Because for probably the vast majority of Republican voters, this is effectively a religion (identity politics). It doesn't matter what the Republican party chooses to do, voting Republican is a part of who people are and to do anything else is simply unbelievable.
To expand on this a little, even before this hyper-tribalism consumed politics, conservatism has always had an in-group / out-group mentality
It has been remarkably effective to find a niche wedge issue and drive it to the forefront.
Abortion, guns, big city crime, religion…the practical impact these issues have on most people’s daily lives is dwarfed by economic policy but it hits the emotional nerve centers and has a crisp message.
And that’s how you get people voting against their best interests time and time again
I sort of fear tribalism will typically win more and more in the future. There’s a large enough population in the conservative end that’s fine with tribalism. And while there’s certainly a fair share of it on the democratic side, the democratic side tends to lure in educated and anti-authoritarian folks who question things, formulate opinions outside the pack, and will have more difficult electing a cohesive candidate. Meanwhile the Conservative Party targeting religious folks already have a group of people who tend to be OK with just me following whatever it’s told to them without question or with little question.
There's a good read that was put out by OK Cupid (the dating site) 15 years ago outlining exactly this. They had a lot of personality questions that they'd use to match people, so they had a lot of this data correlated with a lot of demographics.
One of the interesting takeaways was about dating compatibility (they are a dating site after all). They found that republicans tended to pair well with other republicans, more than any other group paired with itself, and far better than democrats paired with other democrats.
I think this analysis ignores that the Republican party is winning because they expanded their coalition outside of their base of religious and upper-income voters. Trump pulled in lots of either non-voters or formerly Democrat voters. That's hurting the Dems it has made them more uniformly the party of the educated and upper-middle class and losing broader appeal The flip side is that the GOP now needs to manage a more diverse (racial, religious, cultural, income) coalition along with that. Trump is unifying to across the coalition to a large degree but its hardly assured that his successor will be able to continue that.
The GoP does not need to make things work. One of its pillars has been to ensure a hamstrung government, and take a position that government is ineffective.
Any time the other party comes to power, they are unable to make significant change or headway - and the Republicans are proven right.
The Dems are by default the party of Governance so unless they too get on board with gutting institutions, and removing safety nets, they will always be stuck with this weak hand.
The Republican strategies (all of which are publicly discussed in various news articles over the years) do not need to manage a big tent, because even when out of power, they simply need to ensure governance is ineffective.
And given their near mind control via Fox and their content economy - they can even blame the opposition for problems when they are in power.
This is why I think Liberalism is on the outs. Its whole premise is that we can rationally manage society, but there's no romance in this. The Old Left had romance, as did Fascism. Trumpism has a certain amount of it. Abundance and the traditional neoliberal platform of the Democrats simply don't. Only a very small percentage of the population can get their blood up about means-tested social programs.
A Democratic party that was serious about winning elections would turn sharply left, get new candidates, and start the long process of selling voters on things that they can feel some romance in: ending suffering, universal childcare, universal healthcare, good union jobs, a struggle to take back our country from the money interests. Imagining a future where we aren't all climate refugees in Northern Canada.
Unfortunately, the Democratic party is not serious about winning elections. They keep their fossilized leadership in place while their mental capacity deteriorates until it's simply no longer tenable to pretend that they are capable of governing. Younger candidates are considered a success if they can successfully fundraise, even it they can't actually win the elections that they're fundraising for. In every instance, party operators are out for themselves rather than trying to win and deliver material benefits to voters. Republicans at least win (barely, and usually with some extreme gerrymandering), even if they can't deliver materially.
The only alternative I can see right now is a return to the Old Left playbook: a confrontational labor movement. Maybe there are other alternatives that will emerge but I've yet to see one as promising as just organizing your workplace.
Progressives needed to show up at the polls as a bloc. Unfortunately, there is a pervasive belief that this is a symmetric game between Dems and Republicans.
This belief gives people a reason to expect that their protest is recognized, without doing significant harm to electoral outcomes.
