“I Voted for Trump…”
"...but I didn't vote for that."

So, last night I did something I rarely do, which is just drop in on Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN. I was wondering if there was any update on the California fires and I was still getting dinner out and while there was no fire coverage at the time I tuned in, there was a story on a small community in Kentucky and the focus of the story was what the effects on the local schools would be if Trump followed through on his promises regarding the Department of Education and federal funding for schools.
The state, of course, heavily voted for Trump (almost 65%) as did the county (I forget which one) in which the school district was located. The correspondent interviewed both a principal and a superintendent. Both talked about how desperately they needed federal funding and how catastrophic it would be if the money dried up.
They both said they voted for Trump and for “conservative values” but both explicitly stated that that when it came to losing federal funds for their schools they “didn’t vote for that.”
I will confess to shouting back at the television (at least twice): “Yes! You did vote for that!”
The principal specifically stated that she simply believed in her heart that Trump would take away the funds, but that she knew Trump would “make America first again” (or something to that effect).
Like a lot of people, these Kentuckians understand their needs and see federal spending on those needs as vital, even if all that other spending is just plain wasteful!
Along the same lines, I noted this Bloomberg headline this morning: A Trump-Voting Farmer’s Warning: Mass Deportations Would Be a Disaster.
He wants to stop illegal border crossings and likes the idea of deporting migrants convicted of serious crimes. But when it comes to Trump’s broader promises to expel all 11 million undocumented people living in the country, DiMare thinks it would be a disaster for American farmers.
“We have to secure our borders south and north, but you have to have a workforce in this country,” said DiMare, whose family has 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) of tomato farms in Florida and California. “There’s no doubt that is going to restrict and put pressure on farming and many other industries that rely on this workforce.”
The entire piece is a run-down pretty much of what anyone who has more than a surface understanding of the issue knows. That is, we are dealing here with a complicated, market-driven situation wherein if the actual promises are kept there will be significant downsides for agriculture.
It is truly amazing to me, but it is all too common, for someone like DiMare to prattle on about securing the border while at the same time wanting to tap into the labor supply created by a porous border.
Here’s my guess: he wants to make sure that all the drugs, terrorists, rapists, and murderers are blocked from entering while ensuring a supply of cheap labor. After all, all those folks picking tomatoes are just a bunch of hard-working individuals willing to work for lower wages. They aren’t a security risk.
Or something.
At a bare minimum, it is worth reminding everyone that if Trump actually does what he promises food prices will go up. (And yes, there is a very real conversation to be had that underscores that exploitation of undocumented labor makes food artificially cheaper than it should be).
Of course, this is all a political science reminder (along with some of the public opinion stuff noted in James Joyner’s post earlier today) that voters aren’t always especially sophisticated about policy and, moreover, they have baskets full of preferences (some of which are contradictory and certainly have different ranks) but only one vote.
Not only do voters have but one vote to cast per office, per election, but there are only two viable parties. That is a lot of ideas, beliefs, preferences, hopes, and the like to shove into one limited set of choices via a very imperfect vehicle for registering what one wants out of government.
And, again, this is how and why someone like Trump can get elected, even as many of his voters tell themselves they didn’t vote for that!
My point is simply something that has been well-known for a very long time: voters have many different, and often contradictory motivations for casting their votes. Further, they often have imperfect (to put it mildly) understandings about how public policy works.
In some ways, this is why democracy sucks, but just sucks less than all the other possible options.
This is why I think that representative democracy, flawed as it is, works best if a system has more parties (making it easier to find a fit between voter preference and their electoral choices) and stronger parties (making it clearer what specific labels mean and how they are likely to perform in office). None of that is a panacea.
It would also be nice if there was more clarity over policy outcome responsibility, but as it stands it is hard to know who is ultimately responsible (federal government, state government, the courts, the House, the Senate, etc.) and so people tend to make very simplistic assumptions about the president’s power.
Any chance the 2024 election might be a teachable moment?
Trump’s lingering as head of the GOP and subsequent re-nomination, despite all his flaws and corruption, is as vivid a demonstration of party weakness we are likely to ever see. His victory in a binary election during an anti-incumbent wave ought to be usable to open the eyes of some of the “I didn’t vote for that” folks as the buyer’s remorse starts to kick in.
