The Three Main Types of Trumpers
Published at 08:49 on 17 August 2024
Having interacted with some on the Internet, I feel qualified to offer this. By “Trumpers” here I mean simply those planning on voting for Donald Trump this November. Note that the sets are not disjoint: one can for example easily be a part of both the Weirdos and Sheep category.
The Weirdos
These people are, simply put, mentally not all there. It becomes clear when trying to engage them in online conversation. I am not a trained psychoanalyst, and not analyzing them in person, but it’s just obvious they have issues going on upstairs.
The Sheep
These people live deep within the right-wing media bubble. Their mental facilities are, however, intact and normal. They’ve just been brainwashed and turned into cult members. As such, any information from outside the cult is highly suspect and (given that it threatens to take their cult, which they are psychologically heavily invested in, away from them) threatening. It it this crowd that is the greatest driver of the problem with the GOP being inward-facing that I recently wrote about.
The Reluctant
These people will agree that Trump is a deeply flawed candidate. Sometimes (often) you will have to go back and forth a bit to wear them down with repeated reality checks, but eventually they will agree with you. Facts are facts, after all. It’s just that, for them, one personal fact is that they strongly prefer right of centre politics, and given the US two-party system, they have no other choice to express that preference but the currently-Trumpified GOP. So, like it or not (and most of them do not), Trump it is.
What This All Means
Namely, that you should pay attention to the full content of tweets like this one. Specifically the about a third part. He’s talking about roughly ⅓ of 46% (in other words, about 15%), not the full 46%.
If Harris wins in November (and that’s definitely still an if), politics in the USA could for the most part move beyond Trumpism relatively quickly, in a way that’s not possible if roughly 46% were committed Trumpers. That’s because only about 15% (the Sheep plus the Weirdos that for whatever reasons decide to stick with Trump after the GOP realigns itself) are the true committed fascists. The others are merely somewhere on the fascism-curious to fascism-tolerant axis, and are likely to get a lot less curious and/or tolerant about fascism if it shows itself once again to be a loser at the ballot box.
Then you have the conservatives who are neither fascism-tolerant nor fascism-curious, i.e. the Never Trumpers. They would love to go back to voting for a centre-right party, if only a sane one existed. Add their numbers to the Reluctant, and whatever Weirdos decide to come along for the realignment away from fascism, and you have the makings of a realignment.
Self-interest, in other words, can act to motivate the sort of political realignment that morals failed to.