David , you hit the nail right on the head. The MAGA people are not just uninformed or misinformed but in my opinion seem to have had their brains scrambled. Brainwashed. Was Orwells 1984 a prophecy?
I also have friends and family that I can't have a reasonable dialogue with because they have drank the Trump koolaid. Dave I have been a registered Republican all my adult life ,I'm 79, and that party is gone and has been replaced by the Trump party which I will never support.
To me, all of this is indicative of how personal politics has become in this country with the demise of what used to be a sense of community, locally centered. We've so internalized what we process from the information sources we choose, that an attack, because that's how it perceived, whether on Trump or Biden (or how we identify based on our current culture) is a personal attack on us. It no longer matters that the vast majority of us have never met or had any kind of "real" relationship with the people or entities with with we now associate. It's intimately a part of us such that to concede any point is to admit we're terrible people. It's akin to having a dear relative accused of a monstrous crime and then having to defend them against the accusations. It's not going to be an academic discussion.
We don't argue politics anymore; these are personal statements of identity.
The bigger question is how we get out of this cycle.
David , you hit the nail right on the head. The MAGA people are not just uninformed or misinformed but in my opinion seem to have had their brains scrambled. Brainwashed. Was Orwells 1984 a prophecy?
I also have friends and family that I can't have a reasonable dialogue with because they have drank the Trump koolaid. Dave I have been a registered Republican all my adult life ,I'm 79, and that party is gone and has been replaced by the Trump party which I will never support.
To me, all of this is indicative of how personal politics has become in this country with the demise of what used to be a sense of community, locally centered. We've so internalized what we process from the information sources we choose, that an attack, because that's how it perceived, whether on Trump or Biden (or how we identify based on our current culture) is a personal attack on us. It no longer matters that the vast majority of us have never met or had any kind of "real" relationship with the people or entities with with we now associate. It's intimately a part of us such that to concede any point is to admit we're terrible people. It's akin to having a dear relative accused of a monstrous crime and then having to defend them against the accusations. It's not going to be an academic discussion.
We don't argue politics anymore; these are personal statements of identity.
The bigger question is how we get out of this cycle.