Oh, yeah. Republicans don't care about anyone who isn't white, Christian, straight, and wealthy. Anyone else can pound sand, according to today's Republican. Also Republican's are traitors to this nation. They embrace Putin, a war criminal.
Republicans are evil, plain and simple.
No. They're not. They're ordinary people like you or I. For the most part
they're victims of decades of deliberate propaganda campaigns and 'wedge issue' politics, structurally generated by a two party system heavily beholden to a donor class of billionaires and mega corporations who (unsurprisingly) would much rather that the big divisive 'issues' in politics be about comparatively trivial matters like immigration, guns, CRT etc. etc. than about climate change, inequality, corporate power and the world-eating system of current capitalism.
We've agglomerated an incredibly complex civilization around ourselves such that few if any can really have a full appreciation of everything going on in society and the world at large, so
we all turn to simplifying heuristics (eg. 'trust the experts,' 'trust the preachers,' 'fight the power,' 'fight the commies') to try to construct a coherent narrative/worldview for ourselves, and unfortunately those with conservative tendencies have been fed and are more inclined to believe narratives which are wrong more often than they're
righ correct. In the long run that's resulted in an echo chamber effect - and would have even in strictly business model terms, though exacerbated by political interests - in which Fox (for an obvious example) in catering to those tendencies has reinforced and therefore
created an increased demand for an even greater bias in coverage and content.
More and more over the past three years I think it's absolutely imperative that every sensible person start trying to understand this relatively straightforward analysis of how such a shocking and deep epistemic divide has split the USA (and increasingly other countries too):
> Two parties serving a billionaire class
> Wedge issue politics as diversion from more serious issues
> Everyone's use of various simplifying heuristics to help us 'understand' our incredibly complex world
> Heuristic mechanisms co-opted and cyclically reinforced in service to one 'side' of those divisive/diversionary wedge issues
Dismissing the 'other side' as simply evil is not only inhumane and a little unfair - not to mention doing exactly the same thing as they are claiming against you - but most importantly it is
actively playing into the hands of the divide-and-rule strategy which is probably the biggest cause of all of these symptoms to begin with. And that's truly sad, because if there were any faint glimmer of hope over the past decade it's that Trump's "drain the swamp" rhetoric - however cynically self-serving - actually appealed to people... conservatives who on some level are just as sick of the billionaire dog and pony show as many on the left.
