Really? Well…Sticking to Trumpian racism…
Think of a person who doesn’t have much going for him and really feels bad about that. Maybe he didn’t get into college, maybe he flunked out. Maybe he’s had trouble holding down a job, and he knows deep down that it’s his fault. Maybe the only reason he has a job is help from his parents, and he knows he couldn’t cut it on his own.
Maybe he’s never known how to attract others, how to make friends. Maybe he feels people don’t like him or respect him, and deep down he wonders if they’re right not to.
He’s never had love, and certainly hasn’t had the sex he’s seen in movies. Maybe he married the first and only woman who would have him, and maybe he’s always felt she somehow wasn’t good enough — maybe he thinks no one who would accept him is good enough, or maybe he’s a total no-hoper who still doesn’t understand why the prom queen didn’t love him back in high school even though he never spoke to her, or who thinks Kim Kardashian would love him if she only met him. Maybe his wife left him, inexplicably saying he was angry.
Or maybe it’s all in his head — maybe he’s just fine, but it’s never enough to assuage his self-doubt. He may lift weights, work hard, save money, dress fashionably, whatever it is that he thinks matters, and still he feels that he’s out of place. Maybe he overcompensates, bragging and posing to try to impress others, and so he only alienates them further and feels worse.
Either way, he stalks around his lonely home, glowering and imagining telling off or beating up the people who humiliate him in his imagination. With my money (that he may or may not actually have) I will buy and sell you! With my handgun and katana collections I will slay you all when you come after me! My local sports team will crush yours! He watches Rocky II and III and the Dirty Harry movies and gets angry when nonwhites are cast in Star Wars retreads. Meanwhile the pizza boxes stack up on his countertops.
Now, what happens when such people are offered a story to believe in where these feelings, these circumstances are not their fault? Where the fault of someone he doesn’t know, who’s easy to identify by sight?
The story goes like this: Hey, you are NORMAL and the rightful heir to this kingdom. You are a white, Christian man (or whatever the local standard is). George Washington was a white, Christian man like you, so you share credit for everything he did. That anguish you feel one hour into your five-hour shift at Wal-Mart is the feeling of hard work — in fact, you are a hard-working hero who built America, not a lazy half-wit like your manager thinks.
So why don’t you have more than you do?
Because THOSE people took what was meant for you, goes the story. Brown Spanish speakers swam the Rio Grande and somehow took the job you really deserve. That incredibly handsome black man with the incredibly beautiful blonde woman – how’d that happen? It’s unnatural, she must be a horrible slut who just wants black dick, like you saw on Pornhub. Those Orientals who think they’re so smart, making all that money just because they got good grades and went to good colleges and worked their way up while you were watching TV like the other normal people — can’t everyone see that they’re short and their language sounds funny? Has everyone forgotten the natural order of things?
The guys described above will JUMP at this story, which makes them good and even heroic just for their demographics, which gets them off the hook for all their failures, which gives them a vent for all their pent-up emotions, which may even give them a hope of turning things in their favor. Cheer for Trump and he’ll build that wall, he’ll insult everyone who’s not like you, he’ll grab the pussies you’d like to grab and never say he’s sorry.
And that will matter so much to these guys that they’ll believe ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING to keep believing it. It’s a religion in that way.
They will even believe “coronavirus is a hoax,” “coronavirus is the fault of THOSE PEOPLE,” and “THOSE PEOPLE are wrong about coronavirus, but we’re hard-working heroes who AREN’T AFRAID!”
Short version: people are shit.