2024 Presidential Election | ELECTION DAY 2024

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I was on my way to write essentially this, point for point, then read your post.

The factor I imagine is at work in this utterly baffling cut-off-thy-nose-to-spite-thy-face is maybe these communities have already been through so much awful, that further awfulness is a price worth paying for retribution. They assume awfulness will occur either way, but recency bias ingrains the possibility that a hypothetical ttump admin isn't as bad for Gaza than the well document awfulness or the current moment. Thus, I have control over punishing Harris and the Democrats, and maybe, just maybe a ttump admin will end this (it won't, it'll get worse).
Yeah and even that view is just a myopic focus on Gaza, ignoring all the other marginalized groups who will suffer immensely under a Trump presidency (poor immigrant communities, refugees, poor women who need abortions and reproductive care, etc). The world is a big and complicated place, and I just don't understand boiling your entire political identify down to one specific group of people, no matter how horribly they're being treated - and even then refusing to choose the electoral decision that has the best chance to help them.
 
I'm sort of out of ideas for how to explain to leftists that not voting for Harris isn't punishing her at all, it's punishing leftists and the causes they claim to care about. If Kamala Harris doesn't win the presidency she'll still be rich, famous, and politically influential. But leftists will see issues they claim to care about get worse all over the map - from Gaza to immigration to health care to economic reform. You simply cannot reason with some of these people; they refuse to acknowledge basic cause and effect. They always focus on this idea of whether Kamala or Democrats "deserve" their vote or whether their conscience permits them to cast a vote "in favor of genocide" or that they are going to "send a message to Democrats" by withholding their vote. They routinely exhibit a complete misunderstanding of political incentives and the way political power is gained and exercised. I don't know whether it's naivete or immaturity or what. Just can't seem to break through and convince them that they aren't going to succeed in punishing anyone but themselves and the people they claim to care about.
Leftists gave us GWB and Trump... and may give us Trump, the sequel:(
 
Dems have been bending over backwards (example the border bill) to work with Republicans for 4 years. But R's don't want to give any ground or give any "wins" to a Dem administration at the cost to the American people. R's then blame "Washington" for not getting things done.
It's a basic part of the Pub playbook...use the power of Pubs in elected offices to break or make less efficient/effective the workings of the government and then tout those very problems as why the government is bad.
 
Trump was right in saying he could kill someone in the middle of the street in broad daylight and his cult members would still worship him. They don't care what HE does as long as he gets them what they want, a fascist country only for straight white Christian nationalists.
This gets repeated over and over but it is simply not an accurate representation of many in the MAGA cult. It describes some but it does not in any way describe them all.

One thing they have in common is that none of them believe anything negative that comes out about Trump. One reason for this is that they are too vested in the cult of personality. The cognitive dissonance that would arise if they believed the worst about Trump would be mentally debilitating.

That is most obvious for those who believe Trump is some type of messianic figure. Trump is now so tied into their belief system that questioning one threatens the other.
 
This gets repeated over and over but it is simply not an accurate representation of many in the MAGA cult. It describes some but it does not in any way describe them all.

One thing they have in common is that none of them believe anything negative that comes out about Trump. One reason for this is that they are too vested in the cult of personality. The cognitive dissonance that would arise if they believed the worst about Trump would be mentally debilitating.

That is most obvious for those who believe Trump is some type of messianic figure. Trump is now so tied into their belief system that questioning one threatens the other.
It's why he can pull in so many Evangelicals. You do not question the higher authority, and the more they proclaim that trump is the authority, the less they can question him.
 
It's why he can pull in so many Evangelicals. You do not question the higher authority, and the more they proclaim that trump is the authority, the less they can question him.
Well said. This is the perfect encapsulation of what I hate so much about my upbringing in the Southern Baptist church. You couldn't question anything about God whatsoever- everything was "God works in mysterious ways" or "It's God's will" or "you're doing Satan's work questioning God."
 
I don’t want to rehash this argument again, just want to point out that the Gaza dynamic is a bit more complex than just leftists not voting for Harris.

She has major issues with Arab voters because of Gaza. I don’t think they’re all leftists. Most of these people voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Leftists aren’t voting Trump over Harris. It seems like a lot of Arab voters will vote Trump over Harris.

Again, not making an argument about the efficacy of doing this.
To be clear, I wasn’t trying to use a broad brush. Rather, my commentary was an attempt to offer some degree of my knowledge to a circumstance that, on its face, appears irrational, yet has reason whether we like it or not.
 
And that’s what ultimately drove me away. As someone who asks questions about everything, that attitude is repulsive to me.

When one question is asked that they can’t answer, the worldview crumbles. They are forced to reject facts that are right in front of them in service to fundamentalism.
That is sort of what drove me away. To them, faith means unwavering belief. That is a mental state that is impossible for me to achieve. I can't pretend that I know something with absolute certainty that I do not know. My church days were spent thinking that I was (or might be) going to hell because I could never reach the state of absolute knowledge that I was told I had to reach.
 
This gets repeated over and over but it is simply not an accurate representation of many in the MAGA cult. It describes some but it does not in any way describe them all.

One thing they have in common is that none of them believe anything negative that comes out about Trump. One reason for this is that they are too vested in the cult of personality. The cognitive dissonance that would arise if they believed the worst about Trump would be mentally debilitating.

That is most obvious for those who believe Trump is some type of messianic figure. Trump is now so tied into their belief system that questioning one threatens the other.
It describes the vast majority of his supporters and why they support him in the first place.
 
That is sort of what drove me away. To them, faith means unwavering belief. That is a mental state that is impossible for me to achieve. I can't pretend that I know something with absolute certainty that I do not know. My church days were spent thinking that I was (or might be) going to hell because I could never reach the state of absolute knowledge that I was told I had to reach.
Not to derail, but same. It's not that I refuse to believe - it's that I can't. And it took me a while, but I've come to terms with it and am a lot more comfortable with that truth.

And I, too, remember being in church every Sunday as a kid, peeping at everyone else during prayers, and never once seeing anyone peeping back... Never really felt that connection, either.
 
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