Here are 3 science-backed strategies to rein in election anxiety
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People make this suggestion regularly and I always wonder: how, exactly?
I like to think I'm an amiable kind of guy. On a personal level, I'll have a beer with pretty much anyone. Or we can skip the alcohol and just have some snacks. Whatever.
But at least on the political level, the other side is doing its damnedest to make anyone who wants to "compromise" abase themselves by crawling through broken glass first. What exactly should we build bridges on, our shared hate of foreigners? We don't share that. If you want to deconvert someone from a cult, you have to actually separate them from the cult. I don't have that ability, certainly not against their will.
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Yes, there are some guides on exit counselling ("deprogramming" is a different, much more violent and less successful, thing). Do you know what they say? That it takes an enormous amount of work and an extremely long time to deprogram even one individual who you already have a relationship with; that it probably shouldn't even be attempted by someone who isn't specifically trained in the field because there's a high risk of backfiring; and even then, it is often unsuccessful, especially if the cultist doesn't want to change. It is a good thing to do, if you have the skills and resources, for a loved one who needs help. It is not a population-level response to fascism.
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If it's a small group, it's a cult. If it's a large group, it's culture (or religion).
I only know of a few ways to change a culture. Whether it's firing a bunch of people, or letting them die off from old age, they all involve getting rid of enough people that a different culture can take over.
I should hope that the lack of options is merely due to my ignorance, though.
I only know of a few ways to change a culture. Whether it's firing a bunch of people, or letting them die off from old age, they all involve getting rid of enough people that a different culture can take over.
I should hope that the lack of options is merely due to my ignorance, though.
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A heck of a waste if Trump wins. Who in the heck has the answer for post-election Trump victory?
Not to mention post-election Trump election denial, riots, insurrections. Because the only person at that point who might be able to save us from Trump's treason, by exercising presidential immunity, is refusing to act. At least that's what he's been saying.
Someone on the Trump team needs to whisper in the Great Pumpkin's ear that it's time to move to that dacha on the Black Sea Putin promised him in exchange for the destruction of democracy. Maybe he'll believe it and run away. Nobody should stop him. Let him go.
Not to mention post-election Trump election denial, riots, insurrections. Because the only person at that point who might be able to save us from Trump's treason, by exercising presidential immunity, is refusing to act. At least that's what he's been saying.
Someone on the Trump team needs to whisper in the Great Pumpkin's ear that it's time to move to that dacha on the Black Sea Putin promised him in exchange for the destruction of democracy. Maybe he'll believe it and run away. Nobody should stop him. Let him go.
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Guess you haven't figured out the guard rails that saved us last time are a lot fewer and farther between this time. He learned his lesson, and he's ready to go full dictator, because the alternative is dying in jail.
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The Sheep Look Up
Ars Praetorian
It was downright uncanny how many Germans weren't Nazis. Five minutes after Hitler won the prize for killing Hitler, everyone had just been doing their national duty under duress and never believed in all that ideological stuff. Same thing with French collaborators, couldn't find one for trying. Also the Stasi and their informants -- first sledgehammer hits the Berlin Wall, we've all hated the Stasi all along. On those last two, it's a good thing that - unlike the US Army in the case of the first example - the resistance, partisans, leftists, anarchists, etc had an attention span of greater than five minutes. The Stasi records were retrieved before they could be burned, French collaborators had a bad time.
If the fever ever breaks, if MAGA does become a universal derogatory, watch how quickly "mainstream" "conservatives" and Republicans disavow the whole thing. They were never truly MAGA, they just voted R for reasons. Economic anxiety! Tradition! They weren't trying to empower a fascist demagogue hell-bent on dictatorial rule and his frothing paramilitary garbage scow of hardcore racists and white christian nationalists. Perish the thought!
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The GOP and especially Trump's ability to turn ignorant and often previously non-political people into political zealots is astounding.
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Fear may be the most powerful emotion. The Right has used this fact to its advantage forever. "You don't understand it, fear it." Fear has now imprisoned folks at both political extremes, and has been working its way insidiously toward the center. When "they" and "them" no longer appear human to those who oppose, the guns come out.