This isn’t the ONLY problem here, theres reasons progressives feel disillusioned by the party, but the rule of power is that its must be grasped.
The Tea Party movement ate the Republican Party from the inside - they primaried politicians and used their Fox/Media economy well.
I hear you but I think there are much deeper problems. The material basis for the post-war order (high employment in high-margin industry in the developed countries, globally marketized resource extraction everywhere else) is collapsing. "Progressives" are just as lost as the rest of the broadly left coalition, but they're Liberals too, and their world is over.
I think the old "har har those dopes are voting against their best interest" is over simplified. It seems to assume that the only best interest is immediate simple financial self interest. But people are complicated and have many interests beyond immediate simple financial interests.
> I think the old "har har those dopes are voting against their best interest" is over simplified. It seems to assume that the only best interest is immediate simple financial self interest.
You can't mischaracterise a phrase and then say it's wrong. That isn't what it means.
The thing that any "voting against their best interests" critique misses is that most people are willing to vote "against their best interest" if they feel like it's the morally correct thing to do.
Like, I'm an adult who never intends to have children, but I still support robust public education. I could make some arguments about how paying taxes for schools is somehow in my best interest. But the reality is I support public education because I think it's the right thing to do, not because I think it will personally benefit me.
The thing is, conservatives and Republican voters don't lean that way because they're just too stupid to vote for Democrats. It's because they have a different moral framework. And that's something that can be hard to reconcile and address. Changing someone's political views requires changing their entire worldview, which is incredibly difficult.
I do believe that supporting public education will benefit me. (And I, too, have no children nor any intent to have any.)
Robust public education would have gone a long way toward preventing the disaster currently unfolding. The very fact that Trump is aggressively gutting every part of the government that once supported education and science is (indirect) evidence of this.
An educated populace makes better decisions, and requires me to spend less time standing out there with a sign stating the painfully obvious.
I was thinking about the "against their best interest" argument recently and connecting it to the democrats.org "who we serve" page made it even worse than it seemed. Rational people not on the list should avoid them?
I assume you are being obtuse or whatever but anyway -- I will attempt clarify a little more. Why did you add qualifiers like "underrepresented" in your reply?
I am not on the list. My brother is not. My son is not. Most men I know are not. That's the entire problem with making a list; you can't help but exclude.
Do democrats support me and my interests? Have I been voting against my own interests by supporting a party who excludes me from their stated in-group?
You can find many articles pointing out problems with that page, which is probably why they finally took it down.
Saying that people are voting against their best interests assumes that you know what those interests are. Maybe what they really want is not what you think they want, or what you think they ought to want. This is an attitude common among liberals. They know best, and if you disagree with them, you are simply wrong.
Electing Trump was a big FU to that attitude. The astonishing thing is that liberals are so cocksure of themselves that they have not yet figured out this simple truth and are still carrying on as if Trump were simply an anomaly rather than a predictable response to their own actions. The magnitude of the tone-deafness in the Democratic party is simply staggering. And I'm a Democrat, or at least I was until I realized how utterly incompetent they are.
[UPDATE] Ironically, the fact that this comment is being downvoted into oblivion actually demonstrates the very point I am making.
[UPDATE2] With regards to my saying that Democrats are incompetent, this is manifestly true at least with regards to 1) winning elections and 2) controlling Donald Trump. Maybe they are competent at other things, but that seems like a bit of a moot point to me under the present circumstances.
I disagree. When it comes to "voting against their best interests," these best interests are not determined at an individual level, but rather through what is in the best interests of that group of individuals.
It is provable that, for example, having a strong emergency response infrastructure is in the best interests of the people of the United States, and especially in the best interests of, e.g., Floridians. Natural disasters happen, and having a strong, coordinated response to assist the victims of natural disasters is in society's best interests, even if individuals (generally wrongly) think that they are self-sufficient enough to handle that situation.
