The same way Trump's making everything else go away right now: Lift all the boats.
Why would you need black/white/asian/hispanic pandering from a candidate promising you X when you're already financially stable? Why would you need to vote for Socialist policies when you've already got money in the bank, so all they can effectively do is yank your money away with taxes? Why would you need to vote for a politician promising to put an end to American wars if all the wars have already ground to a stop? Why would you want to vote for a politician who wants to reform the prison system if it's already been reformed? What would the sense be in voting for a politician promising better trade deals if the USMCA already took care of it?
Because of
Maslow's Hierarchy. Once you've got your basic needs taken care of, you start looking for belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Politicians have stopped selling workable policies and are now selling a sense of community, of status, and of self-actualization.
That's the really insidious thing about the way the left has been framing "racism" recently. It's not enough that things are improving for everyone; the current outcomes are unequal, and that means there is institutionalized racism/patriarchy/bigotry/whatever that needs to be dealt with. They have insulated their ideological stranglehold against things getting worse
and things getting better, because things will never be perfect and therefore The Fight must carry on.
It's not enough that black kids can get the education they need and their parents can get jobs; they are underperforming whites, and that means there is a Black Issue. If your candidate doesn't address Black Issues, they are
racist. It's not enough that women have been fully accepted in the workplace and can pick any career path--they are only 30% of company executives, and therefore you must vote for the candidate who Fights For Women(TM). And so on.
Rich white college graduates are not voting for Socialism because they are suffering, they are voting for socialism because they are told
others are suffering, and they feel bad about it, and they are told socialism is The Good Thing which will make the Bad Things go away. The middle class is voting for socialism because the Socialists promise
they won't be the ones paying the taxes, it will be those rich white fools. The lower middle class may have their lot improved, but they haven't gotten over the stability shock of 2008, and the Socialists are the ones promising to secure their future. And the poor want Socialism for obvious reasons, no matter how many jobs get created.
Whether people have noticed it or not, Trump's been methodically chipping away at the biggest reasons to even want to vote for anyone else. He's cleaving away at all of the platforms that career politicians have been exploiting for decades, which is why so few of them even want to talk about the economy, it's why you haven't heard a fucking peep about North Korea for more than a year, and why ISIS never makes the headlines these days, and why you don't really hear about the opioid epidemic anymore.
And yet the TDS documented in this thread continues to increase. Impeachment is not a distant memory, it was
last week.
Scott Adams is morbidly correct when he says we now live in a world where facts don't matter. Trump was a racist homophobic alt-right pussy grabber who would start WW3 and end Medicare. The fact that none of this turned out to be true is irrelevant to the question of who you will vote for. You can't go back on that stance without acknowledging serious flaws in the way you describe the world, and if your have personalized politics to the degree the left has, then destroying your ideological worldview is destroying your very identity.
No matter how much better off they are now, people will not destroy their identity to vote for Trump. They'll rationalize it as "growing stronger under oppression", and hey, what a coincidence, their side values such Stunning And Brave victimhood stories as the last remaining form of virtue.
If everyone in every community has a good job and the U.S. isn't going to war, there's not a whole lot of people left to pander to. One of the biggest reasons that they're all stuck in this "Orange Man Bad" loop is because there ain't a whole lot fuckin' else left for them to talk about, and that list is getting smaller by the day.
You
vastly underestimate the power of pandering. If it didn't work, politicians wouldn't do it.
