• bauhaus@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    conservatives view social hierarchy as a necessity which must be enforced. if you’re at the bottom, you deserve to be there, and if you’re there, you suffer because you deserve it, and because you’re at the bottom, you deserve to suffer. cruelty is the point, and without it, there can’t be the joy of their success.

    anything else, to them, is profane and must be fought/destroyed. anyone who tries to climb above their position must be punished.

    relevant videos:

    The Alt-Right Playbook: Always a Bigger Fish

    Endnote 3: The Origins of Conservatism

    • Lawdoggo@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The only thing baffling about any of this is that somehow, millions of ordinary, working/middle-class Americans believe that this system benefits them more than the alternative.

      • Invisinak@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        it’s not baffling at all. the American dream is literally everyone is a millionaire or will be one day. conservatives are the only ones buying into that dream still so they’re trying to live like a millionaire now so that when the money finally shows up they’ve done their part to help their new millionaire friends along the way.

        The problem is they don’t understand that the likelihood of them becoming even moderately wealthy is pretty slim and they’re too blind to see that voting to hurt the poor is voting to hurt themselves in their current situation.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          When I was growing up, at least the way I was taught (and I was only born in 1977), the American Dream was a steady paycheck, a house and a car. Did that change at some point or was I taught something other than what people actually believed?

          • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            As someone also born in '77 I generally heard the same things and the same sentiment. Though I think that might have more to do with family and the general class you grew up in. Because it isn’t Universal unfortunately. Nor can capitalism deliver on it.

      • eran_morad@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Nah, they’re just pissed and want to believe they’ve been wronged by some “other”. Ironically, they’re 100% correct, but have identified the wrong “other”. Baffling, indeed.

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        But voting another way will result in my children being accosted by drag queens who will turn them gay / trans and my freedoms will be co-opted by shitty beer companies who don’t believe in Christ. Then my enemies will take my guns and my elderly parents will be shipped off to a commie gulag and murdered to make room for more whatever whatever whatever… I ran out of tropes. Hopefully, you don’t need me to punctuate that this is sarcasm.

        These are the things that they think about obsessively. They aren’t thinking about how to make the world a better place. They’re thinking about the things they hate and fear.

      • bauhaus@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        the whole “Playbook” is pretty great, bit this one is excellent for explaining exactly why conservatives see things the way they do

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Which is quite a high bar, considering the overall quality of the whole series!

        • Orphie Baby@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I’m not a Christian, but no. And screw your upvoters.

          Edit: Just in case you need an explanation (though if you did, you probably wouldn’t accept it anyway), a person who says they’re a Christian but doesn’t read/learn, understand, or follow any Christian principles except incidentally is not a Christian. It’s like a person saying they’re a pacifist, but they go out beating up and killing homeless people at night. That doesn’t make pacifists assholes, that makes the person a liar. Your brain cells barely need to function for you to understand this principle, so stop with the religiophobic bullshit.