cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/35684522
Despite his support for Trump, Ragland has become increasingly vocal about the need for immediate trade resolution. “We desperately need to get something rectified quickly with China, our biggest export customer,” he told CNN. “We wanna encourage the administration to get a proactive trade deal done.”
Except that Trump has said enough stupid shit in obvious places that it can’t be hidden unless you’ve got a chokehold that is simply impossible to maintain on that many people. Ten million maybe, but no at this point they’re willing. They want this and whether they’re profoundly stupid or incredibly evil doesn’t much matter like it used to considering the damage they’re doing.
Conservatives just suck. The world at their fingertips and daily, unavoidable examples of why they’re super wrong and they still go hard for the worst possible options because they aren’t intelligent enough to understand even the most basic complexities or have even shreds of empathy for people they can’t directly see(and many will even hate those right in front of them). Nah dude, fuck that.
All that is true, but the shit he’s saying goes through a filter. Not just the filter of Fox News but also the filter of those who disseminate that bullshit.
A very sad and unfortunate fact about most Americans is that they do not read the news and most of their political knowledge comes from their friends and family or communities. The propaganda dissemination models that are currently driving the US toward fascism are reliant on there being a core group of malignants who disseminate the disinformation that they get from Fox, AM radio and elsewhere.
The group whom you’re referring to as “conservatives” are demographically the most exposed to right-wing propaganda. The so-called “average” cluster, as revealed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This group (originally targeted by Facebook) is particularly sensitive to the message pushed by conservatives (“law and order”, “traditional”). But if you look at the messaging that’s being used to manipulate them, it’s the same stuff that was used to target Germans in the Weimar republic.
Honestly, the conservatives I have both the least and greatest problems with are the ones who don’t really pay attention any news in particular. They heard once that conservatives are good with money and that progressives have funny ideas and they’ve latched onto that idea with ever challenging it once. They’re simply incapable of looking at something deeper than surface level and they refuse to address the complexity of any given situation. Those people will, at times, end up as centrists who “really don’t like to get into politics” and “think they have cool ideas but they could never get them done”.
This doesn’t much go against my original point, though. They exist in a place where they hate learning and changing their ideas is not something they can really handle. If all they have to do is fit one mold then that’s easy, but once they have to start custom-building their own personality it all falls apart. It’s too much work for them, and they retreat to comfortable familiarity.