Political Memes

Same, because I come from that world. Specifically the trumpy, angry, racist, paranoid, dunning-kruger overconfident american conservative world. That's the family I was born into.

I think my presence on Lemmy suggests my curiosity and skepticism and giving-a-shit-about-other-people-itis led to me clawing my way out of that toxic hole over the decades.

But for how much I can deeply relate to you weighing the priorities, I have no better answers for you. When you are in their in-group (especially thinking extended family) they can be loving and giving people.

I personally think there are two big drivers that don't get enough attention because it sounds like you're trying to insult them.

The first is ignorance. As in literally ignoring the world around you. Living on auto pilot. Out of sight, out of mind. They mentally check the box of "responsible people follow the news" by passively absorbing content from Fox News or one of their local Sinclair news channels. Propaganda works extremely well on them.

The second is the mental pain of undiagnosed mental and/or neurological issues. Treatable stuff like anxiety, depression, and ADHD. In other words I'm not just implying they are narcissists or have borderline possibility disorder.

In my corner of the world, the more conservative a person is, the more irritable they are all the time. It's like they are an animal with a thorn in its paw and don't even know it. I know what that existence feels like, and then you have all these evil forces in the world waiting to reveal who is causing your pain! Surprise, it's those others!!

Part of me judges them harshly. We're talking about middle aged and older people who have had the time to learn. But there's a huge part of me that knows that pain that makes you angry all the time.

What I come back to every single time though, is that every awful person that has ever existed has a sad story. Even if no other person did things to twist somebody into a monster, they had the bad luck to be born with a brain that gives them psychosis later in life, or whatever the situation is.

At some point you have to judge people not just by their actions but on the effects and outcomes of what they do. I can be polite to ignorant ordinary people living ordinary lives. But for high-level politicians that destroy lives by the thousands and millions as they take advantage of it, I really don't care how horrible their upbringing was. I mean I do, but it's only like 0.01% of the suffering we're talking about, and it's not the preventable kind.

They're all just stupid. Being that level of shitty requires being stupid.

There is definitely a program, to follow, and plenty of ways to get on it.

Watch anything about Fitness or History (Anything involving any conflict ever) and you'll somehow get to Alex Jones every time.

Even the dumbest MAGA fool who can barely read and write knows that in general, they are becoming increasingly worse off. And they're not wrong. They just don't understand the "why" or "how".

Instead of looking into it, they tend to cling to their nostalgic perception of whenever they think times were better. Mistakenly conflating their memories of the "good ol' days" -- which are heavily condensed because that's just how the human brain works -- with the ideal picture of life and society.

People like Trump are able to tap into that, promising to effectively turn back the clock, even though that's impossible and complete bullshit. But, it resonates with those nostalgic desires and that creates a powerful bond, for better or worse.

If the Democrats want to stage a serious comeback, they're going to have to take some pages from the playbooks of people like FDR and LBJ.

For instance, shore up Social Security and Medicare. Remove the income tax cap from Social Security. Give all the old Boomers a decent raise. Unprivatize all of Medicare and put it to work making sure that senior citizens get the best quality healthcare possible.

Do whatever it takes to ram that legislation through. Worst case, Republicans oppose it (which they will) and you can drag each and every one of them through the mud.

The Democratic party, as it currently stands, isn't going to do that because they don't have the balls. Until they grow some, were going to continue this death spiral into fascism led by charlatans making false promises about returning to some utopia that never truly existed.

yeah, the attempt to present fascism as a people's libterating movement, as a kind of socialism, is nothing new - these are old rhetorical tricks, which makes it all the more disappointing they work still...

There's a certain level of childish contrarianism going on. "I was going to do this, but now I have learned you want me to do it and so I'm going to refuse"

My brother and I tried to convince our father to install solar panels when he was considering replacing our parents' entire roof due to age. The house was perfect for it: it wasn't shaded by trees, the roof was a 35 degree angle facing mostly to the south, the whole roof needed to be replaced, and there where still some really good tax advantages at the time.

We ran all the numbers for him, showed how it would pay for itself in something like 5 years and actually generate money for him after that, how the tax breaks would save so much money, how a large home battery could be used to power the home when the electricity is out due to Indiana's frequent tornadoes and storms...

Nope. Saving tens of thousands of dollars wasn't enough to overcome the dangers of Critical Race Theory powered panels generating a woke communist DEI field that is going to transgender the tan suit wearing raccoons of the Southern Indiana AntiFa Brigade.

I'm glad he died before COVID hit. He would absolutely have been the sort to say that wearing a mask is something only blue haired lesbian socialists do and gotten our mother killed.