Good luck, all. Flame away on any who dare to suggest communication is more important than ever. I'm going to keep on listening and talking, seeking common ground with anyone I can. Doesn't mean I agree with the MAGA folk. It's just that, regardless of election outcomes, they will still be here. And I will still be here. And if I am unable to recognize the humanity in my neighbor, I cannot expect them to see it in me.
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I think their answer is that they've been trying this for a couple of decades, even back in times when potential communication channels hadn't yet evaporated almost entirely. It's not only the communication channels that have gone, it seems like there's no shared reality, not even a shared vocabulary anymore.
in a way it's truly impressive what has been accomplished (although it's an open question how much is the result of tireless work to make this happen, and how much is self-propagating). Demagogue dictators used to need a firm grip on society before they could fuck up a nation this way, and now with the new tech it almost happens all by itself, almost TOO easy.
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I'm not amiable at all, so I might not be the right one to ask.
I think ideally, you connect on a non-political level. You have shared hobbies, or friends, or relatives. You share pictures of your cats and kids on facebook. You invite people over for dinner, drink a beer, watch sports. You try to be decent. You try not to push buttons. If someone isn't decent towards you, then you don't have to keep it up. You don't need to get into politics at all, necessarily. Just existing as a fellow human being is something.
If you -do- get into politics. Try to pick your battles-- assuming you disagree on literally everything-- abortion, climate change, schools, taxes, lgbtq, immigration, religion, foreign policy, vaccines-- pick what matters most. And yeah, try to meet people halfway. "eg. I don't like illegal immigrants flooding into America either. We can talk about solutions that don't involve militarized camps????" Honestly a lot Trumpkins don't embrace a lot of extremist notions, they just are positive that Democrats are the devil, so they go along with the opposite, which doesn't make talking to them fun, but it is easy to disown strawmen.
I don't think there's much you can do for a hard core trumper, or really anyone who watches Fox regularly. But I do think there's some people who live in Trumpville who could be swayed if they ever met a moderate.
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Agreed, but that presumes that MAGA steps so far over the line as to be a universal derogatory. Given that happening, of course people will disavow it.
That's exactly where a bunch of R's are now, of course. Except without the sarcasm.
The vast majority of people in both parties aren't well informed. Many are mis-informed. Naturally, both sides will claim that the other is mis-informed, but at the very least everyone can agree that most R's and D's are informed differently than each other.
According to the info that R voters consume, Trump is somewhere between ok and awesome. He says a lot of crazy shit, but he doesn't mean it literally. Or it's been pulled out of context. Or, you know, all rich people do that kind of stuff.
I'm not going to "both-sides" this. Republicans hold their politicians to much lower standards. Scandals which would have Democrats expelling someone from office are just Tuesday to Republicans. That's because they're told that they aren't really scandals, and they believe it. Right-wing media is accepting of some really awful shit, so long as their bread keeps getting buttered, and that tolerance-of-terrible means that folks like my Trump-voting parents living in Podunk, Oklahoma never even hear about stuff like the Access Hollywood tape. Just not reported, haven't a clue what it is.
So to get to that "MAGA does become a universal derogatory" state, the sources which Rs trust would need to start talking about how bad MAGA ideals are. Constantly. Just like the 'liberal media' does. They'd all have to do it at once, too, because if just one news org strikes out in that direction alone, they'd quickly lose customers (advertisers) and viewers.
To fix politics, we need to fix the information that people consume. But the vast majority of information is only consumed as entertainment, so people won't switch to anything that disagrees with them.
The right wing media has dug a hole by spinning and spinning and auguring in. They couldn't get out of it now if they wanted to (and they don't want to).
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Ok. I didn't account for some readers not being acclimatised to traditional British understatement. When I said it was alarming from across the Atlantic, that may be translated as OMFG! This could be an absolute disaster for the entire Western world. The article still gives some good advice on how to look after your mental health in stressful times.
