Putting aside whether or not that’s anathema to the cause, I’m not sure how you’d “other” them in a meaningful way. The reason it works for the right is that they target groups who’s members are publicly visible and can’t voluntarily leave (LGBT+, minorities, foreign religions, etc…)

If you target a group of people for their beliefs (something not overtly visible), they can either relabel their group or plausibly claim their beliefs differ in some way. We already do this for fascists and nazis, but very few people are going to outwardly admit to these ideals. Now they’ll just say they’re “extra-constitutional”, “alt right”, “Christian patriot”, or any other hat a bigot wants to swap out for far right authoritarian.

You can’t “other” them where they already proudly claim a majority (white + Christian) so what are you left with?

It’s not necessarily a lack of education, I know a really smart surgeon, generally very reasonable, who fell for this stuff.

If you’ve never seen the echo chamber this guy lives in you don’t understand how bizarre it can be.

On the surface there’s a lot of influencers that can say truly regressive lies, and make them sound innocuous. They say it with such confidence and mixed in with truths and half truths. It can be hard to see the fallacies and misinfo even if you know what to look for.

There’s a constant drip of cherry picked stats and talking points designed to reinforce what he’s feeling. In the back of his mind he knows those support his case but he doesn’t really have an original source to reference. He tries to say them with the same confidence that he heard them with, but they’re not based in reality and look pretty ugly without the professional window dressing.

There’s videos where people do deep dives on this stuff (I can try to find one if you want). You could probably also experiment with it yourself if you have a VPN and a fresh/virtual device to make an account on.

Wecome to Disney’s North Korea+ (brought to you by Tesla)

I’d agree that your reasoning makes sense but is reductionist when talking about America’s two party system.

I grew up in a conservative town and I personally knew lots of people that were truly, deeply compassionate people. Christian in the truly radical, hippy sense of the word. Except they had one issue, abortion made them sad.

It wasn’t any ignorance of the issue or believing in satanic baby eating, but a philosophy arbitrarily picked by their community. They didn’t hate anyone getting an abortion, they just had some utopian vision of a world where they didn’t happen.

Since abortions were framed as murder and one party promised to ban abortions and the other party expand access, they were told there was only one ethical choice.

So their one line of thought trapped them. I could argue up and down the ballot on issues they agreed with, how the economy should be handled, prison reform, etc… but that one stupid idea held them back.

They’re still good people, and voted 3rd party a few times when the mood struck them. But I don’t think wanting one bad policy (with the best intentions) makes them bad people.

So I’d say yes. In that instance, with those people, it’s generalizing to say they were on board with any of the hateful policies. They were held hostage by their single issue, and the right’s rhetoric made damn sure they could never wriggle out.

What if the system is designed to keep you ignorant?

If you want to come to that conclusion in a political postmortem 20 years from now I’d fully encourage it.

The problem is that right now the house is burning down and shaming people for playing with matches won’t save us.

Unless you’re talking about 90%+ of the force resigning, they won’t struggle to backfill with poorly train and radicalized militia LARPers. Probably a much worse situation

That’s the one thing that gives me hope: their views changed radically but only in one generation through concentrated, directed effort. Calling people idiots or sheep misses the point that this is the natural result of exposing people to this shit daily.

Nobody in history ever thought people are inherently rational and considerate, society is held together through a culture that reinforces it. The tools of the information age can rapidly and drastically shape our society however we want it, we just need to pull them out of the hands of those billionaires burning civilisation to the ground for their own benefit.