Life is about tradeoffs
8 March 2024
Life is about tradeoffs. Contrary to Adele’s song, Rolling in the Deep, we cannot “have it all”. All we can do is make the best decisions at the time, recognizing that each choice has positive and negative consequences.
In today’s political world, many voters make choices based primarily on emotions. We like a candidate or a party and it makes us feel good to support them. Politicians and political parties take advantage of this and say things to accentuate these feelings. But ultimately, our society is shaped by the actions these public officials take, not how they make us feel.
For example, rural Americans tend to be Trump / Republican Party (GOP) supporters. In ‘White Rural Rage,’ reviewed in the Washington Post, authors Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman examine why so many remain loyal to a party that does little to help them:
“there is no demographic group in America as loyal to one political party as rural Whites are to the GOP that gets less out of the deal.” By less, they mean policy prescriptions — stuff that might better their lives. What these voters do get from Republicans, the authors argue, is someone to stoke their rage — to fuel its flame from a bottomless stack of cultural kindling. Republicans long ago figured out that it is really the blue yonder that makes rural White voters see red. Exacerbate the villainy in that city-country divide and you have yourself some dependable voters.
Many GOP and Trump supporters are aligned with policies that are NOT in their best interest, in part because Trump and the GOP feed into their emotions. But these voters can expect to suffer if their political choices prevail because they are voting against their interests. Rationally, few Americans should support Trump or the GOP:
As Jennifer Rubin says about Trump:
If, like right-wing media and MAGA true believers, you favor tax cuts for the rich, repealing the Affordable Care Act, banning Muslims, deporting dreamers, letting Russia grab Ukraine, refusing to pass reasonable gun laws and forcing rape victims to carry their rapists' child to term, he's your man.
My view is that the only groups that rationally should support Trump or the GOP, because they are promoting their interests, are:
white men who are heterosexual, Christian, nonimmigrants and wealthy,
whose life is focused on resentment, revenge and retribution, and who are
indifferent to treating people with decency, dignity and respect; indifferent to bigotry; indifferent to democratic values; indifferent to the rule of law and indifferent to Russian aggression and standing up to America’s adversaries.
Anyone else will be directly harmed in a major way by the policies of Trump and the GOP.
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