Opinion | MAGA Is Based on Fear, Not Grounded in Reality
www.nytimes.com
And the fear needn’t reflect reality.

Yet such fantasies are now the common currency of politics on the American right. Remember the days when pundits solemnly declared that Trumpism was caused by economic anxiety? Well, despite a booming economy, there’s still plenty of justified anxiety out there, reflecting many people’s real struggles: America is still a nation riddled with inequality, insecurity and injustice. But the anxiety driving MAGA isn’t driven by reality. It is, instead, driven by dystopian visions unrelated to real experience.

That is, at this point, Republican political strategy depends largely on frightening voters who are personally doing relatively well not just according to official statistics but also by their own accounts, by telling them that terrible things are happening to other people.

  • bmeffer@lemmy.world
    12·
    9 months ago

    The thing is, they don’t know their being lied to. I think the big issue with many conservatives is that they are conditioned, basically from birth, to believe fantastical things as truth, without evidence. I.e. Bible stories as fact. Yes, Gabriel was swallowed by a whale. Of course Noah had all of the animals in the world on his boat. They learn to accept things at face value as long as it sounds good to them. This requires no critical thinking.

    This is how you get otherwise intelligent people who believe right wing myths like high school kids identifying as cats and requiring litter boxes. They will believe anything as long as it confirms their biases. Belief = truth. I believe it, therefore it is true. It’s this simple to them. You can present all the evidence in the world to counter any one of their ridiculous conspiracy theories, but they will never change. Because, to them, belief = truth.

    • GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.world
      6·
      9 months ago

      I’ve seen that with a very conservative former friend. They would send me reel after reel on Instagram of right wing talking heads discussing the “proof” they had that the coivd vaccine was deadly, “proof” that the human soul is placed in the egg at conception, and the LGBTQ+ people were really pedophiles.

      There seemed to be no sense that a 30 second, highly edited reel on instagram could be false. It was telling them what they wanted to hear. The part that annoyed me was that they thought they were debating there position in good faith with these reels. That if they sent enough of them to me I would just say “Wow! you’re right, that reel from Andrew Tate really opened my eyes!”

      We don’t talk any more and I hate that because we were really good friends until about 9 months ago.

    • KptnAutismus@lemmy.world
      51·
      9 months ago

      i was shocked when i found out that everyone was bitching about immigrants collecting all the welfare, even though they are prohibited from working for 9 months after entering germany.

      also many of them have no choice, who’s gonna employ someone who barely speaks english and not a lick of german? but no, mandatory education courses would cost money, we can’t do that.

      conservatives are lying rats who just feed off of the hate they’re spreading.