My Neighbors Are Voting For Trump...from the Texas Observer, from 2016. Still relevant!

[CaliforniaPeggy]

https://www.texasobserver.org/east-texas-trump-voters-lansdale/?fbclid=IwAR1nuvMOIYXcQcuIHp-ivZ5aA26p5h60tQYh-6geEtct9m0lBKkKKR_Ozo8


It’s not because they’re stupid rednecks.

Voting for Trump is about being part of a large reality show. Really.

The general view of the non-Trump supporter is that those who have chosen to vote for him are rednecks with 12 teeth, six of them in their coat pocket, and it’s possible those teeth might be on loan from someone else. The majority of these Trump supporters are listed primarily as White Uneducated Voters, which is code for “stupid redneck.” The kind of folks who kept their first grade report card because they’re proud of the D they made in conduct. (I made a C.)

However, I know a large number of people who make good money, are well-educated, appear to have a dental plan, and yet, they too are voting for Trump. To me this is as baffling as trigonometry, which until recently I thought had to do with Roy Rogers’ horse.

Thing is, the support of Trump in Texas — and I speak specifically of my region, East Texas — goes beyond the smart and the not so smart, the educated and the uneducated. It is more a result of what I like to call the happily stupid; the ones who hold stupid views by choice, not due to lack of intelligence, but due to a kind of tribalism. Facts that interfere with their version of the world are there to be ignored. It’s like putting a hat on a pig and insisting the porker is your Uncle Frank, contrary to all other evidence.

Trump has provided a dark, dank hole into which these folks can dump whatever it is they’re mad about. Even contradictory views, since Trump frequently changes viewpoint in midsentence, can happily nest there, swelling and breeding like poison fungus.

All of it at the link.

[pbmus]

1. Anarchists....

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. Indeed.

[Joe941]

2. To some people politics is like sports...

You choose a team and then support your team through thick and thin. They don't care one wit about what it does to our country.

[kairos12]

4. Drumpt is stochastic terrorist with zombie followers.

[The Wielding Truth]

5. They've invested in the bully. The mean kid who has seized power and gets away with nasty things.

They want to be him and they are smart enough to know that if they aren't a supporter he will come for them.They are caught and they tell themselves and FOX tells them and Trump tells them that they are good to do this.

It is a cultist thing and it will take something like a break from a steady diet of propaganda to free them.

[rainin]

6. It has to do with a decade or more of propaganda (Fox, Breitbart, etc)

My elderly mom lives with me. She lives in an alternate universe where today's lies ring true because they conform to yesterday's lies. We have no common ground because her foundation is false. I have long believed that we can't heal as a country without solving the problem of right wing media. Media should be broken up and publicly owned.

[TomSlick]

7. I recommend clicking through and reading the full OpEd.

The writer is in east Texas. Not surprisingly, things are the same in southwest Arkansas.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

8. Indeed, I did read the full article! I recommend that too.

I thought it was very well written.

I am sorry that you're dealing with this sort of thing in southwest Arkansas.

[TomSlick]

10. It's home - for good or ill.

There are good people here but many of the willfully stupid. There are, unfortunately, also many who are simply hateful and bigoted.

The benefit of being reared in such a place is that I know racism when I see it. I understand the dog whistles. I cannot be deceived.

Here I was planted and here I will do what good I can.

[ConnorMarc]

9. But it's ALWAYS been willful ignorance and tribalism w/these people.

Is this really news to anyone?