[CoastalCoder]

> Question from a European who doesn’t deeply understand your partisan politics: what specifically should they have done differently?

For what it's worth, I think a lot of us Americans have realized that we don't understand the partisan dynamics either.

Many of us are very confused about the ongoing support for Trump. There's clearly a huge chasm in mindsets, and personally I've made little headway in forming a plausible mental model that explains it all.

[mindslight]

Go tune into reactionary talk radio for a taste. Really listen to what they're saying and just let it wash over you. I'll do this occasionally on long drives by myself when I'm out of range of familiar radio stations.

The problem isn't so much differing values in terms of specific policies, but rather a deep chasm of anti-intellectualism that makes them mistrust anyone but their ingroup partisan preachers. Even if you are coming from a place of mostly agreement about some issue, and appealing to values they purportedly have, the minute you start deviating from anything the preachers have said you've immediately put yourself into the "other" camp where their only conclusion is that you "don't understand" or are even trying to trick them.

Those partisan preachers had at least been owned by US business interests, preaching policies that hurt individuals while helping entrenched corporate interests (eg the decades of shipping industry to China). But at this point it seems they've been bought by foreign interests hence the new trend of supporting the wholly destructive policies of trumpism.

[starkshift]

There’s no one single thing of course, but there are themes

A couple generally unifying themes:

1. People that for the most part want to be left alone and not messed with 2. People that don’t want to be talked down to

[user____name]

Those points could apply to all and every political situations everywhere.

[notahacker]

tbf, people who actually believed that Trump was the candidate of leaving stuff alone are unusually deserving of being talked down to...

[gmac]

Right wingers have a whole different set of moral values that strike me (as someone more on the left) as _immoral_ values. Look up moral foundations theory by Jonathan Haidt and others. I’ve found this in one sense useful (so _that’s_ why Republicans react to ${ISSUE} the way that do!) and in another depressing (how do you _deal_ with people who think that doing what they’re told to do by an authority figure is intrinsically a moral virtue?).

[cagenut]

really? or is it just that you don't like the answer so you keep trying to find another one.

what historical examples of this very common pattern did you read up on?