Where do I go to sign up to use this next 4 years of misgovernment to push for electoral reform? Seriously, do we know of any activist groups who are working on this?
@Scott F.: It is definitely a teachable moment–but only if people want to learn.
I’m going to point at laugh at every single one of these people, while telling them “Yes. This is EXACTLY what you voter for! Enjoy it, you sad, pathetic, stupid Motherf**ker”.
@EddieInCA:
I hear you.
These are the same voters who watch an Instagram Video where some generic guy or woman wearing a MAGA cap, is walking through a street near Malibu or Palisades, and asks viewers why the lesbian Fire Department Chief let the fire burn the coastal mountains down.
These are the people our parents should have warned us about.
@EddieInCA:
Those are the same people who firmly believe that:
1. Barack Obama is a gay Muslim
2. Michelle Obama is a man
3. Sasha and Malia Obama are rented props
4. Hillary Clinton had JFK Jr. assassinated
5. Joe Biden is a pedophile
6. The “elites” drink children’s blood
7. The Covid vax was meant to depopulate the planet.
It’s not like Trump ran as some kindly old man and hid everything, like Reagan. These people just seem like helpless idiots, and I don’t think more parties or a lack of polarization is going to make matters clearer for them.
They’re the reason why third parties end up forming around cranks who can solve government in three weeks.
@CSK:
[Comment deleted. Not on topic. Not even close. Also, for the love of all that is good and holy, learn what “whataboutism” is. Please.]
@CSK:
Whataboutism BlueAnon firm beliefs.
Trump assassinations were staged and he was never shot.
Trump will die of heart disease and dementia in a year from the current date.
Due progress requires gag orders on the defendants to make the trial fair for the government.
Russia and Starlink changed the vote results.
Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation.
Biden loves and respects the Rule of Law much he would never abuse his pardon power and give his family blanket pardons.
It’s a well established meme. Videos aplenty.
Folks voting for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, and then are subsequently shocked, SHOCKED, that the leopards ate their faces, too.
Be careful of which you wish for.
Putin-puppet Trump, an Epstein-bestie predator and convicted criminal who publicly sexualized his daughter and incited a terror attack on Congress, is moving his inauguration indoors with the billionaire tech bros — leaving his cultists out in the cold with their travel expenses wasted.
This is the perfect metaphor for the next four years.
There’s a sucker born every minute, and they voted for a known con artist. So I hope they get conned. I hope Russian-owned oligarchs Trump and Musk slash and burn the federal spending poor welfare queen red states desperately need. Hardy har har.
@de stijl:
Feel the same about the party that will let your house burn down and then try to stop you from rebuilding it by denying the permits?
@Paul L.: If you’re listing firmly believed fictions, you forgot they believe Biden is still mentally sharp.
@Fortune:
Was Trump ever mentally sharp?
@Paul L.:
I don’t know a single person who believes what you imagine they believe. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
No one voted for Trump or Whoozit because they agree with them on everything, or think they’ll do everything they promised.
@Modulo Myself:
Who needs a third party for that? As of noon Monday, government will be lead by major party cranks President Musk and First Lady Trump, an incompetent loon who once opined that we should nuke hurricanes. And then, that we could cure COVID by injecting disinfectant — when in the midst of leaving the country with record job loss, riots, lockdowns, and bodies being stacked in freezer trucks.
Fortunately, he was replaced by Biden, a statesman whose competence, wisdom, and experience built an economic recovery that even the conservative Wall Street Journal calls the world’s best.
Unfortunately, the patholgically dishonest, narcissistic, rapist crank Trump is back, claiming he will end Ukraine war on day one. Which in his deteriorating mind probably means forcing Ukraine to surrender to Putin like he’s been doing since 2015.
This quote from Michael Clayton. QED
Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer, 13 Jan 2026):
Oops. Another MAGAt, mugged by reality. If only someone had warned the antiwoke mob that Trump’s oligarchs do not care about her — that book-banning Republicans do not support “free speech.”
It’s unlikely a political leader can be significantly better than those who choose to endorse him. Republican voters are dishonest, gullible dimwits. So. Their leader reflects their own moral demerits and defective minds.
