02-17-2022, 05:15 AM
(02-16-2022, 08:21 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: No disrespect intended, but....all of you are extremely out of touch with anything resembling what the average right winger thinks or looks like. Most right wingers are more like
below is a pretty decent cross-section of the modern right (note that not all of these are subgroups I view positively. there are a few subcultures on the right that are pretty terrible, but most of them are not like what is being described)
- working class employees who see a lot of people milking the system, destroying their neighborhoods or speaking condescendingly to them and want to see consequences
- farmers (interestingly, in Canada they tend to be more socialist)
- law-and-order bullies
- college students who think their SJW peers don't make sense and treat people terribly
- businessmen who just want to make money (ranging from sociopaths to normal people with more ambition)
- grill dads
- parents who are freaked out by how terrible the school system is and how drugs are being pushed on their children for the crime of being normal boys
- Evangelicals
- libertarians who hate corporate lobbyists just as much as anyone on the left
the unironically white supremacists haven't started really reemerging until just a few years ago, and like 2/3 of them say some variation of "I was liberal until like 3 years ago".
The white supremacists have mostly been so all along; just not as vocally until Obama was elected and then Donald Trump. The white vote and the black vote have been totally partisan in some southern states all along. Many of them hid their white supremacist views behind their attack on those whom they see as "a lot of people milking the system." There are few of such people, but those who think there are such people (like Classic Xer here) tend to see them as not being white.
The "self-reliance" meme among conservatives has been prominent among farmers for many decades. They think they are self-sufficient because they don't need urban services and don't want to pay for them, which is somewhat understandable since they live on the margins and are under pressure from their declining position compared to corporate farming companies and declining weather conditions in the age of global warming. But being provincial and parochial, they cannot see the true causes of their declining fortunes, and so they blame urban people-- and again many of those people are not white, so the racist anti-welfare meme comes up again among them too.
As for businessmen, their focus on money is no excuse for their conservative ideology. They just can't see beyond their ambition, so they buy into the self-reliance meme and the tax revolt and the other traits of the neoliberal ideology, which appeals to them even though they haven't studied economics. But the ideology prevails anyway among them because it is the foundation for policies that boost the free market and idolize it, and so they believe that if they are untaxed and deregulated it will enable the "job creaters" (spelled in accordance with GW Bush's accent) to provide prosperity for everyone. It doesn't; it impoverishes most people and and creates great wealth for the few. But again, focused only on their own business and on their need to make money, businessmen can only see their bottom line and favor policies they think will allow them to make more money-- like deregulation and lower taxes. Many other pressured and low-paid suburban workers are also deceived by these tempting neoliberal tax-revolt free-market anti-welfare slogans-- increasingly so ever since the onset of the Sleepening in 1978-79.
Most college students are not fooled by the conservative attack on social justice warriors. These latter are no doubt irritating. I am irritating too probably, to conservatives who don't want to have their ideology debunked. But they fail to realize that there are more important and real concerns that need to be addressed than their personal irritation with those who get angry and throw anti-racist, feminist, pro-LGBTQ and/or politically correct slogans at them. Those who are driven by this understandable irritation, instead of by real concerns, have only themselves to blame if the economy continues to exploit them and global warming ruins everything in their world-- just because they voted for and helped elect the critics of SJWs instead of politicians interested in handling real problems and concerns to the extent that they can or are willing to in this backward, conservative country.