On my Yale Class email list, this morning, a left-wing classmate forwarded a link and a quoted section of Charles M. Blow‘s morally-self-congratulatory and intellectually-condescending New York Times editorial.
[A]s Joe Keohane wrote in the Boston Globe in 2010:
“Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.â€
Supporting Trump is a Hail Mary pass of a hail-the-demagogue assemblage. Trump’s triumph as the presumptive Republican Party nominee is not necessarily a sign of his strategic genius as much as it’s a sign of some people’s mental, psychological and spiritual deficiencies.
It’s hard to use the truth as an instrument of enlightenment on people who prefer to luxuriate in a lie.
I replied (this version slightly edited):
Trump supporters are supporting him, not in spite of his vulgarity, his lack of manners, his constant lying and self-contradiction, his ignorance, and his obvious lack of fixed principles; they are supporting him specifically because he is manifestly unconstrained by ordinary conventions of etiquette, ethics, or ideas.
They are so angry at people like you… and so resentful of how they feel they have been treated by the educated elites of this country that they are intentionally supporting a man they perceive as a ruthless thug, hoping to turn him loose on you. Donald Trump is being nominated as a great big “Fuck You!” to leftists like you for your ruthless and tyrannical imposition of your aberrant values and failed policies on America and to conservatives and Republicans like me for failing to stop you. The peasants are in open, and thoroughly irrational, revolt.
SDD
It’s kind of rich when people like Blow lectures about ignoring facts. Starting with asserting that there are no innate cognitive and physical differences among human ethnic groups. That white men are responsible for violence in the black community. That socialism is a viable economic system. That more people carrying more guns causes increased gun violence. That the War on Poverty actually decreased poverty. That Obamacare has reduced health care costs. That someone with Y chromosomes and a penis can be a woman. There’s not enough space to go on.
Thalpy
SDD, Please continue with your examples that belief trumps reason.
Dan Kurt
re: The concluding paragraph and ending wit: “The peasants are in open, and thoroughly irrational, revolt.” JDZ
Suggest the word “irrational” with “rational.” The peasants action is “rational” as a “Hail Mary” pass is when a football team is behind by 6 points, the clock is at 8 seconds to play, it is 4th Down and the ball is on the opponent’s 40 yard line. If the Democrats take this election, the USA is kaput as NO REPUBLICAN WILL BE EVER PRESIDENT AGAIN. The Democrats will have successfully transformed a White country into the 3rd World with replacement voters since 1965 and will have a lock on the Supreme Court. Amnesty will solidify the Lock for the democrats and a Democrat Supreme Court will strip the 1st and 2nd Amendments.
Dan Kurt
T. Shaw
Well, Duh! I are stupid (so fucking much so that I’m among the small demographic that pays nearly all Federal income tax receipts) and I vote.
This time I’ll vote (also give his campaign $$$$) for Trump because the corrupt, incompetent, useless, no-different-than-democrats, arrogant mother-fuckers “sold us down the river.” That includes you, Thalpy.
Scullman
Keep this up Zincavage, there might be some hope for you yet.
Thalpy
Geeze T. Shaw, Was it something I said?
LibertyorWhat??!!
You summed up the situation pretty well, JDZ, and there is indeed that component in Trump’s support. My revulsion at Trump precedes his candidacy by years, and I have not been able to imagine I could vote for him. Scott Adams’ assessment of his political success has been fun to follow and is dead on. Adams predicts a Trump landslide. Recently I have been thinking this way: assuming I did not have the option of abstaining, what Republican candidate would be so revolting that I would vote for Clinton? The only one I can think of is Satan himself. An abstention this November amounts to a fractional vote for Clinton. Mitt would be President today except for the millions of Republicans who stayed home. However loathsome Trump is he talks a better game on immigration, political correctness and the economy than Clinton. I am beginning to very reluctantly accept that by November I could, choking back the vomit in my throat, actually pull the lever for Trump.
John
“Donald Trump is being nominated as a great big “Fuck You!†to leftists like you for your ruthless and tyrannical imposition of your aberrant values and failed policies on America and to conservatives and Republicans like me for failing to stop you. The peasants are in open, and thoroughly irrational, revolt.”
How elitist of you, you supposedly conservative Republican, indistinguishable from your left-wing classmate as the parties are indistinguishable, to call supporters of Trump peasants. Do you really believe it’s only the downtrodden and uneducated who support him? Many very well educated and successful people, sick to death of being played for fools by the progressives and establishment republicans, are hoping this is the change agent we need.
kevreg
Good post. Some people (leftist) have no idea the clock is running out.
kevreg
Or maybe they do.
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