So many I interact with are just simply unaware and vote based on their discomfort with urban liberal culture. That's it. The blue hair and the pronouns made them feel weird, so they voted the other way.
Edit: Street smarts isn't just about dealing with people on the streets. It's also recognizing which of your office coworkers in a competitive work environment are lying or misleading others to personally benefit via performance reviews and promotions. You contrast this with meeting other city people with tattoos, piercings, dark skin, or bending gender, and you figure out that red flags have nothing to do with superficial appearance.
My aunt is a conservative lobbyist and a drunk. She drinks a bunch of vodka and then texts me and my family about all of the violence that is going to be done to people she hates (including some groups that people in my family belong to). This isn't "blue hair makes me feel weird." This is "I want college professors to be shot." Those are the texts I receive.
I think it comes from a place of the American vision of work. This idea that things that are good don't come easy, and that it requires sacrifice. That if some people aren't getting hurt, then it's not working.
So they view these people getting hurt as a good thing. They use terms like "bleed" to describe the executive agencies getting gutted. They have a medieval view of it, like blood letting is a legitimate solution to problems. That, because there are tears and suffering, something of substance must be getting accomplished.
But sometimes bad things are just bad. And sometimes good things don't require suffering. They don't understand that.
Huxley was right
American Evangelicals and Trump supporters are no less Christian than Catholics during the Crusades and Inquisition. That is the system.
Personally, I don't think that the organised Catholic church was about following Jesus' teachings, but more about consolidating wealth and power. It's disingenuous to call it "Christianity" if it just chooses convenient parts to follow. I mean, Jesus was very specific about not amassing wealth.
That framework rejected him, and I can sympathize with arguments that the system of "Christianity" that developed was not the system he intended, but I don't think it would be accurate to describe Jesus as anti-system per se.
Either way, any definition of Christianity that excludes Catholicism or any other organized sect doesn't seem useful.
It's like people defining Capitalism to require pure free markets, just so they can say the US or British Empires never really engaged in Capitalism. It just seems like an exercise in semantics.
Not quite as real-world Capitalism has an approximation of free markets. I would say that's quite different from "Christians" going against welcoming strangers and feeding/healing the poor. In my view Jesus was against being judgemental, so sects that prioritise being judgemental cause me some cognitive dissonance when they are described as Christian.