blamed regardless of the circumstances. Brace yourselves.
Excellent commentary. I have always wondered why so many of the working/middle class consistently vote against their actual interests. I think this election will be a deafening wake up call for many of them. The extremism that is on the horizon is a BIG SOMETHING BURGER that will finally open their eyes, and they will see who their interests really align with. One can only hope the fall-out is not devastating.
That is a distinct possibility. I am hoping that the dislocations are dramatic enough that they cannot be ignored, and at some point cannot be explained away by the 'overlords'. The coming shit-show will be unprecedented. Ironically, I am trying to be an optimist here.
This has certainly always been true of the Deep South, where Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana annually complete to be on the bottom of every state list. Nothing really changes and they always vote for the worst candidate.
Such a deal!!! Two (and more in the wings) super-rich white men to turn their backs on Americans everywhere. Go back and read/look at the photos taken during the Great Depression. They are heart-wrenching.
It will be the biggest I Told You So in history....
but what good will that do?
Since the party of trump is a party of whiners, "what's in it for me", "ya'll owe me" , blah blah blah, they'll just continue to blame the other side for their mistakes. It'll be Biden's fault or Obama's fault or HRC' fault to the end of time. It's just too painful for them to admit they were wrong.
None.
Stick around for OUR NEXT CHAPTER!
start your list of what you can change in your life to uplift the work for all of us!
This is satire right? Ok.
I hope it is satire. If not, it is tragic that someone truly believes such ridiculous nonsense.
Well then, it’s a bot that has infiltrated our space:(
That which is asserted without evidence, will be dismissed without evidence. Lies and lies, and lies repeated do not equal truth.
People, insist on evidence and facts, or be ruled by liars, tyrants, and thieves
I subscribe to Letters From an American by Heather Cox Richardson, a historian. Today she wrote:
Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil.
There are also stories that voters who chose Trump to lower household expenses are unhappy to discover that their undocumented relatives are in danger of deportation. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Indiana Republican senator-elect Jim Banks if undocumented immigrants who had been here for a long time and integrated into the community would be deported, Banks answered that deportation should include “every illegal in this country that we can find.” Yesterday a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a policy established by the Biden administration that was designed to create an easier path to citizenship for about half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens.
Meanwhile, Trump’s advisors told Jim VandeHei and MIke Allen of Axios that Trump wasted valuable time at the beginning of his first term and that they will not make that mistake again. They plan to hit the ground running with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, deregulation, and increased gas and oil production. Trump is looking to fill the top ranks of the government with “billionaires, former CEOs, tech leaders and loyalists.”
After the election, the wealth of Trump-backer Elon Musk jumped about $13 billion, making him worth $300 billion. Musk, who has been in frequent contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin, joined a phone call today between President-elect Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.
In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump.
Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them. An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”
In The New Republic today, Michael Tomasky reinforced that voters chose Trump in 2024 not because of the economy or inflation, or anything else, but because of how they perceived those issues—which is not the same thing. Right-wing media “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win,” Tomasky wrote. Right-wing media has overtaken legacy media to set the country’s political agenda not only because it’s bigger, but because it speaks with one voice, “and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.”
Tomasky noted how the work of Matthew Gertz of Media Matters shows that nearly all the crazy memes that became central campaign issues—the pet-eating story, for example, or the idea that the booming economy was terrible—came from right-wing media. In those circles, Vice President Kamala Harris was a stupid, crazed extremist who orchestrated a coup against President Joe Biden and doesn’t care about ordinary Americans, while Trump is under assault and has been for years, and he’s “doing it all for you.”
Investigative reporter Miranda Green outlined how “pink slime” newspapers, which are AI generated from right-wing sites, turned voters to Trump in key swing state counties. Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, ‘What is an authoritarian?’”
In a social media post, Marcotte wrote: “A lot of voters are profoundly ignorant. More so than in the past.” That jumped out to me because there was, indeed, an earlier period in our history when voters were “pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”
Many Trumpers I know are profoundly ignorant. They don’t read, they don’t think, and they are easy pickings for misinformation spreaders. Interestingly, some of these people actually have college degrees, but I wouldn’t call them educated.
Thank you, Kent Cooper, for posting all I’ve not read. I know articles and books are written about why people “buy” the false narratives put forth. Not formally well-educated, my parents and public school teachers in the ‘50s & ‘60s taught me to be a conscientious consumer of goods and information albeit with a Dem bent in politics at home. What’s so odd to me is we had to go to a library’s card catalogue to find lots of books to learn. Is it that searches yield for one’s history the way the NPR reported robocalls you Black teens and adults targeted?
Education has been so restricted I fear there will be even less knowledge, curiosity to learn, and a greater acceptance that feeds what must be core beliefs.
Education has been reduced (in many places and cases) to a lowest common denominator linked to a computer access environment. Learning is so damned hampered by such reliance on 'Googling' a topic. False profits, I say.
