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What is the steelman for voting for Trump in the primaries?
He's not a true outsider anymore. He's not an unknown quantity. We know his temperament. We know his governance style. What does he provide over Desantis/Haley/Ramaswamy? He didn't build the wall the first time, why would he do it now?
I have some ideas, but they're all terrible once you think about them for ten seconds. I am willing to believe that the median voter is unable to think clearly for ten seconds before being hijacked by monkey-brain, but I'd like to make sure I'm not missing something obvious.
1. Personal Loyalty: This is close to the Richard Hanania theory. Personal loyalty would make sense if Trump was loyal in turn to his supporters, but he isn't. How many of his lawyers have gone to jail? How many orange-blooded Trump fans lost their jobs or got arrested for believing in him too hard on January 6? He could have pardoned these people, but he didn't. Orange Man good because Orange Man good.
2. Perceived Injustice: Yes, Trump has been treated unfairly by the media and the Washington establishment. Lots of people have been. I can understand why this would be seen as a necessary condition (e.g. "nobody liked by the 'elites' could ever be a good president"), but why would this be a sufficient condition? Surely electability and general competence matter more than an extra standard-deviation worth of grievances against the media.
3. Hatred: I'm not talking about "Hate™". I'm talking about a genuine desire to see one's political enemies suffer. It's not even clear to me that Trump would be better at this than other Republican candidates, but I feel I would be missing something if I didn't put it on the list.
The responses by various commenters here reveal severe contradictions at the heart of “the case for Trump”. I think that this profoundly confused tweet by Martyr Made is illustrative.
In this framing, Trump is the champion of the weird, socially-unpopular kids - the ones shut out of bourgeois normal society. The jocks and the pretty girls snub and bully them, but by banding together in a coalition with disaffected members of the social elite who have become awoken to their plight, they can launch a liberatory strike against the privileged upper crust who have historically marginalized them.
This is textbook leftism! This is literally the ur-narrative of the cultural and political left. It’s also the opposite of reality. Blonde jocks and rich cheerleaders are one of the core voting constituencies for Donald Trump! The weird alienated kids who got bullied in school, meanwhile, are a core Democrat constituency! One bloc of Trump voters are now apparently attempting to re-brand themselves, or re-contextualize themselves, as oppressed victims - the marginalized Other.
However, this is blatantly at odds with the original core appeal of Trump, which is that he was a champion of normal, well-adjusted, classic and confident America, here to take the country back from the freaks and faggots and pencil-necks who have essentially usurped control through subterfuge and used that power to resentfully force their unpopular obsessions on the mass of normal popular people.
And of course, it is manifestly risible for Trump voters to claim to hate bullying. Whatever else you want to say about the Trump phenomenon in 2016, it clearly involved a substantial amount of bullying, derision, and even rough-housing/violence at some of the rallies. (I’m not absolving the Clinton campaign, which of course also involved a different type of bullying and derision.) Trump supporters have also ruthlessly mocked and derided “DeSantoids”, using classic nerd-bashing behavior; see Scott Greer’s (admittedly amusing) unflattering impression of DeSantis’ nasal voice and spergy affect.
Trump voters have no leg to stand on if they wish to wear the mask of the oppressed and marginalized. That sort of maudlin victimhood-signaling has never been what conservativism or right-wing values are about. If anything, Trump voters should be proud to be the jocks and cheerleaders rightly excluding the maladjusted weirdos; playing this “no, you’re not the underdog, I’m the underdog” game is just totally conceding the left’s frame.
If anything, Trump voters most closely resemble the oppositional culture cultivated by blacks. When they are a minority or are relatively disempowered, they cry victim and throw out accusations of cheating and unfair privilege. When they are a local majority or gain any sort of power, though, they ruthlessly bully whites and Asians; they also bully those within their own ranks who “act white” by refusing to wallow in victimhood and who aspire to earn a spot in the majority culture via self-betterment and the adoption of bourgeois values. Blacks as a cultural-political constituency would rather destroy the mainstream American establishment - supposedly for excluding and “othering” them - than try to prove worthy of being embraced by that establishment. And when they don’t get what they feel they’re owed, they riot.
