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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

> If Republican voters actually have a moderate view of immigration, that's great, but they voted for a guy who is putting migrants in cages. Therefore, they all support putting migrants in cages. They could fix that by changing who they vote for, but they haven't done so. I consider this policy to be reprehensible, so how can I not consider Republican voters to be reprehensible?

Except the previous President did the exact same. It's already long since come out that the people in cages photos that so enraged everyone last year were from 2014. Democrats voted for a guy who did that too then.

How do you reconcile this hypocrisy?

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>How do you reconcile this hypocrisy?

It's like when a toddler has a hard fall and looks to the parent to see how to react. As a parent, if you look horrified and make a big deal about it, the child starts bawling. If you look normal and brush it off, the child has a minimal reaction. It's the same fall, but the network of people they take leadership cues from dictated the nature of their response.

It's the same with people (on both sides of the aisle), their social networks, and the press. People underestimate the power of the press and the influence it has on giving cues about when and what to be upset about.

It's not so much that the hypocrisy is reconciled, it's just ignored.

Some background: there are photos of immigrants in cages, taken in Obama's time. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/42228/

This is awful and as someone who generally supported Obama I consider this one of several shameful moments in his presidency. The issue with the Trump administration isn’t just about putting people in cages - that’s the sound bite, and one that should have been used with Obama - it’s how Trump’s zero tolerance policy puts so many people in cages, even if they’re seeking asylum.

> How do you reconcile this hypocrisy?

Why stop there? President Barrack "Drone-Strikes-For-Freedom" Obama certainly has an interesting legacy on his hands and yet it seems to me that the entire world has given him a blanket pass on all of the atrocious things that went down under his terms.

Or the fact that Obama left the Presidency with the US involved in 7 wars, 3 of them started during his mandate.

Nobody is in favor of putting kids in cages, but at the same time nobody can agree on who is at fault or how to stop it. I heard one person use the cages as support for the border wall, saying that if nobody could cross the border nobody would be caught by ICE. Almost everybody can agree on most of the same morals but as far as facts and deductions we might as well all be living in different universes.

I don't want to hear any of that. I want to hear OP reconcile his claim that the other side of his claimed side are all guilty of reprehensible behavior when it's factually correct that his did the same.

This isn't about blame or fixing it, it's about how dangerous it is when we broadly paint those we disagree with as "enemy" and ignore the facts, decency and reason that bind us together in society.

The migrant cage issue is really besides the point. I'm not trying to start a debate specifically about immigration. I could pick any topic, even something innocuous. My point is that if you claim to support a policy and then vote the other way, do you actually support it?

You're assuming that every voter voted for Trump for the positions he hold on the issues you care about. What if Trump was just the best candidate for the issues THEY care about? Also most of Republicans voted for Trump ergo all of them support all the policies by Trump is the same logic I can use to say most Americans voted for Trump therefore all Americans support all the policies by Trump. In reality, most Americans I've met are perfectly good and rational people, they just care about different issues, that's all.

That's a lot of hypotheticals, but I think that it was pretty obvious what kind of character they were voting for. And he has consistently held over 90% approval from Republicans during his term, so they are evidently satisfied with the results. When it comes to issues that I (and many liberals) feel strongly about, he was always very clearly a complete 180 from what I'd consider sensible policy. I've read that over 50% of Republicans now consider climate change to a major issue that should be addressed, but Trump repeatedly declared it a hoax. So, it stands to reason that at least tens of millions of people who claim to think climate change is a critical issues deliberately voted for someone who will expressly move the country backwards in its response.

I'm being somewhere reductive in my position and clearly people had some other incentives in how they voted, but I'm just saying that the premise of this article is meaningless. While Republican voters may not be as strident as they let on, they have placed an army of extremely strident representatives in power and haven't wavered in their support. That's what the country now has in hand and it wasn't by accident.

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