So what I'm saying is that while folks that are "voting against their best interests" may on an individual level have decided that their best interests are different from the best interests of their neighborhood/region/state/country, it doesn't make them <i>right</i>.
A rural voter voting for candidates who will enact policies that will close the only hospital within 100+ miles of where they live is, by definition, voting against their own best interests, as it is in their best interests to have access to that hospital when it becomes necessary, as it could literally be a matter of life or death. Those voters opinions of what might be in their own best interests don't actually matter in terms of determining their best interests, but it matters a lot in terms of getting them to vote against their own best interests.
What Democrats are incompetent at is coming up with messaging that stands a chance of being more convincing than the blatant lies and propaganda of the modern Conservative media machine.
No. There is nothing patrician about it. Stating "it's in your own best interests that the only hospital within 100 miles of your house stays open" is not a "patrician attitude" at all.
Again, it is stating a fact. It is not in those voters best interests to vote for politicians whose stated goal is policy that will cause that hospital to close.
There is nothing derogatory or "patrician" in that. It is a cold, hard fact. Politics are politics, and facts are facts. That people choose to go with feelings and reject facts is beside the point. Their feelings do not determine their best interests.
But we also have a long history of using regulations and other inducements to get people to act in their own best interests. The current regime has just decided that it will act in the best interests of monied interests, to the detriment of a large swath of the people who voted for them.
Now, if you want a liberal, "patrician" attitude, here's one: Fuck 'em. They voted for politicians who openly told them they were going to do things that would be absolutely horrifically bad for them. Let them deal with the consequences and feel morally superior because they've "owned the libs," or whatever other BS helps them sleep at night as their poor, mostly rural communities fall apart around them. Do I think it will get them to vote for politicians who have their best interests in mind? Absolutely not, at least not at a scale necessary to change elections results.
I spend a fair amount of my time in rural America. It's not pretty, and it really doesn't matter if it's a red state or a blue state, rural America is hell bent on its own destruction. It's a shame, but apparently, it's what they want. So let 'em have it.
If you're not free to make (what someone else believes to be) the wrong decision you're not free. Dems assume that they can tell voters what's in their best interest because Dems assume that they can tell voters what those voters value and what those voters think is the best way to achieve it. That's the patrician attitude, the idea that the vast majority of the population is too stupid to make decisions for themselves with the ipso facto evidence being that they don't want the same things that the patrician does. Whether it works out in what is judged to be their "best interests" or not, that attitude is why people are abandoning liberalism and it's a very good reason to do exactly that. Is it cutting off your nose to spite your face? Probably, but after years of someone looking down that nose at me I might be tempted to cut it off as well and damn the consequences. Between that and the way Dems run on "no kids in cages" then rule on "expanded open-air detention facilities for underage migrants", they run on "student loan forgiveness" then rule on "partial forgiveness for people who were already legally qualified", they run on "healthcare for everyone" then rule on "access to insurance marketplaces for everyone with a small subsidy to help pay for insurance that's mostly useless". They run on "women have a right to choose" and when given the chance to make that a law they say it's "not a legislative priority" (Obama, 09). Even if I do concede that Democrats have "my best interest" at heart I don't trust them to actually do any of it.
I'm not sure why you seem to completely ignore what I'm saying.
Let me state again, and plainly: What a person thinks is in their best interests, and what is actually in their best interests are two completely different things.
But you did a great job of boiling down the typical Trump/Republican voter's ethos: "Is it cutting off your nose to spite your face? Probably, but after years of someone looking down that nose at me I might be tempted to cut it off as well and damn the consequences."
This is what we are dealing with in the United States at this point: Stupid people that are pissed off that they're not allowed to be stupid and through their own stupidity endanger the lives of the responsible adults in society.
"That's the patrician attitude, the idea that the vast majority of the population is too stupid to make decisions for themselves with the ipso facto evidence being that they don't want the same things that the patrician does."
Well, when an ever-growing portion of the population is proving that out, maybe the stupid people are the problem. Case in point: anti-vax attitudes, we're having measles outbreaks because stupid people refuse to vaccinate themselves and their children.