The most educated voters have sorted themselves into the more liberal party for a reason. Since the days of Adlai Stevenson, this has been an electoral problem for Democrats.
(And by education, I don’t mean degrees and credentials. My pops never went to college, but he is a devourer of books and knowledge, the most intellectually-curious person I know. He couldn’t wait to say, “I told you so” when I left the GQP.)
@DK:
Didn’t Loomer want to silence everyone who disagreed with Trump?
Reading people like this, it seems like what these Trump voters really voted for was a world in which there are simple answers to all problems. It didn’t seem to matter much to them when they knew this wasn’t the case — as with the farmer with immigrant workers. Trump was telling them the world was simple and Democrats were claiming it was complex, and they chose to believe Trump.
@DK:
The case has been made that Trump followed in Perot’s footsteps, so yeah.
@Fortune:
FWIW, that is part of the point of the OP.
@wr: These voters fell for the okey doke Kamala Harris warned them about. They were propagandized into scapegoating trans woke DEI hire Haitian CRT migrants. So they don’t notice the real force behind their low quality of life are the algorithms, corruption, and slave wages brought to them by the wealth-hoarding, price-gouging, antiwoke rightwingery they vote for.
Same old recycled bait-and-switch LBJ called out sixty years ago:
And the same ole low IQ losers and insecure incels are still falling for it. Only this time — since an increasing number of educated whites have since gotten hip to this evergreen scam — the oligarchs needed to and were able to con a handful more str8 black male sellouts, and a lot more Latino men.
Leave it to Americans to blame the socialism we don’t have for our problems, not the trickle-down voodoo and cutthroat corporatism we do.
Kentucky receives $1.89 for every dollar it sends to the federal government. Trump clearly promised to reduce the federal government. Will this result in fewer dollars available to fund education in Kentucky? Now, I was educated in downstate Illinois that receives about the same ratio of support as Kentucky (unlike the Chicago area that actually pays more than they receive), and thus I am as clueless about the impact of Trump’s stated policies as people in KY.
https://www.farmweeknow.com/policy/state/state-tax-dollars-benefit-downstate-region-more-than-others/article_9207435a-ef0f-11eb-8280-ab69354d438c.html
More parties without eliminating the electoral college, or at very least instituting ranked-choice voting, would be a disaster.
Maine’s execrable governor Paul LePage won the governorship with 38% of the vote when there were FIVE parties on the ballot. He did better four years later, with 48% of the vote with a three-way race. At the national level, it’d be even worse as the electoral college already warps the distinction between popular vote and EC wins (I know both of our hosts know this, and have written about it, I just get irked by the notion that more choices would make much of a difference within our current confines.)
Simply giving people more choices isn’t necessarily a solution.
As far as these “No! I didn’t mean THAT” voters, well, I just DNGAF. Actions have consequences. That IS what they voted for, so they can kindly sit down and enjoy what they’ve brought forth.
@Kurtz:
I loved that movie, Sydney Pollack was perfect in his role.
People ARE incomprehensible
… and … you’re welcome
This is mostly just an expression of Murc’s Law: as Trump voters, they have no agency and thus it is unfair for Democrats to try and hold them responsible for the results of their actions, when it’s really the Democrats responsibility to fix all of this
@wr:
There are few simple big decisions in life.
X will impact Y and Z. And that will ripple through to A and B and C.
If it’s a tough call, engage with treasured fiends and family to work the angles. I think I have enough experience to flatly state “honor your values”. If you don’t, it’ll eat at you consistently.
Honor your values.
Paul L’s response to Steven’s thoughtful essay is a perfect example of Newton’s third law of political discourse: For every well-reasoned and fact-based argument there is an equal and opposite crackpot theory totally untethered from reality.
@Jen:
I would agree that there are a variety of reforms that are needed. The EC needs to go, and we need some version of proportional representation to elect Congress.
Indeed, let’s have it. But let’s talk about the exploitation of wage-slaves, not “exploration”.
@M. Bouffant: It should say “exploitation.” Thanks for noting that.
@a country lawyer: It is both common and exhaustingly annoying.
