Craziest part to me is how successful some right wing groups are at convincing the poor to follow along. Those that quite literally benefit the most from the social programs are willing to vote against their own interests to support the elites.
How mind boggling is it that rednecks are literally willing to overthrow their beloved country for a NY trust fund baby and reality TV star? Then he goes and helps the rich even more and they love him for it. He pisses all over “law and order” and the military. They don’t care. Just wild.
I know a lot of their feelings come from fringe topics like immigration/sexuality, but it’s still amazing considering the economic situation they’re facing. The lack of education and critical thinking is evident.
Because hating an outgroup is always easier than accepting that current hardship is the result of a complex interplay of factors that aren’t entirely understood and that might require counterintuitive solutions that aren’t guaranteed to work.
“Capitalism is good, therefore being rich is good” seems logically consistent, thus “too much concentration of wealth is bad for capitalist societies” is nontrivial and requires some mental work to understand. If the other guy says “nah, rich people are cool; it’s those other people that are different from you that run everything” it’s more immediately palatable.
So how do you get poor people to back the interests of rich people instead of their own? Segregate them and blame subsets of them. Don’t Be a Sucker is as relevant today as it was in 1947.
They’re not the poor. They’re temporarily disenfranchised billionaires who just haven’t joined their contemporaries yet. They’ll never see themselves as the poor.
They spend literally billions of dollars a year on arranging for propaganda in order to create this outcome. It’s sad that it works so well yeah, but they’re pretty good at it and they have effectively all the money and talent in the world to make it happen.
Craziest part to me is how successful some right wing groups are at convincing the poor to follow along. Those that quite literally benefit the most from the social programs are willing to vote against their own interests to support the elites.
How mind boggling is it that rednecks are literally willing to overthrow their beloved country for a NY trust fund baby and reality TV star? Then he goes and helps the rich even more and they love him for it. He pisses all over “law and order” and the military. They don’t care. Just wild.
I know a lot of their feelings come from fringe topics like immigration/sexuality, but it’s still amazing considering the economic situation they’re facing. The lack of education and critical thinking is evident.
Because hating an outgroup is always easier than accepting that current hardship is the result of a complex interplay of factors that aren’t entirely understood and that might require counterintuitive solutions that aren’t guaranteed to work.
“Capitalism is good, therefore being rich is good” seems logically consistent, thus “too much concentration of wealth is bad for capitalist societies” is nontrivial and requires some mental work to understand. If the other guy says “nah, rich people are cool; it’s those other people that are different from you that run everything” it’s more immediately palatable.
So how do you get poor people to back the interests of rich people instead of their own? Segregate them and blame subsets of them. Don’t Be a Sucker is as relevant today as it was in 1947.
They’re not the poor. They’re temporarily disenfranchised billionaires who just haven’t joined their contemporaries yet. They’ll never see themselves as the poor.
They spend literally billions of dollars a year on arranging for propaganda in order to create this outcome. It’s sad that it works so well yeah, but they’re pretty good at it and they have effectively all the money and talent in the world to make it happen.