For instance, I have an aunt who is definitely MAGA, and is flirting with Q-Anon ideas. However, she has pretty good views on the environment and animal rights. For instance, after travelling to Ecuador, she donates to some Ecuadorian land trust run by locals. However, if you start talking to her about the border or gender, she goes full Orbán.
I was talking to my Dad’s wife about the way capitalism controls us, including be media we consume, how all politicians are in the pocket of the capitalist overlords, and she was all in agreement, and yet she is a staunch Trump supporter. But she’s no stranger to hypocrisy, she also thinks that we should cut social spending while living off disability. It’s a real “rules for thee and not me” dichotomy. I do think she’d be a great ally in the revolution in a general sense tho.
Talking to some Trump supporters, I really think a good number believe that the things about him being racist and misogynist and such is just liberal media propaganda, and they don’t actually care much about many political topics but just know there is something wrong with the system. With slightly different conditions or experiences I could see a lot of them being comrades. There are definitely a number of dedicated white nationalist Trump supporters though.
I think you’ve got it. I don’t think many conservatives actually care enough to be coherent. They know something’s wrong, but all they’ve ever known is whiteness, apple pie, patriotism, that whole slurry of stuff. The last time they thought about civics was elementary school where they got the racist hagiography of George Washington. So that’s where they start as their framework.
Especially with older relatives, they also have years and years of capitalist propaganda, furthering division and blurring the lines between “good guys” and “bad guys”.
it’s insane that the strategy of both of the major parties in the US is to obscure their agenda and provide just enough of a narrative framework to allow the average insane USian to project whatever platform they want onto them.
I agree with this. However, I do believe a lot of them are racist in the way that the system guides them to be. I grew up right by a major hub of black poverty, where there was a lot of violence, drugs, theft, etc., and that is what was reported to us on the nightly news. This idea that black people are inherently bad and dangerous is what people grew up with and, for people like her who never get out of their little bubble and meet people different from her, that is the image they are stuck with. The same has happened with hispanic people recently, but she had met enough of them to see that they are “not all bad” (her words).
There’s this subset of mildly racist middle class white people who just don’t care enough to know better.