Your entire argument in this post seems to be that "Democrats did a bad job of keeping their promises, so I'm going to vote for stupidity, even if it hurts me."
At what point did I say I was a Trump supporter? I've voted Democrat every election since I was first allowed to in 08. My point was that if you think you're just going to tell voters "no, you're wrong, you're supposed to want this rather than that" then you're just gonna get your teeth kicked in by Trump a third time.
> Saying that people are voting against their best interests assumes that you know what those interests are. Maybe what they really want is not what you think they want, or what you think they ought to want. This is an attitude common among liberals. They know best, and if you disagree with them, you are simply wrong.
This is such a tired refrain. As a libertarian who was telling my aghast friends in 2016 that Trump was really speaking to people's frustrations and likely to win (thus you know, demonstrating that I at least understand many of those concerns, if not outright share them), this still doesn't explain it. For the most part Trump's policies do nothing to effect his (non-financier) supporters' professed interests, yet they keep lapping it up and coming back for more.
Perhaps with my libertarian biases, I could still be putting too much emphasis on the economic and liberty-based complaints rather than the contingent that wants to criminalize healthcare, put a handful of unlucky brown people in concentration camps, and other negative-sum social policies. But it still really doesn't feel that is where the broad support is coming from in the first place.
Ultimately from where I'm sitting, the responsibility for the communications breakdown mainly rests on Trump supporters for seemingly making "owning the libs" into their primary KPI. The Democratic party certainly has a similar "rabid" dynamic with regards to social justice / diversity, but that's a much narrower contingent (vocal, but still only a slice of policy) whereas for the Republicans it has broadly taken over the entire party platform.
As a fellow recovering Democrat I couldn't agree more. When the party shifted to neoliberalism in the 90s an incredible arrogance came with it. The attitude went from "How do we represent working people and get government to do what they want" to "We know how to govern better than the plebs, how do we get them to want what we're willing to do?" And their reaction to Trump has been to dismiss him as a flash in the pan and try to wait him out like bad weather, but they completely fail to reckon with the idea that whatever else he may be he's currently the guy batting .667 against them and in 2024 managed to maintain the support of open racists while gaining ground with every minority except women.
Trump isn't a disease, he's a symptom. He's an emergent property of a system that has been hilariously blatant about the fact that it doesn't value the people it needs to to continue functioning. Trump fits in a hole the government left in the hearts of the American people when it decided that its primary operating principle is "give the voters just enough to get them to put us in power give everything else to the donors and then buy stock in their companies". Doubly so because the lesson the Dems learned from Obama was that they can exploit identity politics to give the populace a symbolic victory and then govern in a way that directly transfers wealth from their voters to the donor class. Since 2008 the Democratic primary has been a game of "Who will you accept neoliberal market worship from?" An african american man (08, 12), a woman (16), your choice of an old white man, a mixed race woman or a gay man (20), the same mixed race woman from 20 who flat out told us when asked if there was anything she would do differently than the historically-unpopular old white man said "Not a thing that comes to mind" (24). They're the Pizza Party, the manager at work who has been given the impossible task of trying to buck up a completely demoralized staff while not being permitted to offer them anything of substance. The neoliberal wing of the Democratic party has been feasting on the seed corn since 1992 and can't figure out why the fields are empty and their serfs are angry.
Their response to Trump has been internally contradictory to a delightful degree as well. In 2015 HRC specifically instructed Dem-aligned media to elevate Trump's campaign with the theory that he would frighten people so badly that they'd vote for her without her having to offer anything substantial to voters. You'll remember the focus of the campaign was threefold: she's a woman and it would be neat to have a woman president, she's qualified, it's her turn. More of the same policies that pissed everyone off, very little in the way of material support that actually makes the average person's day to day life better, a lot of scolding people for not already being on the Dem side rather than figuring out what it would take to get them on the Dem side ("basket of deplorables") and generally treating voters as a resource that needs to be managed and then exploited for maximum value rather than as the people that you as an elected official serve.
