I’ll trade you, five of the big ones for about 88 million cherry tomatoes.
Lemmylefty
- I’m a good person.
- Being a good person means I hate bad people.
- The people who are against me are bad, because I’m a good person.
- Trump hates all the people I hate and is a strong male leader, so I follow him.
- The only people who would attack him (read: me) are bad people.
- People complain and produce false charges when they are afraid of their enemies and need to take them down.
Conclusion: I identify more strongly with Trump for being attacked for being right by bad people.
The sad thing is that, short of taking a mental sledgehammer to some really important internal concepts of self-esteem and value, you can’t stop this train of thought, and you’ll upset them for even suggesting it’s what they think. The closest you can get is putting in their heads the sense that Trump won’t win, in which case they’ll glom onto the next narcissistic, reactionary blowhard.
If you want some more detailed dissection of this thought process, read “The Authoritarians” by Bob Altmeyer: https://archive.org/details/The_Authoritarians_Bob_Altemeyer_2006.pdf/page/n2/mode/1up
It’s an easy read, but damn if it wasn’t chilling the first time I read it, back in the Obama years.
Ditto that.
And the frustration that comes of that isn’t so much “I didn’t get to make a point, for which I lost the opportunity to receive credit” but more “I didn’t get to engage with the discussion in realtime without having a sense for how others would react, appreciate, or challenge my views”. Reading things afterward has that line of discussion set in stone in a way that’s unlike being a participant.
The worst part is that the unwanted, unplanted cherry tomato plant is outperforming the beefsteaks that I actually planted. Are we SURE we’ve actually domesticated these things?
Beefsteaks are awesome; I’ve finally figured out the deliciousness of a simple tomato sandwich, just tomato, good bread, mayo and salt and pepper. Beautiful.