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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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politics
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Why is the focus always on blaming other people for problems instead of fixing the problems?
Trans people this. Gay people that. Brown people. Immigrants. It’s somebody else’s fault. We’re doing it right, but those other people are ruining everything.
If it smells everywhere you go, it’s time to look under your own shoe. No plans. No policy. The party of hurting Americans.
Because they have no solutions.
They prolong the problem and obstruct solutions because they benefit from hurting people and don’t want that to end.
So they became the problem.
Because if they actually tried to fix shit, they'd have to recognize there are systemic issues that they benefit from. And then they wouldn't be the GQP.
Conservatives are fundamentally incapable of governing, because they have no ability nor interest in improving society. So they just make up problems to get elected, then steal anything not nailed down once in office. Well, that's the normal conservative aim, Trump also wants to make all of his legal problems go away.
Because their only real interest is funneling wealth upwards. Very few Republicans in power genuinely give a damn about any cultural war topics. No Fox News gasbag is choosing to live in Alabama lol. But the only way they can build a viable electoral base that supports stealing from the working class is by inventing and/or exacerbating working class divisions.
"Oh no, you're not unemployed because your boss outsourced your job, it's because, uh, that gay brown migrant took it!"
It's basically the aristocracy maintaining their old life style in a new disguise.
Recommend reading Eco's short essay on Ur-Fascism.
https://archive.org/details/eco_ur-fascism
Really, anything by Eco, just a brilliant author.
Fascism 101. Give the people a scapegoat to blame all their problems on.
Even more apropos!
Because if they pointed at the problem they wouldn't get elected. Any republican that points out any problem that isn't "minorities bad" swiftly retires or is primaried on the right.
I just want to go get a cup of coffee with another dude without feeling like I'm gonna get shot or worse.
just my 2c...
conservatives require hierarchy to exist. they believe it always did, does, and always will exists - that achieving any kind of equality on a large scale is a pipe dream and unnatural and impossible or even evil to strive for, because it necessitates "knocking them down" to do it. so, their focus is to ensure that they are not currently on the bottom of this hierarchy (fortunately, there's always someone to put beneath them) and to ensure that the bottom does not "rise past them" to leave them at the bottom (as anything promising equality may do). they rally around loud personalities that project power and control (even if it's not true) because just as there must be those beneath them, there must be those above them as well - they pick superiors that are the most personally relatable to them (in an arbitrary, per-person manner) so they can feel they are higher in the hierarchy than they are. after all, if you're just like this person who is obviously high on the ladder of society, you must be pretty well-off too, right? is this why the people they pick tend to be bigoted, unintelligent, and cruel? maybe.
the reason it's always someone else's problem is that the problem (in their mind) is that the people beneath them (their "lessers") are acting as though they're on a level of the social hierarchy that they don't belong. therefore, all social problems clearly have an obvious clause: "if only everyone else would just know their place under us, we wouldn't be having these conflicts." - it can't be them that's the problem, because that would imply there's some kind of issue that may suggest they're not as high up on the social ladder as they thought. gay/trans/brown/etc people want to be recognized as equals? it dilutes their position on the ladder. they would claw past others in this imaginary hierarchy by any means necessary, so of course they assume the "others" will too. no, it's an attack on them, they have to strike back!
gay nightclub shootings and anti-lgbt violence? "maybe they shouldn't have called attention to themselves as they tried to push us down the social hierarchy" someone (anyone) threatens violence upon them? "intolerable. inexcusable. they need to learn their place beneath us"
why do so many of them hate being called cis? because being labelled cis puts them at the same level as a trans person, who they believe is automatically beneath them by virtue of not being exactly like them. it is an attack on them, because they are not considered the normal, the default, as they believe they are. an identifier implies that differentiation between the conservative and the trans person is required, which implies it's not clear to everyone that they are inherently superior to the trans person. you may as well call them "poor powerless worthless scum who deserves to be exploited and abused" in their eyes.
it's maddeningly difficult to convince a hierarchy-addict that it's a delusion.
it makes being a politician for them pretty easy, too. just be relatable to the average self-absorbed person, and claim to do what's needed to put the inferior scum back below your voters where they belong so they can rise up to be superior once more. no surprise this interlaces very well with fascist and racial supremacist ideologies.