To me, the defining feature of the modern Democratic party is their self-assurance that Trump is an idiot combined with a complete unwillingness to acknowledge the fact that that idiot just keeps kicking their asses. If your opponent is weak but consistently puts you on your back what does that make you?
From the perspective of an independent, I’m not sure why you’re singling out Republicans here. It reads just as true if you’re to swap in the word Democrat.
If it turns out that Obama is in the Epstein files, my friends won't have to get rid of their Obama hat, or their Obama sneakers, or their Obama cologne, or their Obama watch, or their Obama bible, or take down their Obama flag, or delete their Obama NFT trading cards.
Both parties are alien and hostile to me, but for very different reasons.
This is why arguing politics with these guys is pointless. I once naively thought I could bring around one of my MAGA friends to the light side by focusing on policy but it just doesn't work. He admitted that everything Team R is doing is not really helping him but in the end it's always something like: "Look, I was born a Republican, my family is Republican, I will never vote Democrat, no matter what any of them do. We have to trust Trump to do the right thing." It's truly a religion. There is no getting to these people.
Given the complete destruction of norms and institutions over the last year, the country is already lost for at least a decade, if not several. "Winning" is now a fantasy for our kids to maybe enjoy one day. I'm not sure that spite is a particularly bad option in this scenario.
Seriously I wish we could split the country. Let the deplorables live by themselves un-vaxxed, with guns, religion and all of their other non-sense. And let us normal people live by ourselves with science and compassion.
(Unfortunately this will not happen. Because two things will have to be split: national debt and the nuclear arsenal. Heavy Sigh…)
I think that a fundamental problem with democracy is that as the state indulges its natural tendency to expand and centralize it leads to a state that is the average of an increasingly large pool of citizens' opinions on how their country should work and much like how the average number of fingers on a human hand is very different from the expected number of fingers on a human hand the average of everyone's opinions on how things should work is completely different from any one person's opinion. Thus, the thing that is ostensibly designed to ensure everyone gets at least some of what they want actually ends in no one getting anything they want, and it promotes factionalism that will eventually lead to separate power structures. It's happening right now, whether its southern sheriffs refusing to enforce gun laws or northern mayors declaring their cities to be sanctuaries from federal immigration enforcement, the development of competing power structures has us hurtling toward a constitutional crisis and maybe that's not the most terrible thing? Getting there is gonna suck but maybe there's just a natural boom/bust cycle for democracies where they swing on a pendulum between "growing and consolidating power while watering down voters' intent" and "collapsing back down to a place where voters feel like they're actually part of the society they're governed by". Maybe the antifederalists were right, and this was always supposed to be several independent countries governed by a few overarching laws that should really only ever have been concerned with trade and immigration, and accepting a common currency to further enable both of those goals.
Don't you think it cuts both ways though? I saw a video where a guy was asking (presumably liberal) NYU students about quotes relating to immigration policy. He initially said they were from (republican person T), and they stated that they thought the comments were racist. Then the interviewer said, oh wait, sorry, they were actually from (democrat person O), and the students immediately shifted their opinions and said the comments were reasonable.
I'm sure there's a little tribalism on the (D) side, too, but I don't know anyone who decorates their house, yard, and truck with Democrat merchandise and flags, wears Democrat political shirts and hats, has a shrine at home with a life-size figure of a Democrat politician, or brings up Democrat politics in social settings that are not even remotely political like a kid's birthday party. I've seen real life examples of all of these from the (R) side.
You don't want this, I promise you. I was in a Discord recently that was the liberal equivalent of MAGA and it scared the bejeezus out of me to see Dems frothing at the mouth like rabid red hatters.
You've never seen evidence of cultural/tribal signaling on the left? Never seen an "in this house" sign, somebody wearing a mask outside and alone/spread out, NPR tote bag, "Anti-Racist Baby" book on the shelf, brought up Robin Deangelo or random Trump jokes at a bbq... Fish don't know their wet.