• Sometimes there are too many regulations. When corporations get big and powerful, sometimes they push for regulations that will make it harder for their competitors.
• Immigration isn't always well managed. Often corporations will try to bring in immigrants so that they can avoid paying non-immigrants a higher wage. Illegal immigrants should be deported (but the companies that employ them should be heavily fined too).
• Drugs are bad, m'kay? Mexico's issues with narcos terrorizing them, destabilizing their government, etc. is driven by the demand for drugs from the US. It's true that when Americans are buying illegal drugs, they're often funding these narcos.
• Freedom of speech. This is normally something that is more of a conservative value. The left is typically more willing to say certain points of view shouldn't be heard.
• There is waste, fraud and abuse in the government. An occasional house cleaning is a good idea. But, it was Al Gore who did it the right way. DOGE was a clusterfuck.
• Think of the Children! Sometimes the world moves too quickly, and it has a bad effect on kids. Take, for example, kids getting addicted to their cell phones and social media, or kids using ChatGPT to cheat. Raising kids in a more traditional way while we figure out the effect of these new-fangled technologies might be smart.
• Chyna. The west really should have been harsher with China. China didn't respect IP rules with respect to US patents and trade secrets. China's government continues to promote and back certain companies. The "de minimis" rule was awful and really needed to be fixed.

What makes this hard to answer is that conservatives and liberals have flipped on a number of issues over the past decade or so. In Ye Olde Days, the left wing was protectionist because labour unions were strong. It was the conservatives that were pro free-trade, etc. Then the neo-liberals were pro-free trade, and the conservatives have become protectionist. Protecting nature has shifted back and forth as a conservative or liberal value. The left used to be skeptical about big business, but then it was the right who was trying to regulate the Silicon Valley companies, while the left defended them, and now the bosses in Silicon Valley are going hard right. The right used to be much more pro-immigrant because it was good for business, while the unions on the left opposed it. Now the right is anti-immigrant and the left is pro-immigrant. The right used to be the pro-war party, while the left was anti-war. Now the right is isolationist and against getting involved in military things overseas, and it's the left who wants to continue working with allies and intervening to protect vulnerable countries like Ukraine or vulnerable minorities who are being persecuted. (Both parties are terrible on Israel and Gaza). The right used to have freedom of speech as a core value, and it was the left who thought some people shouldn't have a platform and shouldn't have their views heard. Now it's the right who wants to censor everything and the left defending free speech.

I think the reason it’s hard to find a good answer is that their opinions aren’t based on anything logical, just whatever they’re told to believe at the moment. A person with no truly held convictions cannot be right about anything.

This isn't too far from what has been researched. Take a gander: https://theauthoritarians.org/

Are there any issues where conservatives are correct?

If you look at earlier 19th and early 20th century conservatives, they absolutely make pretty good points.

More than a few social safety systems world wide were instituted by conservatives, under the thinking that people are fucking shit to eachother and thus it falls to institutions to take care of basic needs. A famous example is the German welfare state created by Bismarck.

A lot of natural beauty has been protected by conservatives, because they used to believe in actually conserving things.

Conservatives of the past have done a LOT of good in preventing and reversing government overreach in personal liberties.

I could have absolutely had a great discussion with a conservative from 1925. We would have some major disagreements, but more than a few similarities. And a modern conservative would loathe everything about that same past conservative.

Are there any issues where conservatives are correct?

Flawed premise and why we're in this shit-mire. We keep thinking that we can appeal to the minds to relate with or connect with or change the policies of a third of our population when they're not using their minds to begin with.

They are the segment of the population not concerned with policy and values and principles, It may seem backwards to say they don't have values when they have such violent ideology, but their entire motivation for the things they defend violently is entirely emotional.

If their feelings change, so do their stances. If you can tell a better story that engages them and makes them feel feelings, their brains will latch onto that new narrative and they will either abandon the old one or encorporate it even if it contradicts... because again, concepts like contradiction and inconsistency are products of logic and reason, and we're talking about a side based in emotion and impulses. For example, when a conservative suddenly has a family crisis and needs assistance, they become entirely for public support systems and socialism. When they need an abortion, suddenly they're pro-choice. When one of their kids is harmed by a shooter, they want gun controls. They can hold these changes in belief WHILE also remaining anti-socialism, pro-gun and pro-life. We have a very hard time understanding this if we are people who read and write and think with language.

Trump and his ilk tap this easily by saying short, pithy and powerful statements to help emotional minds validate their own feelings. You sad and overworked? it's the migrants! Worried about your kids education? TRANS PEOPLE IN THE BATHROOM.

It doesn't have to logically make sense, our brains don't work like that by default, they just need a story to explain the feelings.

There are aspects of "Make America Healthy Again" that are actually good ideas but the problem is that they are tied to extremely bad ones. Like getting rid of artificial dyes in food and improving food purity are good ideas on the surface, but they're tied to dumb ass ideas like seed oil panic and anti vax. Furthermore, none of this stuff is actually being supported by law. It's all just rhetoric and the actual law and policy changes are just more pro corporate nonsense and all action taken by corporations so far has been voluntary statements saying they'll do something in the future. I think this is the real problem of the conservative movement at least in its current form. Even when they stumble upon a good idea, the fact that there is no underlying logical framework to that idea other than just further enriching those in charge means that said idea can't be implemented properly and without other nonsense.