Putin and (to a greater or lesser extent) Xi meddle like hell, be that as part of global politics and a desire to increase their power, or perhaps from a desire to hurt the Western world. Some US thinkers and their influential backers do their own meddling - this is those who believe in the absolute freedom of the wealthy. They hate all effective government, seeing government and intergovernmental cooperation as a threat to that freedom, because a democratic locus of power is capable of restraining even the most powerful of individuals. An aim of such meddling, by anyone, is to create FUD, highlight extremes, and set the population against each other. Encourage them to tear themselves apart, sound familiar?
The rest of this is somewhat me pissing into the wind. It is not aimed at the poster I'm replying to, I don't really expect anyone to read it or agree but maybe...
I think the US shat the bed in its response to 6 Jan 2020. Yes, it was slightly relieving to see how unorganised and generally useless those who stormed your capital building were, and a blessing there were so few deaths, but it was still a warning shot that should have been heeded. Those responsible should have felt the full legal weight of the federal government fall on them from a great height, sentencing the gullible nutters alone was far from sufficient action. I assume the powerful were not pursued because bipartisan support could not be summoned and a fracturing of your country was feared. In my view, it was a mistake not to take robust action. I also think any politician who did not immediately repudiate Trump and also repudiate those politicians who supported his attempt to overturn the election committed treason in spirit, creating and exposing a real weakness in the power structures of your society that remains open to exploitation. I think it is a mistake now for the Democrats to be playing politics as usual, winding up their supporters to increase their vote while risking failure by trying to install a candidate based on internal party politics and not who has the most chance of electoral success. Aside from anything else, that can buttress a sense that 'those in the know don't see it as all that serious'.
None of the above changes the fact that thinking of the tens of millions of Trump voters as a monolithic them and ascribing the worst characteristics of the insane portion of MAGA to them all is not a path to a solution. In some lights, it is little different to those on the right who think the same about 'the libs'. Outreach and communication isn't about giving way or saying 'both sides are at fault', it is a way of using human connection to reduce 'them or us' thinking which, unrestrained, leads to horrific outcomes on a national scale.
If you don't want to engage in outreach, at least stop fanning the flames that threaten to burn you. Let go of the hyperbole and remember that most Trump voters are people just like you. I believe ordinary people are the overwhelming majority of your 'enemy' because I can't believe that tens of millions of US voters are maliciously insane. Media and social media successfully spread the lies, by all means use the same propaganda tactics as a vector to address them, but those who think of themselves as being on the right side must recognise shared humanity and break bread with those whose views you oppose. That excludes the minority who are beyond reach. The MAGA extremists, race war mongers, the authoritarian religious zealots, those who seek to overturn democracy, and those who just want to watch the world burn. They should be pulled down, ridiculed, and marginalised using every tool available. As for the apparently nihilistic media and social media moguls profiting from stoking the flames on both sides, I'm not sure how to effectively address them and their power, but I think it must be addressed.
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It's too dangerous for Biden to act if that is what you are referring to. Trump would accuse it of being politically motivated and it would give the other side an excuse to do what they're already hankering to do. Not that they necessarily need it but it can't help.
I could accept it as necessary maybe if the justice system wasn't already working on the problem. Trump is being sentenced after the election. It is possible he could go to prison. They will accuse Biden of being behind that, of course, but it won't be true which matters to enough people still on both sides.
Not 100% of Republicans are in the cult or even Trump voters. Many are deluded, uneducated, or apathetic. Many also still respect the justice system. If it comes from the Biden administration directly they risk what is left of that respect. And that matters when the goal is to lock the motherfucker up and throw away the key.
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Uh, Trump is the one fanning the flames. He is the only one who can stop that. There is a time for everything, including rage, when it's in response to atrocity, and that is what they have lined up.
Sure I recognize the humanity in Maga. The Nazis were human. Humanity is ugly. It may not be nice to call them garbage but they chose this to the extent any of us can choose. It isn't the same as calling people garbage because of innate traits. Yes, garbage. They chose it. If Trump is elected it is too late to go back. Too late to reach out.