I blame the filibuster for a lot of this. It has prevented Congress from congressing, so things have more or less strongly favored the status quo no matter what people voted for, so they might as well vote for fun lunatics if nothing will change anyway. Politics just becomes performance art, since policy doesn’t matter.
Drag that forward, and you get people voting for Trump.
@M. Bouffant: I support exploring wage slaves!
Awkward probes for everyone! A chicken in every pot and a probe in every butt!
@Gustopher: Your campaign slogan writes itself: “Anal probes for aliens, not by aliens!”
@Steven L. Taylor:
Agree heartily on EC. It is essentially undemocratic. If you live in Massachusetts and voted for the R presidential candidate, your vote doesn’t count in the outcome. At all. Like with D voters in Alabama. It is as if you didn’t vote. All of the EC votes go to one candidate if they won by a million votes, or by one vote. That is fundamentally unfair and anti-democratic.
Democracies shouldn’t have baked in systems that disregard entire voter cohorts on purpose.
@al Ameda:
I’ve seen that movie many times, as I love it as well. But it has been a while. When I found the clip, I was a little surprised, because I remembered his delivery as more abrasive than it was. Now I need to watch it again to see if that is the only scene he plays like that–pretty sure it is.
Everybody in that movie is so damn good–Wilkinson, Swinton, Clooney. Hell, Merritt Wever stands out in the deposition scene simply for her response to “the cows won’t wait, will they?”
More Pollack:
I also love his performance in The Sopranos. The way he flatly tells Johnny Sack how he went from Oncologist to World’s Smartest Orderly in a prison hospital is perfect.
More seriously addressing the content of the post: this is the kind of “told you so…” that these people are going to get for 0, 2, or 4 years, depending on what happens with Congress. It will be 0 if there’s even a modicum of pushback from 1% of Republicans insisting that, no, in fact that’s not what they were voted in to do. Surely we can find 2 among this crowd willing to point out that reducing services is a Bad Plan. Surely? Or maybe not, as Trump’s thrall is his promise of being wealth-adjacent, so if you want to be wealth-adjacent you’d better get with the program. In that case, in 2 years, barring something drastic I would expect there to be a turn away from Trump’s obviously damaging economic policy – but it will still take 4 years to finally dump the man.
The only real hope is that these people recognize in future elections that the Republican Party is taking away their resources. But these are people who willingly voted for a criminal to trash the economy and their infrastructure so they wouldn’t have to call a trans woman “she”. I don’t expect they’ll figure out that under the classic 3-step Republican plan, Step 2 is always blank.
Well, I think Trump is more relatable to many of them, which to them seems a very sound basis for a vote. I rate relatability (not to me so much as the working-class people I grew up with) very highly in primaries, but not so much in the general.
Of course, there’s more than one way to seem relatable to people, so you don’t have to sound like Trump to do it.
I think what is needed is “X is terrible. We can solve X by doing Y” Then pound that message in as relatable and colorful terms as possible. Irritate people a little. And so on.
As satisfying as “I told you so” is to say, as a political message it is a non-starter. But y’all know that… right?
I understand the general notion that no candidate is going to be 100% in alignment with your policy positions as a voter. But it would be tremendously helpful to recognize that a candidate who is a corrupt, traitorous idiot isn’t going to serve very many people’s interests well. (Not in this country, at least.) And maybe that some of his positions beyond that should be disqualifying even if you agree with some of the others.
The electorate here is in even worse shape than I thought.
@Steven L. Taylor: @Fortune:
The difference between an argument with an aim and person talking just to talk, illustrated. (And, per his response to @Paul L., one who can build a towering efigee out of straw.)
Fortune:
Taylor is not arguing otherwise. You do not demonstrate an understanding of the OP. Not only do you merely reword a point made in it, you do not seem to grasp that the points being made are nuanced, detailed, and specific.
I say this, because your opinions expressed in comments betray a striking similarity to the subjects quoted. The difference:
A farmer can be forgiven for being willfully uninformed about how public policy works; you are a regular commenter on a blog written by scholars of public policy.
Oh, and BTW, I never responded to your last post from an exchange a few weeks ago. Please, tell me what exactly I do not understand about Trump voters or Republicans at large. Granted, I did post that Michael Clayton clip–“people are incomprehensible”–but outside of OTB, most people with whom I spend time are Republicans who voted for Trump. I listen to them to get an idea of what they think and why they think that way without judgment. And they like to hear my point of view as well.
