This is something coastal Democrats still don't understand. They only see the culture war aspect of Trump and fail to see that his platform was mostly an economic argument.
His
primary platform. As a president, he was a bog standard republican who didn't really do anything to expressly help those sorts of people; rather, he simply discarded onerous obama-era executive orders, which was a boon to just about any and every business. As a result that core of his primary, which had a sharp and distinct vision that at times would find itself agreeing often on certain topics with progressives, left him.
That core is the sort of core that you can see for other figures like Bolsonaro, Orban, Duterte, and Duda: in favor of large government and large government spending, just only on certain things. Marked difference from the Reagan core, and largely pushed for foreign policy and domestic infrastructure refreshes not too different from Saint Bernard Sanders himself. Trump made many homages towards those things, and realistically did nothing to their advantage; and in some cases, he even engendered the opposite. The Keystone pipeline originally passed certification when republicans didn't even control Congress, just lacking the votes to override Obama's veto. Instead of bringing said certification up again and passing it in congress, Trump's desire to look like he was fulfilling campaign promises led him to enable it through an executive order... leaving it vulnerable to being yanked out if he didn't win again. The working-class base took note, even if the middle-class howler monkeys laid the blame exclusively at Biden's feet.
Trump's votes numerically (discrete and %) in 2016 were smaller than what he brought in in 2020, and he was against a far more genuinely unlikable opponentthen. That's because he replaced the rust belt workers of his primary with gated-community culture warriors. You might recognize some of them - they're what explains
this bit of exit polling. They're well-off, generally exurban, and are the font of "pwn the libs." Their political beliefs can best be summarized as "things are different and I don't like it." They were well off in 2008. They were well off in 1992. They were well off in 1972. They're the neocons with a new coat of paint, because the only reason they were neocons was because everyone else was doing it.
There is so, so much performative politics coming out of that party as the vultures swoop in to try to claim a position as Trump's anointed heir whenever he steps out of politics - bills passed and media firestorms all doing nothing, just so we can get some soundbites to pwn the libs. The demographic that raised him up is getting fucked over as they always have been, and the corpos are running as rampant over everyone as they always have. For all the screeching about social media, lacking any real ideological persuasion about the purpose of speech or government's use of regulation on such industries has led a whole lot of the ascendant right to argue with the highest flourish for the equivalent of having to enter a date of birth before looking at a whiskey brand's website.
But we danced that dance before, and as soon as the marxists were empowered they spun on their heels and declared anything they disliked 'hate speech'. That's the problem.
name one thing even remotely like twitter or facebook in all the history of the first amendment, and explain to me exactly how mccarthyism, blasphemy laws, and decency laws didn't already actually violate the first amendment versus private companies doing #justprivatecompanythings
you can go call jamal a niggerfaggot over on gab, and if you attach your name to it, you'll still face social repercussions. I know it might seem hard to believe, but genuine neo-nazis and genuine commies have dealt with this kind of shit for almost a century without crying nearly as much as some guys upset that the professional world isn't xbox live.
yeah, tranny shit is hard to contradict anywhere - because trannies have money and influence, and people are retarded. Kinda like when you just had to say that DnD was turning everyone into satanists when the flower children turned to god and still had plenty of cash-money to fund the world's jack thompsons. And who could forget the climate Zappa had to push back against, where those same flower-children-cum-christians had a government-regulation-based axe to grind with musicians? oh yeah people who never knew about it
and the last limb i've seen people complaing about "there's no point in supporting free speech..." concerns the fact that they couldn't cope with the fact that they fell for actual misinfo because it hurt their self-image. people bitching that the various media platforms "selectively removed conservative content as fake news" use that as a predicate to say that there's no use in caring about free speech... which might have a little more gravitas if not for the fact that people were pushing outright falsehoods, en masse. I remember a dude going frame by frame over a video that went viral with THEY'RE CHANGING THE VOTES FROM REPUBLICAN TO DEMOCRAT, SEE!!!!!! and the video itself showed them... copying ballots that were being rejected for one reason or another, with identical markings between the two ballots. He pointed this point, and thennnnnnnn everyone else proceeded to seethe and cope and say he was lying or that he doctored the footage because they were too retarded to boot up a video editing software and check the frames themselves. and then there were the invented powers of pence to throw the election out on january 6th which find no succor in the constitution, but that's OK because it isn't like anyone that shared that shit had ever fucking read the constitution, etc etc etc.
the "new" right has never cared about free speech, because they can't identify the concept and are largely just first-time political neophytes who can't even can't even their first political loss. i could use spoiler tags to make this smaller but this is already the shitposting zone of the webzone
