Comment by GeneralMayhem
16 days ago
If you're sane and rational and decided that you liked Trump's promises (with "rational" implying that you were actually listening to what he'd do, and not blindly accepting his nonsense about "I'll make everything perfect immediately!"), that leaves only the possibility that you're evil. Or a Russian operative, I suppose.
His promises on things he can actually do are exclusively for things that are wantonly destructive and incomprehensibly stupid (tariffs, mass layoffs), hateful and incomprehensibly evil (mass deportations without due process), or straight up treason (pardoning J6 insurrectionists, breaking alliances). If you voted for this person, you have to either be so stupid that you believe his obvious lies, or so evil that the things that aren't lies are things you like.
Many people who voted for tribe X voted for tribe Y a few years back. Have these people irredeemably changed in your eyes? Are they stupid for doing so? Is it possible for stupid, easily believing people to choose tribe X again? Does it make their stupidity disappear?
Does choosing a correct tribe increase intelligence and reduce gullibility?
One increasing view we hear today is of the "uneducated ignorant malleable masses". Should we think of our fellow tribe members this way?
The question being asked by people in tribes are "what to do with stupid/evil people" and history shows examples of tribes attempts to answer that.
I don't think you're disagreeing with me. The comment I responded to says that calling Trump voters ignoramuses was -
> trying to find an easy way to avoid the conclusion that the majority of them are sane and rational people who liked what he was saying.
My point is that to vote Republican in 2024 you must either be insane, irrational, or outright evil. It doesn't make you that way, it reveals that you already were.
> Many people who voted for tribe X voted for tribe Y a few years back. Have these people irredeemably changed in your eyes?
I think that Biden->Trump voters, or Obama->Trump voters, are incredibly stupid or short-sighted. There is no good reason to have done that. If you were a consistent Republican voter you might instead be a selfish racist piece of shit, but if you've switched from the Democrats in recent years the only option I have is to assume you're a gullible idiot.
And to be clear, yes, I think this is specific to the time we're in. I don't think I'd say this in 2000, for instance - it was pretty obvious that W was not going to be a good president, but he was not an incomprehensible choice, and you could imagine people who thought Gore's brand was tainted by association with Clinton's various forms of griminess. But Trump and his merry band of lunatics are not simply "the other tribe". They are an obvious and unprecedented threat no matter what your values are, unless your only value is breaking shit for the lulz.
> I don't think you're disagreeing with me.
Yep, and I'm not really agreeing either :-)
There is an alternative to thinking in binaries.
One way perhaps is to think about the permanence of judgements.
Think about how many people would need to switch sides for the next election. Would their status as lunatics and gullible and idiots be instantly revoked and become mentally healthy, rational and intelligent after they are on the correct side?
Many politicians would say they would remain idiots even when they vote for them and that a cynic might say that politics is just about two tribes warring against each other on a battlefield where they seek to manipulate a group of idiots to their side.
I would suggest that thinking about one's allies as idiots isn't a good thing. (Maybe their status does change instantly - in that case the idiots have the potential to be intelligent which weakens the original judgement) However it's also a difficult thing to do as it would compromise one's own group identity. It makes the binary groups more fuzzy. It introduces an overlap in the venn diagram of us vs them. Thinking of an "other" as potentially one of "us" reduces the internal coherence of the "us" group - it opens the borders.
People in groups like to keep the group strong and the borders secure. To open the borders is a difficult and painful thing. It's understandable that the binary tribal politics remains strong as it benefits both tribes.