I read an article in the Atlantic yesterday from someone who is, once again, trying to tell us that what motivates Trump supporters is deep seated racism. You know, that might be true for a lot of them. But not all of them. I suspect many of them have implicit bias towards other groups, not just black people.
Anyway, I think reaching for racism every time ignores the real reason why Trump is so maniacally important to his base. It’s low hanging fruit.
I’m working on a different hypothesis. And if it turns out to have any validity, we are looking at something else entirely. This something else has been cooking for a long time before Trump. And it’s going to last a long time afterwards.
Without giving too much away before I go into this, I’d like to show you some images.
Think about those images. I think they are telling us something about the base Trump supporter.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
Off topic: It’s been 21 years now, but I still miss the Moon. 😉
On topic: Am I correct in guessing that those pix come from JW literature? They remind me of a brochure from them that I saw once.
Lol!!! So astute. Yes, the second one is from JW literature. The other three don’t. But you could be forgiven if you thought they were all pictures of religious paradise.
Run with that thought, IBW.
Something like apotheosis but without the Ascendent Madoka
I see pastoral images of happy people doing nice things. They could be covers of childhood books; Heidi, stories about a family enjoying a nice day outside. They certainly do evoke the 1950’s, though some could have come from a century before. it is an idealized view of a happy and safe world. There are all White people in the pictures, but those stories and pictures might have been of Europeans, who of course were then mostly White people. Or they could have evoked small town America, at least as it was portrayed then.
We may not be on the same theme here with regard to what is behind the Trump voters, but I do understand on some level the wish to return to some kind of prelapsarian world, where everyone was safe and cared for. Most of this is of course imagined, but things were certainly safer and less complicated for most people back in the ’50’s. The mass media, the cycle of cable news with its upsetting headlines and stories, has certainly contributed to what has been called free-floating anxiety. Of course the sociologist Durkheim was writing about anomie, a sense of not belonging, not being connected, back in the 19th century. But that was Europe, and America had more room, and perhaps a higher standard of living. I grew up in a small suburb; most people were pretty nice;, and left their front doors unlocked. I would walk down the long hilly street to the boulevard where the grocery store was, to do a shopping chore; people were out watering the lawns or washing their cars, they would ask me what the score of the Dodgers game was, as i listened to my transistor radio on the way. The biggest problem in school, was a few boys smoking in the bathroom.
And that Norman Rockwell picture of America does have an appeal. Republicans have tried to tune into that for many years; they portrayed themselves as the party of “Americanism”; apple pie and fireworks and barbecues. They did it in the 1920’s, they did it under Eisenhower and Reagan and the Bushes. Trump is laughable in trying to call up that image, but people still respond to it. In 2008, Obama, who was losing Pennsylvania to Hillary, talked about White people clinging to their guns and religion, which I thought was insulting, but did have some truth in it, as we have seen. They are clinging to something, many people are; turn back the clock, let’s read Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and Chip Hilton stories, watch My Little Margie, and listen to Rosemary Clooney and Patti Page. The problem is that no one can get us back there, and Donald Trump has utter contempt for such people, and just wants to con them into voting to make him an immensely wealthy dictator, the very thing that these people like to think they are totally against.
Yes. You’re getting there.
Now, combine that with IBW’s reaction to the images. They look like they come from Jehovah’s Witnesses literature. And add some of liliam’s mention of certain religious elements in Trump’s admin.
This is not religious but there are elements of paradise.
Of course, that false paradise did not exist for non-white Americans, and it was phony as a $3 bill even for many white Americans. Many workers were still underpaid and underprotected, and how many children and wives (and even a few husbands) with seemingly “perfect” lives were battered? How many LGBTQ people were forced to live a lie?
The American Dream is a lie. It always has been.
RD- are you referring to Revelations and/or Isaiah? Those preparing for the final “beaming up” to paradise? I think that may be a motivator for the likes of Barr as well as certain groups of the masses.
Barr has his own flavor of this but it’s not the one that is motivating the MAGA base.
I agree with that.
“Make American Great Again” and “Stronger Together,” the two campaigns’ competing slogans, became proxies for an epic battle over the changing face of America.
These photos represent what we are dealing with as far as the trump supporters are concerned — a confederate insurgency and a nostalgia for the mythical golden age of the past and being fueled by anger, became a defense of the divinely ordained way things are supposed to be. It also intertwines fears about changing demographics, immigrants, Muslims, women, LGBTQ, globalization, the impact of the Great Recession, the decline in religious affiliation and racism. In other words, nostalgia voters (i.e., trump supporters) reacting to the perceived changes in their established social order.
No matter how hard they try, the 1950’s aren’t coming back, and many of us don’t want them to. At the end of the day, white evangelicals’ grand bargain with Trump will be unable to hold back the sheer weight of cultural change.
That first image looks North Korean.
It is!!
The slightly Asian looking woman surrounded by innocent little lambs disguising what is really happening behind the scenes.
I cut out some of the high tension power lines but left one in the pic thinking you might not notice it.
Btw, Jehovah’s witnesses have a lot of pics of gatherings of people from all over the world in native dress passing bowls of fruit and veg while lambs and tigers gambol at their feet in happy herbivore abandon.
No Fucks Left To Give Hillary Is Best Hillary. 😈