Oh, I can insert yet another quote from Michael Clayton:
Sure, you’re not trying to kill me, and I am not expecting a check from you. But you repeatedly show a failure to understand the people you engage here as if every single one of us has the same views for the same reasons.
I hate to be a one-take pony, but again — these people are casualties of a decades long influence campaign. They are not cognitively equipped to question the conventional wisdom in their local and social communities. They’ve been conditioned to believe through multiple layers of confirmation bias that a ‘return to Christian values’ is the key to broader prosperity. Trump is going to bring back those values–so, from their standpoint, they voted for the greater good. They also know, through multiple layers of confirm bias that the Dept of Ed is evil. Do they have money? Of course, so did Satan when he offered it to Jesus.
Remember, the reason we consider toothpaste and multiple pairs of pants as essential–is marketing. In this Kentucky town there is nothing but confirmation that Pepsi is the superior choice. Coke is preferred by pedophiles, communists, and people that want to destroy good Pepsi-loving communities. All the billboards, churches, barbers, hairdressers, and Pastors are 100% Pepsi. When they long onto Social media, all the cool people are into Pepsi, and there are funny videos memes of ugly and weird coke drinkers talking about the chemistry of the coke formula–Lolz. BTW they also saw videos that confirm Coke politicians hang with Diddy and drink while using coke at their orgies. The crime ridden cities are run by coke drinkers–
Who the eff would pick Pepsi over Coke? (Except degenerates)
@Jay L Gischer:
Ha! Based on what? If American voters were fine with “Haitians are eating cats and dogs” and “Puerto Rico is garbage,” I unlikely “I told you so” will mortify them.
This is not our grandparents’ America, where inciting a terror attack on Congress, mocking a disabled reporter, and calling your daughter a “piece of ass” would’ve been non-starters for a political candidate. The notion Americans have non-starters anymore is quaint at best.
@Kurtz:
The scene where Sydney gives Michael the $80,000, and Barry wants conditions added, and Michael says something like, ‘if I was going to shake anyone down, it would be you.’ Then Sydney moves to stop the hostility, and says something like, ‘Barry is an asshole, he knows it … there you’re both on the record.’ He hands the check to Michael, starts to walk away, stops turns around and says to Michael, ‘you’re welcome.’
Such smart dialogue.
@Kurtz:
I believe that the article and the comments are wrong to emphasize ignorance over calculation. The article does get to preferences, but the comments indicate that the point was lost. Commenters may have different views arrived at in different ways, sure, but EddieInCA, al Ameda, Modulo Myself, DK, CSK, wr, Slugger, Jen, Stormy Dragon, Jay L Gischer, and Jim Brown 32 all expressed some variation on the theme of their opponents being ignorant. Voters don’t act with perfect knowledge, but it’s not all leopards and faces.
@ptfe:
I expect Trump to attempt to govern by executive order and SCOTUS opinion. Some of the potential opinions are scary. Eg, if the Court reverses its previous position (from the 1970s) on presidential impoundment, the Republicans don’t need Congress to pass a lot of budget cuts — Trump and his appointees can simply not spend the appropriation.
@Jim Brown 32:
No doubt. People tend to take things for granted and are shocked, just shocked, when it’s taken away. Brought to mind an old lyric: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
Reality has a way of catching up to us.
@Fortune: Please keep in mind that I worked in Republican politics.
I am SUPER familiar with election tactics.
What we would always say is that “voters are busy.” What went unsaid was most people don’t care about policy, and they don’t want to learn.
@de stijl: In what way are the people who are
surprised and worried that Trump will harm agriculture profits with the immigration policies they favor to keep illegals our of our cities and our schools not honoring their values? The problem is that a lot of us have crappy values.
I’m not surprised mind you, the nation–aspirations of its founding documents notwithstanding–was founded on the principle that not only are “some animals more equal than others,” but also that some animals are only 3/5 of an animal to begin with. This type of crap is hard to drive out of the soul. Fortunately, most of us reject the idea that we have “souls” to begin with, but that doesn’t make the equalization easier.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Most people believe we have souls, including the Founders, which was their basis for believing that we are not just animals, and all have rights. The people who believe we’re just animals tend to be the ones who falter on rights.
