They say it all the time. You just have to hear, and more important, listen to them
About 70% of reps think the government deficit is too high. About 45% of Dems think the same. Both have been, interestingly, increasing yearly.
Widespread, 60% of voting age adults in USA think the government spends too much “on shit nobody cares about”. My quote.
Because people want the spending on medical care, education, science, social security, helping the needed and so on. Polling shows it.
But this has to come at a cost.
Dems want a bigger state apparatus behind all this.
Reps want an efficient, smaller one behind this.
Interesting as well , a lot of people, like 40%, want more spend in security forces.
… no one believes trump will deliver a smaller government. If they do they haven’t been paying attention.
This use to just be a libertarian thing, too. So, you can say they are united in this cause but could I really ask any MAGA person and this is what they will tell me?
OP is asking an interesting and important question. While I don’t claim it as definitive, there was an insightful article written in 2016 that attempted to address the question head on: How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind
If it were actually country vs city why donald trump?
I’m going to go on a less extreme take. They’ve been told from childhood they live in the land of opportunity, yet they work in dead end jobs or working fields.
They see money flying away every paycheck they live week to week on while being pumped propaganda (that people in suburbs and urban areas don’t see) that shows people who look different from them getting gov’t housing and getting programs funded with their tax dollars.
The same party they now demonize supports ridiculous looking gay parades that show a mentality they don’t understand, so they begin to hate. They wake up morning after morning in the same place with no change, and they stew and stew and stew.
So now they basically give up and see a hyper-masculine wannabe saying all the things against those who are different, and the long encrusted anger starts spewing out.
Most of the comments here are ignorant and hate filled against the wrong people. It’s not the MAGA supporters that did this, it’s the system. We need to stop polarizing ourselves with hatred and point the finger at those truly responsible. Not the poor (literallly) voters who are so dejected and living in decay that they just don’t give a rats ass anymore.
The more you hate the other side, the less you see the truth. The goal is to make you hate them. The goal is to make them hate you. You can’t define an entire person in a paragraph.
I think MAGA represents to Republicans what progressives like Bernie and AOC represent to Democrats. Republicans were able to reimagine their party into a form that isn’t just going to follow the status quo that, like you said, has led to a stagnant existence for average Americans over the last 50+ years. And stagnant is probably a nice way of putting it, since buying power has essentially disappeared, on top of wages barely moving.
So Trump comes in, he says drain the swamp, and you hear that to mean the whole machine, everyone who, for the last 50 years (and some folks have been involved in that government for a good chunk of that 50 years, just perpetuating that status quo) has allowed the rich to get richer at the expense of the working middle class.
And so you toss on your blinders. You’re not necessarily a bigot, but you believe social issues are a distraction from actual problems (i.e., ones that affect you directly), and you vote in a way that you hope will better your life. It’s hard to blame someone, especially someone just exhausted from grinding through their shitty life, for thinking about themselves. It’s not the right way to think, but I get it.
This is pretty much it, in my view.
Americans need to watch the Estonian-Georgian movie Tangerines before demonizing “the other side”. Besides an anti-war movie, it’s also about a movie about how two sworn enemies realize the other is also human.
A good clip to watch if you’re not interested in watching the entire (relatively short) film
Why, the same thing everyone gets from voting: stopping the other side.
Remember that they accurately believed the DNC were horrible. They stopped Hillary. They stopped Biden and Harris. Good for them? Kinda, not really though.
… We know Trump is worse. Far worse. But they saw a legitimate threat, a group of people who were not going to make their lives better, and they took some kind of action to stop them.
And then lots of bigotry. Can’t forget that.
A MAGA I know told me this is all worth it because he doesn’t want his son to know gay people exist and wants revenge on the people who told him he can’t say “Merry Christmas” anymore…
So straw man arguments and a misunderstanding of sexuality.
They will 100% sacrifice their own happiness and rights if they know it’s hurting people who live their lives is ways they don’t like.
This isn’t an exaggeration.
They literally want bloodshed and the world to burn
This is conservative vengeance
And everyone is going to suffer from it
I realized this during the 2016 election. People always say they are voting against their own interests, but their only real interest is to spite someone else. Hurting other people is a win, for them.
they want to be openly fascist
It hurts people they think are lesser, such as LGBTQ and people of color. Racism and bigotry are very much alive in the USA. They would eat a shit sandwich if they thought a lib would smell their breath. Hate is all they know.
Check r/conservative and you get a fair idea.
I do. There is no information there i couldn’t find written on a bathroom wall.
That makes sense, it’s probably the same people writing both messages.
There are two levels of maga, the exploited and the exploiters.
For the moronic rubes who vote for it, it is purely about the bigotry. Their daily life is going to get fucked up in so many ways, but that is ok because minorities.
For the the psychos exploiting the endless maga train of morons it is pure grift.
They think all of the gov’ment was corrupt and bad, so they’re cheering for the destruction of all gov’ment.
I normally do not talk politics with people I know, but this one person said they like trump because: “all I know is when he was president, I did good financially”.
I tried to tell him that the government is slow to enact things so he did good because the previous president. He didnt want to hear that and dismissed it.
If that’s all he knows he doesn’t know very much.
My cousin said the exact same thing.
They don’t know shit, but they still vote with such confidence. It’s maddening.
Like most MAGA.
“We made people we don’t like fucking miserable for a bit”
Ultimately the kind of person that goes all in on a cult like MAGA could lose everything to shitty policy or because their great leader started a war or smth – But they’ll still reason it was worth it because all those <Slur>s were put in their place.
Crabs in a bucket. They don’t care if things get worse for them as long as they inflict the same suffering on everyone else.
