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Comment by Herring | Hacker News Reader

Vote for republicans => get red state policies.

Trump won the popular vote. America is trying very hard to become one big red state.

Red states have had the worst outcomes for generations but they keep going back to republicans. The reasons escape me. The Civil War was basically southerners strongly preferring to use slaves instead of modernizing. Lots of them died for this. Make it make sense.

This dysfunction goes a lot deeper than any one administration. Maybe the rise of China will motivate them to get their act together.

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It's simply that blue states haven't been making a case that democrats know how to run things. I would seriously recommend reading Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

Sure, but in comparison, they're running laps around red states. Which have significantly higher levels of poverty and are overall just less developed. I mean, if you look at just about any metric from income to education, the disparities cannot be ignored.

And, it should be very clear why. When you, say, de-prioritize or are even actively hostile to public education then of course your education is going to suffer. Which, in turn, makes your economy suffer, because most people who are working are now uneducated and therefore poor. So you get a lot of brain drain.

There's some notable exceptions, like Texas. But, it's definitely a trend that red states just have worse outcomes across the board. It seems to me people in those states just don't care much, which... whatever. If they're fine with it then I guess it's fine.

> Make it make sense.

There's a great book called "The One Sentence Persuasion Course - 27 Words to Make the World Do Your Bidding", which I keep thinking about with respect to Trump and his ability to sway his voting bloc. The 27 words are:

"People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies."

Trump ticks a lot of these boxes. He "confirms" their suspicions and justifies their failures when he says their problems are caused by immigration, China, and wokeism. He helps them throw rocks at their enemies every time he invents a new petty nickname for his political opponents ("Sleepy Joe" Biden, "Crooked Hillary" Clinton, "Kamabla" Harris, etc). He encourages their dreams with his "Make America Great Again" slogan and "allays their fears" with his "Only I can solve it" rhetoric. And they eat it up because, as misguided as he is, he speaks to them on an emotional level, not a logical one.

Trump's base is fundamentally fueled by grievance, and he knows it. When we stop bending over backwards to give them some noble rationale and start looking at their actions from this lens, it starts to make a lot more sense.

I might be one of the few in my circle that feel their grievance is justified. It does still boggle my mind that they would rally around someone is who is in fact part of the problem.

Mind elaborating on why you feel its justified? Just curious.

If they're feeling like "the fix is in" and they no longer have a voice in the big decisions happening in this country — that there is a small club of elites that are calling the shots ... well, they may not be wrong.

If they're feeling overwhelmed by the pace of the change happening in our modern world/society, feeling as though they are being left behind — they're not the only ones.

If they're feeling as though the contract between the wealth-holders and the laborers has been getting worse and worse for the worker, they may be on to something.

Maybe they see the wealthy continuing to fail upward and are finding that just working hard and saving money seem to be less than treading water.

There's plenty of things to have grievances about.

And I think "left" and "right" might have common ground on these issues.

The US right wing thinks very differently about inequality compared to progressives. They are more about opportunity than outcomes. They want free markets, individual responsibility, and are generally skeptical of govt programs aimed at redistributing wealth. They argue these can create dependency, distort markets, stifle economic growth, infringe on individual liberties and property rights etc.

In practice, this means tax cuts, deregulation, opposition to min wage increases, welfare reform, school vouchers, opposition to unions, healthcare cuts, project 2025, etc etc. They’ll reduce govt intervention and go all in on free markets.

They are wrong because the outcomes of this unrestricted free market approach are not so good, but nevertheless for now it’s impossible to find common ground with FDR-style progressives. Check back after the next depression.

Note: there’s also a strong racist/sexist/homophobic/etc streak that prevents most kinds of solidarity.

Those grievances are justified, but they aren't grievances held by the right. If they actually feel these things, they sure aren't voting to change them, in fact quite the opposite. As you pointed out, they are rallying around people who openly are trying to make all those problems worse.

OP (toomanyrichies)'s comment makes much more sense. The right's grievances aren't against elites, the wealthy, the privileged, employers, or the pace of change. Their grievances are against less powerful outgroups who serve as scapegoats that can't fight back: Immigrants, minorities, gay and trans people, "woke" culture warriors, the poor, and so on. The government is seen as a tool for punching down and exacting cruelty onto these outgroups. That's what really motivates them.

I live in a "red" part of the country, surrounded by Trump flags. Ask them what good their team has done for their own lives, and if you get past the canned talking points that don't make sense, they'll admit their lives aren't really much better than they were in 2016. Ask them what they like about MAGA, and it will be all about the attacking and cruelty he's doing to their perceived enemies.

> If they actually feel these things, they sure aren't voting to change them, in fact quite the opposite.

+1. Just as we engineers say "The purpose of a system is what it does" [1], a corollary to that is "the intention of a vote is what it achieves". If red-state voters consistently vote against their own economic interests, then either one of two things is true:

- They must have other interests in mind (i.e. punching down on marginalized groups), or

- Their interest in economic self-preservation is outweighed by their belief in helping the rich get richer, possibly because they see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires"? [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/QuotesPorn/comments/jotijb/john_ste...

This is quite helpful and insightful, thanks. I just went down a rabbit hole about human psychology and scapegoating.

Thanks. I tend to agree with your points.

Republican grievances have a lot of overlap with Democrat grievances, and even on the high-visibility topics where they don't, Republican grievances are still mostly based on real issues. It's many of their policies and ideologies that are immoral or un-American, not (most of) their grievances. You may feel like you're in the minority, but I actually think people generally believe this, but won't admit it without overwhelming caveats, because of aforementioned policies/ideologies.

You can get the same picture from the other end: For each real position a politician takes on an issue they will lose everyone who disagrees. If you chose sides on a hundred topics in the most sensible way you will lose everyone.

So they have to be as vague as possible about everything until an audience gathered behind some specific topic, then it is required to lie so that they think you are one of them.

Beyond those basic requirements the competition is to encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies

but it doesn't even matter anymore.

Red state policies (or at least a subset) appear to be popular based on the most important form of voting - with one's feet

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-...

Not sure what Trump does could be called red state policies. There are elements of them, but it's mostly an endless chaos machine and he tries to personally profit or enjoy himself with it. But mostly profit.

The overlap is extensive. Abortion, immigration, racism/DEI/trans, tax cuts, deregulation, judicial appointments, fossil fuel production, skepticism towards green energy and climate change, prioritizing conservative Christian religious preferences, restructuring/downsizing the Federal Government etc etc. Most of what he does is currently and historically very popular in red states, with predictable outcomes. Corruption is non-partisan, but they definitely turn a blind eye to it.

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