@Fortune: You and I clearly live in differently perceived universes.
Pew claims that 83% of the US population believes in the soul. The three largest religions believe in the soul, and account for well over half the world population. The Enlightenment was built on the concept of natural rights, which emerged from Christian thought. Communism was responsible for 100 million deaths and was atheistic. Both Communism and Nazism were influenced by Hegel’s idea of Geist, which was more a world soul than an individual one. Those are all facts.
@Paul L: This is just a stupid take, even for the right. Newsom has suspended the permitting and other similar regulations so that homes can be rebuilt just the way they were, and then burn down again. If you’re going to complain about something, at least complain about reality.
@Jim Brown 32:
I have a thing about people in restaurants who ask whether they serve Coke or Pepsi. Who the hell cares? Order a cola. Back when I drank such things I’d order “diet brown soda”.
My Google foo isn’t up to finding it, but there was a Bloom County episode where characters are arguing Coke/Pepsi and throwing back and forth, “it’s the real thing!”, “The choice of a new generation!” In the last panel a character, IIRC Milo, observes, “They both taste like malted battery acid.”
@Jen:
Nice. Much more understanding than my usual crack that they’re a box of rocks.
@gVOR10: I don’t like any soda pop with sugar in it, so I drink diet if I have a cola. Diet Pepsi is just vile.
@anyone:..human soul…
Where in the human body does a human soul reside?
What is a human soul composed of?
How is a human soul detected?
@Mister Bluster:
Soul is located in either Detroit or Philly. Both? At least is was in the 60s and 70s.
A nice song is Where Soul Meets Body by Death Cab For Cutie. Scruffy, indie rock from the early 2000s.
We might be inclined to ask ourselves: What kind of smucks are we Americans, having recently suffered 4 years of a boastful, empty, shambolic, Trump Presidency, that we would give his catastrophically over-inflated sense of self another run at our trust?
And we keep looking in the wrong places for answers, incorrectly assuming that Americans are focused on the issues of ordinary politics: inflation, the economy, immigration, foreign policy, Healthcare etc. Some do, but apparently for Trump devotees, any expressed interest in these topics is performative.
What draws the faithful to Trump is the power he projects (bigly) and the comfort it provides them as protection against conjured threats, reinforced by three decades of unrelenting conditioning from the Right’s outlets of derision, and bolstered by massive cash reserves.
Trump is a buttress against all they have been programmed to fear most: woke, D.E.I, transgender, E.S.G., communists.
They will take a stand against “woke” before they will take a stand for healthcare, or for education.
But this does not not mean they are against healthcare or education. I have gone toe-to-toe with Trumpsters that have stronger educational credentials than my own, and when we get to the nitty gritty empirical details that blow their argument apart, they default to one of the memes, like “forced sex change.” Bam, argument over. Time and again. I can only conclude, that “substance” is not at issue here.
They don’t really care about inflation:
They don’t really care about immigration:
They don’t really care about the details. And they are vulnerable to a certain kind of messaging that bypasses reason. We have 125 years of American advertising to thank for that.
Decided to check in to see what’s happening on OTB today and see:
Definitely didn’t have “Hegelian Philosophy as an apparent root cause of mass murder and genocide in 20th century” on my bingo card for the day.
Yeah, I am definitely logging out after that one.
For the record, Hegels use of Geist in Phenomenology of the Spirit really has little or nothing to with any concept of the human soul as understood by Christianity (making it different than, say, Goethe use of the same term).
@mattbernius:
I was staying in a little room AirBnb style in somebody’s converted house in Port Antonio, Jamaica in the mid 90s. My neighbors / fellow transient residents were work friends from the Goethe Institute on a group vacation. Good folks.
@Kevin:
@Fortune:..including the Founders, which was their basis for believing that we are not just animals, and all have rights.
All the white men.
@Paul L.: It’s more of a tacit acknowledgement that the permit process was going to get destroyed by an unprecedented amount of applications resulting in extremely unreasonable delays. But yeah sure believe whatever your hobbyhorse demands today.