I don't doubt they exist--I just haven't seen any, and I have seen many dozens of examples from the other side. I'm talking about an order of magnitude difference in degree of tribalism, not claiming total absence of tribalism from one side.
Tribalism coming to the Dems is taking FAR too long. People recognize that tribalism is working for the Republicans, so it’s natural that they are going to eventually imitated the winning strategy.
Seriously, I can’t believe it took this many decades for it to happen, and only after Trump made its efficacy blindingly obvious.
PS: Tribalism is not good for the overall health of a polity. Its just that people imitate whatever strategies appear to work.
My observation is that “both sides” (EDIT: of the electorate) are locked in this dynamic. In the ideal world people are able to evaluate specific ideas, but instead people judge ideas based on who it comes from.
id love to know some of the good ideas from republicans, because for the past like 50 years or so, nearly every one has been a disaster or discriminatory
Here's where I think the bulk of the US population is:
- They're in favor of giving asylum to those who really deserve it (yeah, I'm sweeping a huge amount under the rug of the word "deserve"), but they're not in favor of "open borders" or large numbers of people coming here not through the legal process.
- They're in favor of equal opportunity and helping those who are downtrodden, but not in favor of "white guilt" or hiring/admission quotas.
- They're in favor of giving someone a break, but not in favor of giving criminals an infinite number of breaks (whether violent criminals or just shoplifters).
When the Democrats won in 2020, they took that victory as an endorsement of everything they believed in. It wasn't. It was a declaration that we didn't believe in where Trump wanted to take us.
When the Republicans won in 2024, they took it as an endorsement of everything Trump stood for, and everything he will decide to stand for in the future. It wasn't. It was a vote against the Democrats implementing everything they wanted to over the last four years.
In fact, it's not just the Republicans who make that mistake. I keep reading "you voted for this". Well, not exactly - there are a bunch of people who voted against open borders, but did not vote for militarized thugs grabbing people off the street based on skin color. (Yes, I know, their vote enabled that. My point is that their intent was not that at all, but only to vote against an open border.)
The bulk of the population doesn't want the Democratic platform or the Republican platform. They want some kind of sanity, avoiding the extremes of both sides.
(You say that the Republicans only have extremes? Not so. They also have "stop doing what the Democrats are doing". In some cases, that's not a bad idea.)
There is not a single national-level Democratic politician who advocates for open borders. If there is, please tell us who.
The feeling of an open border is due to a confluence of our asylum laws, the Constitution, and a surge in relative desirability of the United States vis-a-vis the rest of the world. The President cannot directly change any of these factors.
The reason it feels like some of that has changed is because we have a President who is flouting our asylum laws [1] and the Constitution [2], having the net effect of making our country less relatively desirable [3]
Your observation is yours, but it isn't mine and many others.
I grew up in a Dem household but I don't vote dem because my parents did or because I'm a party member (I'm not), it's because the lesser of the two evils is almost always the blue side.
And this was before the GOP literally became a cult. Now it's not even a choice.
I concur that ultimately you have to decide which party to vote for (and I happen to vote similarly to you).
What I am asserting is that it would be better if we were able to judge ideas based on the merit of the idea rather than who it comes from. That is, in my experience, not happening and the electorate for both dem and rep are guilty of this behavior.
I absolutely agree with that. But as a vote for a candidate due to an agreeable policy position is also a vote that's likely to vote as a block for everything else, it's not entirely invalid to vote that way (historically).
But as today's GOP is the Party of Trump™, and they now vote in lockstep, it's a simple "nopes".
I abhor partisan politics -- Washington warned us against them at the beginning and he was right.
The false equivalence you reference, and that I agree exists, is about the politicians actions.
But I’m talking about the electorate who, in both cases, largely do not seem to evaluate the strength of ideas or policies, but, in many examples I can cite, judge ideas based on who it comes from.
