What Is It With Some Boomers Who Oppose Trump?
What Is It With Some Boomers Who Oppose Trump?
Some of the ones who are against him are all like: "He's so rude, he's going to ruin our country." But, then they turn around and tell me that the country has an illegal migrant problem and that we shouldn't try to take so many migrants into the country. It's almost like they want his policies but, they just don't like that he pushes them in such crass style. It's so much of the dynamic you see with the two parties, where one is the mask-off barbarism party and the other one is the "smart" and "civil" barbarism party. No matter how many times you explain this to these people, they always find themselves back to the beginning where they were traumatized by seeing Trump be rude in 2016, and allow that to be the pass the Democrats need to enact similar policies as the "civil" barbarism party. It's maddening to try to reason with these people and see it's all been a fruitless effort.
the most aggravating part is biden isn't even really civil, put a voter in front of him with a question he doesn't like and he'll get way more rude than trump ever did with voters
I think it’s that Trump exposes that the type of people they think ought to run the world don’t conform to their vision of them. Like if this rhetoric was coming out of some used car salesman turned politician out of Iowa they’d just be “that’s the bumpkins for you.” But Trump is urban, private school and Ivy League educated, well to do businessman. It’s like a monarchist being confronted with the reality of their system of superior blood right breeding being a drooling Hapsburg jawed buffoon.
As a Boomer myself, I think this is it pretty much.
Had many arguments with my wife trying to point this out...Trump is pretty much the American Classic Liberal in every meaningful way in what he does, but is fairly unfiltered in the roiling sewer of liberal racism and classism that always lurks underneath the surface of any servant of American Capitalism out here in the wild whenever he opens his mouth. Put him in a powdered wig and he fits right in with the founding fathers.
It's the sympathetic resonance that liberals feel when subconsciously agreeing with what Trump says that really pisses them off...that ol' cognitive dissonance that he weaves so well
Some of the ones who are against him are all like: "He's so rude, he's going to ruin our country." But, then they turn around and tell me that the country has an illegal migrant problem and that we shouldn't try to take so many migrants into the country. It's almost like they want his policies but, they just don't like that he pushes them in such crass style.
Democrats in a nutshell.
“I am the hero of the universe, I cannot be a bad person, and Trump is worse than me because of his crassness, so if I attack Trump, I am proving to the world how good I am (as if anyone could doubt this!), plus I get to enjoy the benefits of Trump’s racist counter-revolutionary policies via Biden, so it all works out.”
Lots of trump supporters are also not the rabid chuds we see online. They’re reluctant or quiet trump supporters and remarkably similar to biden’s huge boomer contingent in their class position and ideology. I’ve heard them say that they support trump, “if only he’d keep his mouth shut!” They were also pretty nervous about his troubles with the law and only supported him because biden/killary was worse, etc.
I think the labor aristocracy and petite bourgeoisie has a few different wings. Unproductive office/nonprofit workers exist to make capitalism seem more palatable and therefore tend to support Biden. Blue collar workers support Trump or RFK or have checked out of corporate politics. Airbnb landlords and restaurant owners are probably more on the lib side since they deal with a diverse customer base, while business owners who deal with resource extraction tend to be much more obviously conservative (since their businesses are clearly destroying the environment). Race, gender, and/or sexual orientation can complicate this picture.
There’s little reason for these people to change their minds since they belong to the global 1% and capitalism is still working for them. If they’d been really truly fucked hard by capitalism, convincing them would be a lot easier.
Regardless, as capitalism heads toward the singularity of revolution, the whole universe is concentrated into a single point of light behind it, one so small that the differences between liberals and conservatives become impossible to see.
Lots of trump supporters are also not the rabid chuds we see online. They’re reluctant or quiet trump supporters and remarkably similar to biden’s huge boomer contingent in their class position and ideology. I’ve heard them say that they support trump, “if only he’d keep his mouth shut!” They were also pretty nervous about his troubles with the law and only supported him because biden/killary was worse, etc.
I saw some people use this as their justification for voting for DeSantis before that petered out. Now they basically ignore how crass Trump is while every other word that comes out of their mouth is about "illegals." I try to talk to them about the push and pull cause of migration and how to mitigate that and their brain doesn't even register that "migrants" is another word for "illegal immigrants." Its stuff like this, the easy proliferation of old fashioned reflexive white people racism, that makes me lose a lot of faith in human progress. They don't want to listen to any solution other than the horrifying solutions barbarism offers.
I think most white americans (and sadly many non-white americans) have truly appalling political views, but these views only seem normal here in the USA, AKA Big Israel. Ultimately these people are probably not going to be convinced. They really will have to be fought violently.