Quote from Sprony34 minutes ago, Sprony said:
When you think about it, those figures are meaningless since the voter turnout is so high... I watched the official numbers 45% of Americans haven't even voted (see that Spreadsheet for the source). The representation is therefore hugely biased and could represent a contrary trend to what it should be. In France for instance, the best result of the extreme right wing were during the municipality election where the turnout was equivalent, but when we have presidential elections it is much less present (around 20% at most) (source: French reliable source and Less reliable Wikipedia article ). Because of that, the extreme wings never pass on at those election and do a little bit better at the ones with high turnout. That could be because the minorities suffer from such a despair they don't want to vote, and that leads to results where only zealous voters go. In those, you can have racist people from minorities, or anti feminist women. They have a flawed view on the world where they think they have to serve men, or that migrants should go back to their country when they are themselves in families who emigrated. The common denominator is often education, and the fact that they do not realize their own position. Like once I talked to a second generation Algerian, and he told me Arab from the magrehb area should go home, but when I told him, his grand parents did exactly that, he told me: "who cares I'm french, they're not? ". He didn't realized that he was indeed french because we let his grand parents stay when they came. Does that help a bit understanding where it could sometimes come from?
In Europe, or at least in some European countries, elitism is looked at as the people who have done a lot of studies or who are rich ( see Farage comments about experts during the Brexit). They think those people are out of touch, even though they're sometimes not, or that they shouldn't, and they don't feel like they're heard. A guy like Trump made them feel heard, and even though he clearly don't give a flying **** about some inequalities issues, people voted for him because they felt like it. I'd have to find that article again, but I read about an analysis of Trump semantics, and he was in a feeling lexical register and not a rational like Clinton, which made people be passionate and not reasoning (that's caricatural I know, but there may be a part of truth lying underneath that generality). Starting from there, his proposition don't matter, because it is in the register passion that it went down.
Then, people might be listening to absurdities like that because they're angry, and they don't think it through, but when they do, they change their mind and don't let it happen. That sound probable at least. It is the same argument as before I admit, how uninnovative of me.
And damn I Wang to use that same argument of feelings and passion for that last part as well, because racism can ne considered as anything but rational. It revolves around fear, desire to be better or even jealousy, feelings related thoughts in summary. And because it is their way of thinking,it is appealing to them!
Truth hurts