Guest post: The want to break things party
Originally a comment by iknklast on Existential crisis.
Trumpists are neither conservative nor liberal; they want to break things. Conservatives don’t want to break things, they want to keep them intact the way they are. They also don’t want change to their own lives; liberals want to make changes to the overall system.
I actually think Trumpists are confused about what they want and about how possible it is for a society to work the way they want. Most of them are the ones who failed seventh grade civics and think the teacher had it in for them because of some sort of liberal bias that kept her from seeing their brilliance.
They don’t understand government; they don’t know what it does. They just know they hate it. They know they hate paying for it. They have been convinced that it does nothing for them, and does everything for the people they hate.
And they perceive that everyone has it better than they do. That’s not really the case, though some of the working class could claim a lot of people have it better than they do…just often not the people they think it is. The ones who have it better than they do are often the ones they vote for, believing them to be just like the “average American” voter – in short, themselves. The rich gaudiness of a Trump merely indicates he has reached what they want to attain, and he is the one to help them attain it.
Wait, Schools still teach civics?
It’s remarkable how well corporate America has deflected the anger and resentment that you’d think would be directed at them for exporting millions of jobs overseas. Trump ties-and MAGA hats forchristsakes-are made overseas by foreign workers, not in the USA by American ones. They don’t see this even though ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS READ THE LABEL! Yet Trump said he was going to bring all these jobs back to the US. Did he? No. Did he have the power to? Not at all. Yet he’s a hero.
I’ll never get it.
Colin, I used that word in my class today; most of my students denied having taken civics. So, maybe the Baby Boomer Trumpistas flunked Civics; the later Trumpistas didn’t have Civics.
Social Studies may well have been history+ civics but I’m not sure… The only education I remember being definitely civics was for a Boy Scout merit badge.
BKiSA, in my school, they called it Social Studies in grade school, Civics in Junior High and Mid-High, and Government in High School. I’m not sure Junior High even exists any more.