If it's deeply embedded in the psyche, why not get "mean" with the rich?

There you have it.

They are promising a return to the way things used to be. It's easier to blame the person you see getting a job instead of the guy behind the scenes taking your job.

When wealthy liberals speak they have no problem attacking them as elites and other bs.

They attacked Harris for buying pots and pans in France. They attacked AOC for wearing a designer dress . But they have no problem with Trump and Musk.

Obviously not every single one is, but you can say that about literally any group that not everyone in it behaves exactly the same without it discrediting the larger truth. Right wing populist movements around the world are anti-immigrant, anti-women etc. Yes obviously Trump has money but he puts on the trappings of a more common man. Not that I blame her, but you wouldn't see Kamala Harris at a UFC fight for example.

…for a left-wing populist as they are a right-wing one, as long as they know about each alternative.

However, here in the U.S., we’ve had almost three decades of a major cable channel pushing the right-wing narrative 24/7…while left-wing voices are shut out of even “liberal” channels and shows. As a matter of fact, said channels and shows are far more likely to platform “moderate” conservatives than left-wing populists.

Give us a leftist equivalent to Fox News for thirty years, and the political landscape of this country would look far different.

If anything, they often overlap. Just look at trade and tariffs. Left-wing and right-wing populism both embrace protectionist economics. Perot and Buchanan were no different on trade and tariffs than a lot of the left-wing populists of yesteryear. They also tend to become anti-immigrant for the same reason they oppose free trade and support higher tariffs: they believe an outdated philosophy about American jobs. Go listen to Bernie from a decade-plus ago speak about immigration and it's almost indistinguishable from Trump.

Populism is a cancer and liberals should not embrace it. It's rooted in jingoism and division.

convinces the American people that someone other than the rich are to blame AND that they could be rich some day.

Evidently inequality leads to authoritarianism, while authoritarianism leads to crony capitalism and greater inequality. That’s objectively the reality — a self-reinforcing feedback dynamic that seems hard to interrupt. On the other hand, there is a perceptual challenge. Subjectively, MAGAts will have to be convinced that support for the authoritarian order represents a blow against the elites who are oppressing them. This is the agenda of right-wing media operations. Eventually the internal contradiction can lead to its collapse and demise.

Destruction apparently feels good especially if it’s something someone else built.

...that I hope isn't an ultimate and final truth about us.

"It's in your nature to destroy yourselves".

A species that evolves to the top of the food chain by killing, can't turn that off to thrive over the long term.

...and we've certainly become really good at killing each other. Whether or not the concept generalizes to other civilizations remains to be seen (assuming they exist, or existed)--but then again, I wouldn't be surprised. I think Carl Sagan referred to this as "technological adolescence"; he considered it extremely dangerous if a culture couldn't evolve quickly out of this stage of development. One might as well give a gorilla an atomic bomb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Fermi_paradox

Already his poll numbers are the worst ever, even on the economy. Dems should be able to win back the House in 2026.

Have to remember a lot of the little things we political nerds care about aren't a big for most people, but a crappy economy or a mishandled pandemic ARE big deals.

Of course there won't be any country worth ruling by then.

And Trump will just go quietly into that good night waiting for his legal woes on time-out now to return.

but the country will be done with him and yes, it won't be easy to dislodge hm from the WH

It's basically what they say every day. Somehow, Republicans are always getting screwed by Democrats, even when it's clearly Trump and the Republicans fault.

Media brainwashing. If they didn't have it, they would implode.

Trump is a demagogue.

The last thing Democrats should do is appeal to people who are far gone politically, who are racists and sexists and xenophobes.

Eff all of them. Let them die out.

Naturally, the author of the piece is a white male from the UK. Clueless.

Stay the eff out of US politics, George.

They need only be conservative and white. Your run-of-the-mill non-progressive (from the middle to the far right) white voters believe such myths as republicans (white conservative men) are better at handling the economy and republicans (white conservative men) are better at handling national security. Nothing can be further from the truth. Yet the pass given to white conservatives from white voters is mind-boggling. And it's an American tradition.

Just to quote one random article: https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/articles/why-do-victims-go-back-to-their-abusers/

isn't recognized as psychological condition. Whuuuuhhhhh?

Metathesiophobia, agnostophobia, neophobia (fear of new things) and xenophobia. All of these can be seen to be working. Moreover, the anti-immigrant policies that so characterize modern day right wingers around the world, play to fear of the other, which is often tied to scapegoating ("they are eating the pets" ).

Scapegoating is closely related to fear of the other:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201312/the-psychology-of-scapegoating
"The ego defense of displacement plays an important role in scapegoating, in which uncomfortable feelings such as anger, frustration, envy, guilt, shame, and insecurity are displaced or redirected onto another, often more vulnerable, person or group. The scapegoats—outsiders, immigrants, minorities, 'deviants'—are then persecuted, enabling the scapegoaters to discharge and distract from their negative feelings, which are replaced or overtaken by a crude but consoling sense of affirmation and self-righteous indignation."

Finally, right wingers create fictional problems to overcome: rampant attacks by drug gangs of "illegals" seems to be one of these themes. Facing a common threat enhances in-group cohesion.