@Mister Bluster: The Founders struggled with the implication of “all men are created equal”. They didn’t believe that all people are identical, and it would have been a common belief that some people (women, blacks, children) weren’t capable on their own but did have human rights.
@Steven L. Taylor:
@Fortune:
No one voted for Trump or Whoozit because they agree with them on everything, or think they’ll do everything they promised.
Steven: FWIW, that is part of the point of the OP.
I think that what people are pointing out is that there a lot of people who voted for Trump, despite his well-known positions which would deeply affect these people’s interests.
These farmers b*tching about deportation knew both how much they depended on illegal labor *and* that Trump and the GOP’s position was to deport those people.
@Mister Bluster:
Christian, Islamic, and Hindu teachings on the subject tend to conform with Greek philosophy.
The soul is “form”, an animating principle. Ideas have no composition.
It isn’t located anywhere.
Kick a dead guy in the face. Kick a living guy in the face.
@Barry: A person can believe that a Harris administration’s immigration policy would be worse than a Trump administration’s and still not believe or hope that Trump will fully enact his promises.
@Fortune: “Kick a dead guy in the face. Kick a living guy in the face.”
So to you, the definition of “soul” is identical to the definition of “life.”
In that case, sure, we’re all breathing here, so we all have “souls,” so you win. Yay you.
On the other hand, you have now defined the definition of “soul” so far down it has no meaning. According to you, every single living thing has a soul, including plants.
But I suppose that’s no more meaningless than the pile of sentences you used to start this part of the conversation. Not since Bart Simpson delivered his famous report on Libya have we seen so many vaguely repeated factoids strung together to pretend to make a point.
“They called it maize.”
I live out in the sticks. We have pretty minimal building regulations but we still have some. If there is a disaster and a tornado hits or a house burns down they largely waive the regs. That is actually pretty common across the country and in California. I think LA has regs that are too restrictive so I wouldn’t want to live there, however housing costs are high there showing that most people are willing to pay a lot of money to live there and are willing to live with the regs.
Steve
@wr: I’m trying to condense 2600 years of thought into five sentences so yeah, the flow might not be perfect. If you reread my first reply to “Just nutha ignint cracker”, you’ll see I’m addressing three statements he made: 1 most people don’t believe in souls, 2 the Founders didn’t believe in natural rights for all, and 3 those who don’t believe in souls have a better track record on rights than those who do. All that and I’m genuinely trying not to hijack the thread, those points were just too important to leave unanswered.
@DK: Seriously, DK, do you think someone will suddenly go, “Oh, thank you for telling me “I told you so”. I see the light now! It has changed my life!”
Honestly, my therapist is often right and she never, ever engages in “I told you so”.
There are message about what to do next that embed a change of course, which can be read as an admission of error. But I’ve never seen any advantage at all in pointing that out. If they say anything, it’s more like “yeah, let’s give this a shot.”
@Fortune:
For extended periods in our history, it appears that our Christian God didn’t have soul, or have a soul.
Why would a loving Christian God, one with a soul, do nothing while Stalin murders millions of Russians, or while Hitler murdered millions of Jews?
@Fortune: So here also is some philosophy. The concept of “belief” is buttressed by element of action. Said differently, ‘belief’ is an amalgamation of thoughts and behavior.
Since you take the idea of the concept of the soul as belonging to the world of forms–we can conclude that you acknowledge a hierarchy of ideas. Meaning, ideas adjacent to ‘soul’ are not in same pantry as, say, the idea of ‘government’ and it’s adjacent ideas.
Wrapping those conclusions up with our historical understanding of ‘belief’ we would natural expect to observe behaviors, behaviors not of a common category that would confirm belief in common ideas , but behaviors of an all together different category.
It’s pretty clear that 83% of Americans are not engaged in that different category of behaviors that affirm their belief in a soul. If fact, the overwhelming majority of people professing to believe in higher ideals spent most of their waking day pursing means of survival, physical gratification, and status. Logically, we can conclude they don’t ‘believe’ in a soul at all. They ‘believe’ in their own perishable bodies and the status of themselves and their identified tribes.
TLDR: To surmise there is a soul is not to believe there is one–philosophically speaking
So many leopards… so many faces.
Hey… remember when “draining the swamp” was a thing?