Our motto needs to be, “It’s Education, Stupid!” The GOP pushes for vouchers, bankrupting local Public Schools, without telling poor parents (white and POC) that they’ll never be able to utilize those vouchers. You get to pay for books, supplies, transportation, extracurriculars, etc., etc. Another GOP bait and switch.
Agreed. U.S. public education is at the mercy of voters in any district. Of course, most people do not know that to be an informed voter means that you are knowledgeable about who is running for the local school board in your district. Many do not even know to vote for in that category and will often skip it or vote their "party". That is why down ballot elections are as important as electing top officials such as president, senators, or US house members. The down ballot is most important because it affects your children's education, the funding that education receives, and a whole host of expenditures related to public education and your community.
Project 2025 focuses on funding for private education - merely a term for propaganda. The goal is to create an entire generation of children that are literally brainwashed from an early age to be further propagandists for the party. It is also in the agenda that young people in public schools approaching the age of 18 years old will have mandatory registration for the military. Like the draft for going to VietNam of young men 18 years or older that I lived through with my boyfriend in 1971.
It's Lifelong Education Stupid - just because you are 30+ DOES NOT mean that you can stop educating yourselves!!!
And for the win, never forget Trump University!
I too read HCR (she is my Shero!). Many , many MAGAts will be shocked when reality sets in...
I think in general their minds will not comprehend this, and they will have their propaganda machines going full tilt which will help them blame anyone else. Anyone here read Orwell’s 1984? The first most essential thing the Party does is teach you to believe the propaganda over what you see with your eyes. Really, this is not going to be a huge problem for most people.
Exactly.
What makes you think that the people who believed the lies leading up to this election, won’t be fooled again by the lies they will be told when the economy goes south and they are hit by actual hard times?
And what makes you think that the same media sources that promoted the lies leading up to the election won’t concoct and sell a new set of lies to the same people?
All available evidence suggests that new — but equally effective — lies will be created and believed.
Of course, I agree 100%, John, with everything you say; HOWEVER, I am convinced that Fox News, and all the crazy right wing ecosystem, will blame whatever happens on Democrats, or George Soros, or trans people or “woke” cancel culture, and the cult and cult adjacent will still believe it. Reality means nothing to 70+ million people now. There is a real and frightening fantasyland around us. Being angry and owning the libs and controlling people and hating people is all there is, the sum total of their existence……..we shall see, I pray you are right.
The 4B movement is arising. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Lonely MAGA men just gonna get lonelier now.
I’m sure the MAGA male, like their father figure Trump, won’t take “No” for an answer. And now that the STATE owns women’s bodies, who’s to stop them.
Well, rape is still a crime.....for now anyway.
Maga men will remain their pitiful, lonely, angry selves because any woman who pays attention will never be attracted to that kind of loser. No woman is deserving of that kind of relationship. Girls, we have great toys and each other for positive human contact. They have their hand.......
I want to believe the MAGAs have enough bandwidth to understand who did this to them. But his machine has already introduced the 'enemy within' riff, which they can convert to scapegoating with just a few slurry drunk uncle speeches and a chorus of screamers on Fox. It took years, millions of lives, and U.S. military and industrial support, plus the Soviet Union on the Eastern front, the UK military, and the French resistance, for the Nazi's destructive policies to catch up with them. We can't count on any of those. The breakdown of the middle class that started with Reagan could be their final undoing. If the concept that the middle class is a bulwark against revolution is true, then maybe, as the French discovered, you can't take it ALL away without paying a price. But first and predictably, they turned to the right, where Trump & Co. and sophisticated psychological manipulation were waiting to meet them.
~I beg to differ with you on this, John...trump's cult members will always blame the democrats/liberals for everything bad that happens to them...I honestly don't believe they will ever stray from their beliefs of his "goodness"...and i'm sure that trump will be telling them that it is Biden's fault that they're suffering in the years to come.....................(thanks for all your great articles, btw--i consider you a calm voice in this time of chaos)...
The only thing I didn't agree with is when you said their wives, daughters, nieces, ( and don't forget their mistresses or granddaughters they raped ) will bleed out from not being able to get reproductive healthcare. No those rich bastards will get healthcare from their Gilead bretheran
The rich always have gotten, and always will get, the best healthcare, including reproductive care, that their money can buy. For everyone else, ‘Let Them Eat Cake’.
John, why don't you have a Share link to Threads? Many of us have migrated off of Twitter. We live on Threads now.
I've realized over I've the last few days that this is exactly the same as dealing with my abusive ex-husband (ironically, he is liberal) with whom I still have to co-parent our 9&11 year old children. My life is devoted to doing everything possible to take care of things for them in a less than ideal coparenting environment and make sure they're getting the things they need, but making sure I don't say things the wrong way so that he yells at me in front of them and upsets them.... and sharing as much information with him as I can because that's what is best for the kids and what a good coparent does, but then if I say too much I'm lecturing and trying to control him... and if I try to have a conversation to understand where he's coming from so we can coparent better because that's what the kids need, then I also get yelled at because "I don't really want to listen and we'll just do what I want anyway"... etc etc etc. No matter how much I try to adjust because what I care about is the health of our coparenting whole (the kids), it can't work because he is driven by individualism and anything he perceives as "being told what to do."
