[amanaplanacanal]

I would guess that if you polled voters on election Day, and asked them why they voted for Trump, science funding wouldn't even come up as a topic. They would probably talk about high prices, or criminal aliens, or how they didn't like Harris.

[chadgpt3]

They voted for a massive grab-bag of obviously bad stuff. They may not have examined every single item in it, but they obviously wanted this style of bad stuff to happen. This action is aligned with their revealed preferences.

[gwerbin]

That was kind of my point. They actively voted for a lot of bad stuff, but it was framed in a very different way. They voted for things like ending the tyranny of woke liberalism, and believe that end is so essential to achieve that it justifies essentially abandoning the rule of law. What they did not vote for is the long-term consequences of supporting that position.

[adampunk]

What?! They most certainly did vote for those consequences! Why infantilize these voters? Nobody robbed them of the agency needed to see that an obvious criminal tyrant was worse than a woman, twice. They just didn't care. It's ugly and depressing to imagine them not caring about things that matter to them intimately, but here we all are.

[gwerbin]

It's not that Harris was "a woman". It's that she was -- or so the propaganda line went -- a treasonous saboteur who would continue the woke left-liberal-socialist agenda, which is a path to certain destruction, and along the way allow American governance to be co-opted by corrupt plutocrats and criminals, as well as politicizing and weaponizing the executive branch against political enemies to suppress opposition to the agenda.

That of course is all setup for consent: Trump doing all that stuff is just fighting fire with fire, the justified means to the end of not only making America great again but now saving it from certain doom.

People are both more clever than you think, and dumber than you think. Few non-experts would claim to understand skyscraper design. And yet somehow everyone with a social media account and 4th grade literacy skills claims to understand how to govern 300m people and the largest economy in the world.

I don't consider myself a Jeffersonian Republican, but I can see clearly that tens of millions people voted for short-term action to fight against this or that perceived boogeyman, and did so largely from an emotional perspective with little foresight into what the consequences might actually be, beyond "X candidate says he will fix Y bad thing and I think Y is very important". The fact that 3-time Trump voters feel disappointed and betrayed and yet somehow still claim that Harris "would have been worse" points to a serious lack of unemotional big-picture thinking when it comes to the future of the USA. Hell I see people going all the way back to Obama -- "yeah OK so Trump did [100 unimaginably horrible things that will eventually hurt me] but Obama once hit a US citizen with a drone strike so what's the big deal? get lost snowflake god bless my president"

[krior]

Doesn't change the fact that the US voted for this.