I say this all as someone who voted for Trump in 2020 and who will vote for him again this November, assuming he’s the GOP nominee. I just hate liars and cope. The people in power in Washington DC and in the media and academia are certainly not Chads and Stacys. They were not jocks and cheerleaders. They see themselves as champions of the marginalized and disempowered, the same way that [the Trump who exists only the minds of his ardent supporters] does. Oppositional populism is a great way to drum up votes and guilt your way into power, but it’s also the sign of a catastrophically unwell society. Give me a candidate who is proud to represent normal, productive, intelligent people, and maybe then I’ll start getting excited. That’s what Ron DeSantis was supposed to be, and Trump supporters called him a fraud and a sellout for not going to bat hard enough for J6 rioters or agreeing that the 2020 election was stolen.
Our country is fucked.
It's an analogy man. Do you understand why the dorks and losers would cheer for the linebacker? Then you understand why people cheer for Trump. You are reading far too much into it. And you are demonstrating a problem I have mentioned before - high school is forever now. You have so firmly and readily mapped your old high school cliques onto the political demographics that an analogy using an opposite framing agitates you. Also you are a Trump voter by your own admission. Trump voters are people like you.
But it’s a poor analogy precisely because it doesn’t actually resemble observable reality. Analogizing Democrats to jocks and cheerleaders, and Republicans to freaks and geeks, only works if the actual ground-level reality isn’t the opposite of that. Literal (white) jocks and cheerleaders, in real life, are in fact Trump voters. The kids who are the most likely to be bullied in school are future Democrat voters who despise Trump - in many cases precisely because they see him as the guy who will help jocks and cheerleaders persecute the losers!
The linked tweet could have chosen to analogize Trump voters to any number of different things or groups, but instead he chose the one group which is least like Trump voters.
I think it depends on how you’re thinking about the bullies vs bullied. I’ll concede that the jocks/nerds version of the story isn’t a good fit. On the other hand, the social acceptance and power dynamics do absolutely fit. Liberals are not classical jocks. They don’t do competitive sports or things along those lines. What they are, though, are the cool kids and the empowered kids. They’re the ones “normies” want to impress. They’re the ones who can define what good and bad taste are. They’re the ones that marketing campaigns want to appeal to. And MAGA tend to attract those who don’t fit in. Being a smug, highly educated (or certified as such) agnostic who works in socially conscious companies “making a difference” is cool. Being a religious person who works in a conventional job with no overt social mission is not.
If you were to map this onto Breakfast Club, think of the DC elites as the princess girl. Always dressed in expensive and fashionable clothes, eating the hip new thing (which in the 1980s was sushi apparently), always trying to make sure she fit in. That’s the DC elite — including the snobbish attitude. The MAGAs would be perhaps Bender or the Jock. The dork is too busy on hobbies and interests to care. And I suppose the artists are just hanging out making art and being weird.
Why the heck would I want to do that? The whole point of the Breakfast Club is that all the kids in detention are outcasts, some of them more obviously than others. It is a movie about how generation X was (as Strauss and Howe put it) the most aborted, most abandoned, most latchkey generation in history, or how (as Tyler Durden put it) our Great Depression is our lives. Claire (the "princess girl") is going off the rails because she is collateral damage in her parent's acrimonious big-money divorce. Andrew (the "popular jock") is beclowning himself with performative toxic masculinity because he thinks he won't be respected by his father if he doesn't.
Politics isn't like that. None of the Breakfast Club characters (probably not even Vice Principal Vernon) would be a serious political candidate in adulthood. There is a reason why Generation X is underrepresented in Congress and America keeps electing borderline-senile Boomer Presidents rather than letting an Xer into the White House.
All 5 students plus the janitor in the Breakfast Club are more likely than not to be Trump voters in adulthood simply because they are white and live in the Chicago suburbs. Vernon would as well if he weren't a union teacher. Claire is unhappily married to a man who owns a car dealership (or divorced from him, in which case she votes Dem like Julia) and Andrew is a corn ethanol salesman at ADM.
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