
People like to talk about “constructed divisions” and they’re real but I genuinely think it is mostly due to maga strategy and botched democratic response, not the two conspiring to trick people. Trumps camp does horrendous things and wins over conservatives (usually less educated ones) by refusing to be kind to people they view as enemies. Then the people who care about the people getting hurt call those uneducated people monsters and it only pushed them further into hating the educated elites.
But the educated, and more often than not liberal people, are the only ones actually seeing the monstrous things being done. Bc trump and those circles don’t report on their own abuse and preach that anything else is a lie. So liberals are often backed into a corner where they end up calling conservatives stupid for believing the lies they’ve been told. Or judge these conservatives as if they know what evil they’re supporting when many genuinely don’t.
But how can you tell someone that they’ve been fooled because they weren’t educated enough to avoid being fooled? (education is a privilege, not some moral victory. Some are lucky enough to get it and others arent) Or tell them that the things they’re supporting are hurting people and that that harm matters? The difficulty of figuring out how to say this is a wonderful piece of strategy from the trump camp. Leftists still have no cohesive clear strategy to fight back against it
Acting like political opinions are immune from criticism of that person just because they were political. You know what were politically contentious issues in America? Slavery. Segregation. Lynching. Politics are a vehicle for expressed opinions. And sometimes those expressed opinions make someone a bad person.