Trump supporters aren’t fascist pseudo-Nazi nationalists or bitter-clinging deplorables. They’re just scared and misguided patriots who need to be brought home.
This article is from The Editor’s Corner, with insights, short-posts, links, and general ramblings from Editor/Owner Justin Stapley.
The first thing you need to understand about Trump supporters is that few of them take Trump as he actually is.
For the most part, they support a mental construct of the man they’ve conjured up in their minds (one held up by the Potemkin operators in conservative media).
They either pay very little attention to the news and project qualities upon him he doesn’t actually have (The St. Trump construct) or project upon him a mastery level of political maneuvering, viewing every move as an expert calculation against the Left (The 4D Chess construct).
And to protect these constructs from being torn down, Trump and his surrogates ensure his supporters view him as both a personal and national avatar.
For example, if you call Trump a liar, they take it as calling the American Dream a lie and as an assault on their own individual sincerity.
And finally, they view Trump as a guardian, the only one with the will and ability to stand up for forgotten America. Attacking Trump supporters personally feeds the beast of fealty like nothing else can.
Trump supporters feel hounded, preyed upon, and marginalized by the media and progressive elites. They think they’re losing their country, and Trump has promised to save it for them.
This is why I say things like, “Every time you call a Republican a fascist, you create another Trump voter.” The over-the-top rhetoric aimed at Trump supporters literally feeds the psychological processes that have created the Trump era.
The only way to defeat Trumpism is to understand and empathize with Trump supporters as much as possible while pricking their conscience with firmly and consistently applied principles and ideals.
This is why the #Resistance is a failure. This is why the Democrats have only managed to stoke the flames of Trumpism at every turn. They have built a construct of their own.
The Left ultimately wants Trump supporters to be fascist pseudo-Nazi nationalists who know precisely what and who Trump is, because it allows them to ignore the entire conservative world view as a lie.
An attempt to understand Trump supporters would require the Left to recognize the part they’ve played in engendering the rise of Donald Trump and to recognize just how similar the populism, victim mentality, and identity politics that exist in their own movement is to Trumpism.
This is why I do not trust the Democratic Party to solve our crisis in any way. They are the architects of Trumpism’s foundation and the unwitting accomplices in its mercurial rise to dominance of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
Yes, Trump supporters are ultimately responsible for who & what they’ve put into power. But they’re not fascists, racists, or evil people. They’re scared people who are responding to fear. I’ll even go so far as to say they’re just misguided patriots who need to be brought home.
But they won’t be brought home by further marginalization, and they definitely won’t wake up from the lie that is Donald J. Trump if we put a political party in power who will just feed their fear all the more and who delight at believing they’re all bitter-clinging deplorables.
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