Trump voters did not do so because of economic insecurity.

I bought a new Samsung tv. It's pre-loaded with about 10 right-wing news channels. Newsmax, Blaze, Real America's Voice. Extreme right wing garbage and lies. There is no left wing or simply honest,objective news equivalent. Same across the board with other brands. Just shows how much the right wing has taken over the media. Propaganda works. People are so brainwashed they lose their kid to measles and stay anti-vax. That's what we're up against. Gullibility and propaganda.

Haven't had one of those things for a decade or more so I'm blissfully ignorant.

like LG channels and Samsung channels. I'm disgusted to see all those right-wing garbage news channels on there in the default lineup. You can take them all off but I'm sure a lot of old timers like me don't fool around through the somewhat complicate menus to remove them from their guide.

A lot of Trump supporters aren't marginalised economically. They participate in the economy on the same footing as everyone else. The trucks and boats being driven in those flag waving convoys aren't cheap.

The gap is in education. My theory is that society has become more and more complex as technology gives us more things to worry about and manage. A hundred years ago if your house flooded or there was an earthquake you just wrote it off as God's will and rebuilt it when you could, often with the help of your neighbours. But now you have to try to get your insurance company to reimburse you or not based on whether their flood or seismic modelling could reasonably have predicted the event or not. If you bought somewhere you shouldn't have because you didn't do your due diligence, you're fucked. And you can't just rebuild your own house, it needs to be up to code.

You don't just get a check when you retire. You have to create a 401K and make decisions about the stock market. You have to predict where the job market is going and retrain five or six times of the course of your career with gaps of unemployment in-between. Your employer isn't going to pay to train you - you have to anticipate what they need and pay to train yourself. You have to hire someone to fix your car and set up your TV for you. You have to keep track of a million different subscriptions that it's a pain in the ass to cancel but which are sucking you dry behind the scenes.

You have to keep in mind constant updates about what to eat, whether or not to drink alcohol, how much to exercise, etc. As a voter, you need to understand proposed policy on stem cell research, genetically modified food, climate change, gender diversity, AI, regulation of toxic chemicals, foreign aid as a instrument of soft powers, nuclear containment, lowering drug prices and managing risk from pandemics.

And all of these demands have left a lot of people behind. Particularly the 66% of Americans who don't at least have a four year college degree. They don't have a clue how to lower the price of eggs or housing or incentivize clean energy or encourage on-shoring of industries in the national interest and they're pissed off that they're being asked to think about it on top of everything else. So they are burning down the system that is asking them to think about it. They want easy answers they can understand and they want to hear "just get on with your life and we'll take care of everything else for you".

And so yes, they want to stick it to the smarty-pants because deep down they know that society is leaving them behind and the one thing they can understand is that they don't really control the forces that are impacting their lives. So they want to destroy the club of people who they think do. And it's easier to blame the party that can't offer easy answers than it is to blame the system that is putting them in that position in the first place.

Lots of non-college-degreed individuals have plenty of smarts and have succeeded in many ways in this world (not just the Bill Gates but also self-taught craftspeople, etc.)

Perhaps the problem is the jealousy that happens when your example "big biggy boat owners" realize that their cognitive skills just aren't up to living in this more complex world.

Trump appeals to the dark underbelly of human nature.

Some years ago a friend of mine attended a holiday party, some of the people there
were MAGAs, educated with money. They were gloating and joyous talking about how
Nancy Pelosi's husband had almost been killed by a intruder with a hammer, giving him
serious head injuries.

My friend was shocked.

My concern is with the extent to which the humanities have been cut out of curriculum in favor of STEM and then you get a lot of young people with advanced degrees who don't understand ethics, morality, logic, civics, political science, critical thinking, law, history, psychology, etc.

I would consider those people also "uneducated" and ill equipped to function responsibly in a more complex society.

Which as resulted in the total moral and civic duty collapse, the greatest in US history.

takes control of government and fires people. It doesn't bother them that Trump is wealthy. In fact they brag about it.

But they are happy about a labor union guy being deported to El Salvador prison.

Can he explain this ?

Why this need to see white bigots as victims all the time ?

The dream of a populist yelling-revolution 99% vs 1% uprising against billionaires and oligarchs is impossible.

"If you can convince the lowest white man that he is better than the best black man (he actually used colored), he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him someone to look down on and he'll empty his pockets for you."

This is what Trump and Musk have done: convinced poor whites that actually immigrants are to blame instead of rich people like Trump and Musk. Why anyone believes them, I'll never know.

The man who has little may well resent the man who has a lot, but he fears the man who has nothing, lest he lose the little he has.

People will put up with all kinds of deprivations as long as they see someone worse off than themselves.

Peddling Fear and Hate.

Remember, Ronnie Reagan started it all by making fun of the federal government and belittling President Carter.

All Republicans are responsible for the fascist regime that is taking over,

People lost their minds over a trans person appeared in a Bud Light commercial.

Do you know what impact that had on my life?

Not. One. Iota.

If you don’t like it, change the channel or shut off the TV. That’s what a rational person would do.

The problem is, rationality isn’t exactly in charge right now.