He’s a father of a 28-year-old son and he’s hurting. A retired police officer, he proudly voted for Donald Trump every time he ran and never hid his political beliefs from his family. “My son and his wife say that since I’m a fan of Trump they’re no fan of mine and cut me off,” he said. “Now I can’t see my only grandchild who I was so close to. It’s crazy and it’s tragic.”
It’s also increasingly common. The 2024 election spatchcocked the nation, widening a rift that was exposed in 2016 and put in an even sharper gulf four years later. Now, the hyper-partisan politics in the shadow of the 2024 election is breaking the bonds of families to a greater extent than ever before.
Hah! That’s pretty much exactly what I’ve said to my (right wing) relatives on a number of occasions but it doesn’t work. Does the author not realize that this perspective is very liberal?
Liberals and progressives are the folks with empathy that can’t fathom how anyone could vote for Donald Trump; a well-known grifter, actual criminal, tax cheat, and total scumbag who cheated on all of his wives.
I have a ton of empathy yet I still don’t understand conservatives. The only thing that makes sense to me is that they’re authoritarian and their chosen authority tells them to hate certain people, that any given thing is a conspiracy, and that no government-run program is ever a good thing. But to tell them that to their faces is like telling them that they’re stupid and suckers. To them it’s incredibly insulting.
Yet when you try to figure out how they (someone who lives off Social Security) came to believe that, “Mexicans are stealing our jobs” it’s the only thing that makes sense. They really are suckers. They may have been “smart” at some point in their life but not anymore. They choose how to vote based on anger at imaginary enemies and fake news.
Don’t try to equate liberals to understanding the empathy of progressives. Liberals are supporting a genocide as we speak. They’re rightwingers who believe themselves to be on the left. They are not.
They want Order. Specifically, an Order where everyone is put on the Proper Rung of Society and Keeps to Their Place. And of course their Place is above X (insert minority group here) because they are Special because of Y (insert ridiculous circular reasoning—usually racist—here).
These people literally believe that if Society becomes Unordered, it will collapse. And of course the only ones who can maintain that Order are the Great and Glorious White Men. The proof is that all the richest, most powerful people are White Men! (Any rich, powerful person who isn’t White and Male obviously got there through DEI action or cheating somehow.)
Innuendo Studios has a pretty good video on this in his Alt-Right Playbook series.