It clicked that the gaslighting triple reverse of an abusive relationship that makes you question your reality and sense of self is where we are now, and us being more accommodating or understanding isn't going to change anything. In fact, that's part of the gaslighting - most of us do see and understand the lack of education, or the trauma, or any of the many things we are trying to make very in society, and we let that be an excuse to stay in an abusive relationship for too long. We're not only spending all our energy seeing and empathizing with and doing three work on these things, but then we're being told we're NOT doing them and being punished for it. People can be manipulated with disinformation through no fault of their own, AND when they are presented with new information and perspectives they have a choice. If we provide voters with accurate information, if we beg them to consider that these things affect them and that they're being fed lies by the other side and they still choose to not listen or examine their assumptions, it's not on us.
With my ex I needed to accept that I don't have control over what he does. Like with voters, I thought that in the end he would prioritize collaborating for the good of our kids over his own "freedom," and I was wrong. I thought that I just needed to understand him better, to say things a different way, to not trigger him, to not make him feel like I was controlling him... whatever. Nothing will make him change his mindset and I needed to let that go. We still have to raise kids together, so I just have to do whatever is needed to get them through it for the next ten years. Post-election we can't just stop working, because we live in our society too, but I'm done trying to understand or convince MAGA a-holes about anything. We be our best selves and live and fight for our Democratic values and focus on the things around us that we need to do to keep our people safe. That's what we can control right now. Seeing the twisted, abusive haze of how we're being portrayed is a big step.
Hugs for your personal situation. You're a brave and strong person!
Thanks Pam ❤️ but I feel we're living in a fractal where every pattern is the same - when we're aligned with the right purpose, as I feel we are, you really can't do anything but live your life considering the whole. Despite all the misery of dealing with him, I can't give up because the whole (my kids) is too important - but I can let go of my desire for him to understand and want the same thing. When I have to deal with him, I try to instead use my energy toward the goal of getting what I can that helps my kids, and not trying to get him to understand me (it's hard). The parallel I see for us, at least as an individual at a hyperlocal level, in the next 4 years is just letting go of reaching out, educating, doing the work and fixing broken MAGA crap unless it's something we need to keep our people safe (which granted is a lot). Be completely ourselves and don't pander at all to them or care if they understand us. They won't if they're not ready to. No matter what we do they'll blame us, say we're lying, misrepresent us, even as we do the work that would lift us all up.
In the end I think it's about the mental power we give them - I think a lot can shift by taking that away as a start. It seems completely crazy and pointless, but I/we know that we're living the right values, and when you live out the right values as a collective, things will fall into place even if we can't imagine what it looks like yet. We haven't gotten the right "how" yet, so maybe we just start with what we DO know it's right, which is WHO and WHAT we are and be that and see what happens. 💙
A sobering analysis. My husband and I have been saying the same thing. It will be a moment of bitter irony when they realize that, now that they've elected him, he no longer needs them.
But will they actually realize this? It’s so distressing to see the alternative reality from where they get their information… How can facts get through this?
Oh, he needs them alright, at least until he's on a ventilator. He's got more crap to sell them!
I agree with everything you said, except they WILL find a way to blame us, even if it's just "you should have run a better campaign" or "you picked the wrong candidate...it's all the Dems fault."
I have no doubt WE will be blamed regardless of the circumstances. Brace yourselves.
John,
Excellent commentary. I have always wondered why so many of the working/middle class consistently vote against their actual interests. I think this election will be a deafening wake up call for many of them. The extremism that is on the horizon is a BIG SOMETHING BURGER that will finally open their eyes, and they will see who their interests really align with. One can only hope the fall-out is not devastating.
I don’t think so. I think they will blame others as they always have and as they will be told to do. It will never be the fault of the overlords
That is a distinct possibility. I am hoping that the dislocations are dramatic enough that they cannot be ignored, and at some point cannot be explained away by the 'overlords'. The coming shit-show will be unprecedented. Ironically, I am trying to be an optimist here.
We are ALL trying to be optimists 😕
Yep.
This has certainly always been true of the Deep South, where Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana annually complete to be on the bottom of every state list. Nothing really changes and they always vote for the worst candidate.
...for them, us and the world. Everything feels very fragile especially since Drumpf has assumed that he IS now President.
A very disappointed "amen" to all of that. Going to be some difficult years ahead.
I am going to try not to resent the people who voted for trump (apparently a two for one - we get Musk too.
Such a deal!!! Two (and more in the wings) super-rich white men to turn their backs on Americans everywhere. Go back and read/look at the photos taken during the Great Depression. They are heart-wrenching.