This is a just-so rationalization, which feels good, but people have looked into many of these, and they don't really hold up.
The most common one is that poor white people are overwhelmingly voting for Trump. The average household income of a Trump voter is something like 75k - hardly poor (depending where you're at).
Anecdata: I know plenty of Trump voters who are very smart. A friend's dad has multiple PhD's and accomplished career as a theoretical physicist. He's also pretty racist. My father is a retired engineer, and doesn't like Trump, but keeps voting for him, because the Democrats are on the wrong side of issues he cares about. (Gun control, namely)
The reality is likely to be - they have used the mountains of publicly available data, and fine tuned their messages with the help of a highly partisan rage-baiting media ecosystem to capture more voters. It seems to me, the right wing is more organized, and manages to keep their voters and party members more aligned and on-message. They also have a much more voracious appetite for fighting dirty (rough talk, conspiracy theories, whisper campaigns, untraceable mailers giving wrong polling place info to black communities, etc.) - something the Democrats do not have the stomach for.
This explains election results (agreed) but I'm more curious why outrage-generators and conspiracists seem to have culturally taken a stronger hold on the right over the course of decades.
I would tentatively suggest that it because the right lost the broader cultural "wars".
Our story-telling media is, if not actually "leftish", generally progressive in the broadest sense of that term. Struggles over gay marriage, contraception, divorce, interracial marriage, civil rights were all, as of 2010 or so, pretty much wrapped up in ways that broadly speaking reflected a progressive win.
So for quite a few decades, the conservative right have been "forced" into their own little culture bubble where you can still ask if a white person and black person should be able to marry, whether contraception violates the will of god, where evil is punished and not "understood", poverty reflects personal failure and moral flaws rather than systemic issues and so on and so forth.
That creates a strange distortion (ask any group that has been an outlier to the mainstream culture they live within), and in this particular case this has manifested as both endless outrage and conspiracy-mongering.
Of course, meanwhile, the same conservative right have won on most economic issues. Union membership and power are down, taxes on the wealthy are down, all attempts at socializing health care have been rebuffed, industries were successfully deregulated, capital gains taxes are low, the share of GDP flowing to labor is down, estate taxes barely exist, defense spending is way up, and more recently Roe has been overturned.
So there's this strange contradiction in which progressive ideas have come to dominate the cultural sphere (though this may be changing) while conservative ideas have been the most successful in the economic and political sphere. Progressives often don't recognize the success they've had, and the failure side just looks like more of the same. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to downplay their successes (because these things are actually not broadly popular) and are left facing their "losses" in the cultural sphere, which can no doubt (Dobbs not withstanding) seem pretty overwhelming.
Me either. I think that's possibly a self-serving guess, to be honest. But how would we test it?
On the comedians question: some people think it's because it's easier to be funny when kicking up than kicking down.
Comedy requires deep thinking, powers of observation, and self-reflection.
This is a just-so rationalization, which feels good, but people have looked into many of these, and they don't really hold up.
The most common one is that poor white people are overwhelmingly voting for Trump. The average household income of a Trump voter is something like 75k - hardly poor (depending where you're at).
Anecdata: I know plenty of Trump voters who are very smart. A friend's dad has multiple PhD's and accomplished career as a theoretical physicist. He's also pretty racist. My father is a retired engineer, and doesn't like Trump, but keeps voting for him, because the Democrats are on the wrong side of issues he cares about. (Gun control, namely)
The reality is likely to be - they have used the mountains of publicly available data, and fine tuned their messages with the help of a highly partisan rage-baiting media ecosystem to capture more voters. It seems to me, the right wing is more organized, and manages to keep their voters and party members more aligned and on-message. They also have a much more voracious appetite for fighting dirty (rough talk, conspiracy theories, whisper campaigns, untraceable mailers giving wrong polling place info to black communities, etc.) - something the Democrats do not have the stomach for.
This explains election results (agreed) but I'm more curious why outrage-generators and conspiracists seem to have culturally taken a stronger hold on the right over the course of decades.
I would tentatively suggest that it because the right lost the broader cultural "wars".
Our story-telling media is, if not actually "leftish", generally progressive in the broadest sense of that term. Struggles over gay marriage, contraception, divorce, interracial marriage, civil rights were all, as of 2010 or so, pretty much wrapped up in ways that broadly speaking reflected a progressive win.
So for quite a few decades, the conservative right have been "forced" into their own little culture bubble where you can still ask if a white person and black person should be able to marry, whether contraception violates the will of god, where evil is punished and not "understood", poverty reflects personal failure and moral flaws rather than systemic issues and so on and so forth.
That creates a strange distortion (ask any group that has been an outlier to the mainstream culture they live within), and in this particular case this has manifested as both endless outrage and conspiracy-mongering.
Of course, meanwhile, the same conservative right have won on most economic issues. Union membership and power are down, taxes on the wealthy are down, all attempts at socializing health care have been rebuffed, industries were successfully deregulated, capital gains taxes are low, the share of GDP flowing to labor is down, estate taxes barely exist, defense spending is way up, and more recently Roe has been overturned.
So there's this strange contradiction in which progressive ideas have come to dominate the cultural sphere (though this may be changing) while conservative ideas have been the most successful in the economic and political sphere. Progressives often don't recognize the success they've had, and the failure side just looks like more of the same. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to downplay their successes (because these things are actually not broadly popular) and are left facing their "losses" in the cultural sphere, which can no doubt (Dobbs not withstanding) seem pretty overwhelming.
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