(6th August 2025, 4:09 PM)Weltall Wrote: On the other hand, I have a 19 year old co-worker who is a kind, courteous, empathetic, and emotionally mature young man, not even jokingly racist or sexist, and he voted for Trump because he sincerely believed that the economy would improve.
Lumping all his voters together feels good, but I also think it's counterproductive. It feels important to communicate with this guy, on the subject, in a completely unantagonistic manner. No disrespect. It's a little challenging, but maybe worthwhile.
This is indeed challenging, and it's something I have to check myself on constantly. I have relatives who voted for Trump and will stand by that vote seemingly no matter what happens. Are they bad people? No. My mother, in particular, doesn't like anything about Trump but has been religiously conditioned all her life to oppose Democrats, and so she feels that Trump was "better than the alternative." She's also politically disengaged, so that doesn't help. But it also doesn't help that my uncle (her brother) is very politically engaged in the sense that being in right-wing echo chambers counts as engagement, and my brother is falling further and further down that rabbit hole himself (with a much more religious fundamentalist branding on his preferred echo chambers), and their views influence what little political belief my mom has. My uncle is very confident even when he is objectively wrong, but he's also not a bad person or even a dumb person--perhaps just a closed-minded and hard-headed person; he also claims to be a political moderate even though 99% of his ire is directed toward the left. My brother used to be much more politically moderate, and the abortion issue is why he skews right, but he's seemingly becoming more radicalized over the last few years. And yet, he is generally a kind person and has as much of an anxious, people-pleasing mentality as I do, probably even more.
All this to say that people are indeed nuanced, and as easy as it is to fall into the trap of lumping them all together as contemptible, terrible, stupid people, if we do that, they will perceive us as unhinged and continue to remain safely in their echo chambers away from those angry, hysterical liberals (which, in turn, also leaves us in an echo chamber of our own screaming into the void--cathartic, but ultimately not helpful). Conversely, there are actual MAGA fanatics out there who spout hate speech and complete idiocy with a smug confidence. There is no reasoning with those people. But not everyone on the right is like that, and many of them feel alienated by the left. My wife is a lot better than I am at helping my mom to see other perspectives without coming off as angry; it helps that my wife comes from a fundamentalist background and has seen the Heritage Foundation cult for what it is, but she also understands where the evangelical right is coming from because she, too, was once entrenched in that very same "us vs. the world" rhetoric.
Shit's complicated, yo.