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Friday, November 27, 2020

Why

 NY Times: Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Trump? To the dismay of Democrats, the president’s strategy of ignoring the pandemic mostly worked for Republicans. By Will Wilkinson

Mr. Trump has a knack for leveraging the animosities of polarized partisanship to cleave his supporters from sources of credible information and inflame them with vilifying lies. This time, it wasn’t enough to save his bacon, which suggests that polarization hasn’t completely wrecked our democracy’s capacity for self-correction: Sweeping a medium-size city’s worth of dead Americans under the rug turned out to be too tall an order.

5 comments:

Mark said...

Why are we still asking why?

"Mr. Tr**p saved his party by weaponizing polarization"
That was the "strategy in plain sight" from the start and will continue to work after Jan 21st.

"...Until the mind-bending spell of polarization breaks, everything that matters will be fiercely disputed and even the most egregious failures will continue to go unpunished...."

How about this for a question: "How do we help to break the mind-bending spell of polarization instead of feeding the monster?"

Glynn Kalara said...

The deep psychological roots of the extreme polarization need to be excised from the Nat'l soul somehow. The two sides are living in two separate realities at the moment one however is rooted in science and reason the other belief and faith. Belief and faith do not require objective proof. We've watched as these two realities have clashed in court as regards the election and thankfully its there PROOF is paramount not belief or faith. Trump has lost because numbers count not his Bullshit demands that the numbers be changed to fit his reality.

Mark said...

"...extreme polarization excised from the Nat'l soul somehow..."

Yes, the key word is "somehow". That's at the core of my question "how do WE help...?"

Jim Sande said...

I don't have anything to add. For me it was simple, is Trump a man of high moral character? Clearly he is not. One thing I have noticed in Trump supporters is what we call magical thinking. Right now these people believe that Trump will be president for a second term even though there's no evidence of voter fraud etc etc. So it's magical, this is placing one marbles in with something that has no tangible evidence, that's a type of belief system that I can't understand.

Jim Sande said...

Also I think the David Brooks article adds a lot to this question. The Rotting Of The Republican Mind