Quote:
Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Here's the thing. I don't take very seriously the economic anxiety expressed either by my bank President relative or my cop relatives. Yeah, cop relatives with little education who, with OT, make north of $250K a year. Sure, economic anxiety is why they use those nasty names for immigrants.
I do take seriously the economic anxiety of soy farmers (what my grandparents did). But post 2016, pre-2016, they had experienced a long stretch of good years.
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If those cops are saying the racist stuff that other relative said, I'd say they're just garden variety bigots. They clearly have no economic anxiety, so they're just voting their racist tendencies. They are incurable. Forget about them.
The 800 lb gorilla in Trumpism is not the bigot, or the economically insecure person. I think, and I could be wrong, it's the smart, thoughtful person who rationally calculates that Trump is the better choice for him.
In the past this would be called a pocketbook voter. But I think it's more complex than that. I think there are a lot of smart, rational voters who look at politics, think its a dysfunctional mess and simply vote for their own interests. Rather than examine these people as parts of the population, it might be better to examine them as individual actors who no longer feel connected to the rest of the population. They are people who see our political system as a joke and thus "draw the circle smaller." They think shorter term and focus not on what's better for their community, or their state, or their party, or the country, but instead focus on simply taking care of their families.
When there's upheaval like 2000 crash, followed by the 2008 crisis, followed by inequality, volatility, and so much insecurity all over the world, people tend to hunker down. They refocus on themselves. They also don't mind authoritarians so much. They'll give anything for stability.
Those, I think, are the huge numbers of people who don't show up in Trump's polling numbers.
