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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that MAGA are bad people because they have right-populist political views, I claimed they were bad people because they repealed the character floor for political leadership, arguably in 2016 and uncomplicatedly in 2024.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.
You say it's arguable they were bad after 2016, while others probably claim they were bad after 2020 or 2024. Much of the mainstream blue tribe had already decided that people who dissented from certain social issue orthodoxies were morally suspect, not just wrong. That mattered because once the “bad” label was attached from ordinary disagreement, millions of people understandably stopped believing the mainstream was judging them in good faith. The anti-Trump crowd had made their decision to leverage moral condemnation even before they became the anti-Trump crowd. Sure, more people have become convinced that Trump supporters are bad people, but the social issue purity tests had begun way before that. That "bad" label attached itself to of millions of people before Trump was even a candidate. Were they 2 bad after 2016, and 3 bad after 2024?
I have a mixed circle of friends too. Half of my closest friends are liberal to liberal-progressive. Most of them avoid discussing the subject entirely and I watch what I say.
It may not be obvious why the standard bearer for "Deport the illegals and reshore manufacturing" needs to be a reckless sociopath, but I think the explanation is pretty apparent. Our institutions, media, universities, and social media helped create a synthetic moral consensus about which views were acceptable and which weren't. That consensus made ordinary conservative politicians susceptible to the same purity tests. The only individuals left willing to cut against the consensus and say what others felt were individuals who were already ostracized, or who simply just didn't give a fuck, or who were naturally disagreeable. In came Trump (a disagreeable narcissist who didn't give a fuck about playing by the rules), and later Elon (an Aspergian who is nearly impervious to social pressure).
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The character floor for political leadership was repealled on February 12th 1999, and wasn't it "the right" that voted to repeal it, but rather the same affluent liberals now complaining about their opponent's "lack of character".
Nor do I believe that Trump is "a reckless sociopath" or at least not any more so than Clinton or Obama were, rather he is simply not beholden to the pretenses of affluent liberals. You are trying to criticize him for not being "a proper gentleman" when not being a proper gentleman is a core component of his appeal.
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