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This might actually be true about MAGA.
Now imagine how insufferable the opposing party’s candidate and campaign would have to be for nearly 80 million people to overlook the flaws of a corrupt, narcissistic, petty billionaire.
You're not wrong. I also think wokists are vile.
The only solution is to keep demanding each side do better without regard to what the other side is doing, even though each side would really prefer to use their outgroup's sins as a blank check to be as terrible as they want.
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This would carry more weight if Trump's approval wasn't cratering and we didn't have an endless parade of clueless swing voters saying they thought he was just going to use his inflationary policies to lower egg prices. Trump benefited tremendously from gentle, sanewashing media coverage during the election. It's example #1,032,548 of people getting suckered by the most embarrassingly transparent conman. They really ought to have known better, but it's not evidence of much but the fact that most people aren't very discerning.
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Yeschad.jpg. Trump is, at the level of personal character, one of the worst people to hold high public office - anywhere in the democratic world - in my lifetime. (I'm not considering his political views here - would you rather buy a used car from Donald Trump or Nigel Farage, or let your daughter work in their office?). The MAGA GOP who nominated him are bad people who should feel bad. The Democrats who failed to beat him are culpably incompetent and should also feel bad. Within the Democratic Party, I would say that the fixers who fixed the 2016 primary for Clinton and the people who concealed Biden's cognitive decline during the 2024 primary rise to the level of bad people.
The MAGA GOP who nominated Trump against Kamala Harris and the anti-white, anti-male coalition should feel bad? I sort of feel bad. I wish he wasn't such a reckless sociopath. I just don't feel as bad as I would if Kamala had won.
I think your comment nicely captures the moral asymmetry that occurs in anti-Trumpers when they start blaming people for supporting him. It happens constantly. The GOP are labeled as both wrong and bad, whereas Democrats were just wrong. Good people, but wrong. Democrats have their goodness to fall back on.
If you look outside the Western bubble, the social views of even moderate Republicans are quite liberal compared to average citizens of most non-Western nations. In other words, if Trump supporting Republicans are bad people because they fall short of elite Western progressive norms, something like 85% of the globe falls into the bad person category. That's right. The vast majority of world's people are bad, except for the Western liberal-progressive.
People have a deeply flawed choice to make between a couple bad options. One is Trump/Nigel Farage and the other is a group whose driving force is fundamentally at odds with the ideals that make a country a country, and whose end goals align more with creating economic zones with no shared memories, or obligations, or culture, or concern for what it means to be a citizen.
We have sociopaths that are (at least incidentally) willing to do what is necessary to make a society empathic, and we have empaths that are (at least incidentally) willing to do what is necessary to a make a society sociopathic. The gamble is that a society can survive a bad man more easily than it can survive a ruling class that no longer believes the society is real.
You are entitled to accuse me of motivated reasoning here, but the point I am making is symmetric. I have not claimed that MAGA are bad people because they have right-populist political views, I claimed they were bad people because they repealed the character floor for political leadership, arguably in 2016 and uncomplicatedly in 2024. My continued presence on the Motte should be a signal of good faith - if I believed that right-populists were per se bad people, why would I still be here?
You can't do politics without meeting good people sincerely pursuing political goals you do not share, or good people with different political views to you because they don't understand the issues, or (very occasionally if you are smart enough to be a Motteposter) good people with different political views to you because you don't understand the issues. My social circle contains Brexit supporters in both the first two groups, for example. I have less experience meeting MAGA normies, but I have spent enough time in red states to know that most Republicans, and even most Trump voters, are not evil.
But "Men as dishonest as Donald Trump should not hold high political office" used to be one of the things 90% of citizens agreed on. (So was "Men as uncouth as Donald Trump should not hold high political office" but I care about that a lot less). It isn't obvious why the standard bearer for "Deport the illegals and reshore manufacturing" needs to be a reckless sociopath. Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot weren't. Nigel Farage isn't. (Admittedly Boris Johnson is one.) I know Richard Hanania has a theory for why populism always leads to kakistocracy, but I think it proves too much.
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That seems like a fully generalizable counterargument. "Imagine how bad the IDF must have been in Gaza around 2007 for the Gazans to elect that band of murderous thugs called Hamas as their government". "Imagine what the wife must have said to her husband to drive him to kill and dismember her".
Yeah, people make comparative choices, and people who disagree (usually redditors) often contort those into moral endorsements. In this case, the comparative choice of voting for Trump is being analogized to supporting Hamas or a man murdering his wife and dismembering her.
Unkind, unnecessary
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I don't think "preferring one candidate over another" is generalizable to "murdering someone."
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