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It feels like you were trying to say something coherent, but instead are having a stroke.
That's the charitable assumption at least.
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As a guy not living in the US, I wish the Arsians were the ones to determine the election.
Please vote and good luck. The world needs you to be sane.
Please vote and good luck. The world needs you to be sane.
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This gave me the idea that our civilisation is just a bunch of nested self-propagating one-direction self-destruction dolls. Climate change is the outer doll, But once inside that one, things obviously split up instead of nesting, as well. But there's the MAGA doll, with the Anti-Science doll within it, which contains the Antivax doll, which contains the child mortality barbie.
Etc etc.
It's a shitty analogy, that breaks down the moment you think for 5 seconds. Still proud of it, lol.
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You're being downvoted handsomely, and a colorful way to express why (I think), would be: "All good and well, but how am I supposed to calm down a dog with rabies?"
I like dogs, I don't want to hurt dogs, especially not if their problem is not of their own making.
But that still doesn't explain HOW it could be done, even if I wanted to, without both of us potentially dying in the act.
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Despite my referring to Trump supporters as being indoctrinated in a cult, the spiral of right-wing media is not the same as rabies. I'm under no more delusion that changing minds is easy than anyone else - indeed, I'm not suggesting that the ardent Trumpists can have their minds changed significantly at all, although I think it's bad to lump them in with undecided voters who happen to vote Republican (no matter how angry we may be at their willingness even to consider it).
People are struggling financially (from the fall out of COVID, from climate change, from the costs of involvement in world events, because people are always struggling). The economy looked better under Trump, although not obviously from him doing anything, especially since (as Ars noted) many tariffs haven't kicked in yet. People without education in global politics or how finance works (apparently including Trump) think the presidency is responsible. Desperate people like keeping fuel prices lower and current jobs in place in the short term no matter the long term consequences - which is why, world wide, it's taken so long for politicians to do anything at all on climate change. There are more people entering the US under the current presidency than Trump's, and if you see those people as a threat (at least to your finances) rather than desperate humans fleeing persecution, you could argue Trump is prioritising stopping them, albeit without a very workable plan.
Those are semi-legitimate concerns which are making people vote Republican; if someone even half believes some of the right-wing media stories (and I'm sure the left-leaning media is at least legitimately guilty of downplaying or ignoring some stories, if not to the same extent) they could be considered to be voting rationally. Dismiss those concerns and they'll keep voting Republican, and soak up the right wing echo chamber until they do end up like those convinced Trump is their saviour.
Some levels of delusion can be challenged; some positions can be shifted, some priorities can be changed, some preconceptions can be overruled. Not for everyone, and not about everything. But not by confirming every right-wing media claim that liberals are irrationally against everything that a moderate/borderline Republican might stand for.
It's hard to get past preconceptions or overrule a narrative. If it weren't, I'm sure the Democratic campaign would have been doing a better job of it. If someone is terrified that you're going to come for them and everything they believe in, of course it's hard - and sometimes dangerous - to communicate. Especially in a country where people are, for some reason, disproportionately armed. I've certainly no easy answer for how to unpick the lies and biased that people have been fed.
But if your reaction to "irrational" people who have been persuaded you're going to kill them is that the only solution is to kill them (or even to talk about it on a forum), I don't see a good ending. That's its own spiral, and at some point it's not actually media lies that will be seeding mistrust and hatred. Surely it's better to try something else?
Yes, if you take the moral high ground it's easier for people to take shots at you. I'd still prefer the view.
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Indeed. I don't have solutions, I'm suggesting calling all dogs rabid based on the tiny minority with the loudest barks is a mistake and ignoring the actual rabid dogs and hoping they go away isn't a viable strategy. Most of all, I'm saying take a breath, think, and don't dehumanise a section of society (even by humourously referring to some of them as rabid dogs), that is the path to horror.
ps
I wonder if a lot of those voting Trump wouldn't feel quite so aggrieved if the loss of their industries had been taken half as seriously as the potential impact of ML systems on other industries is now.
Edit
Fluppeteer put it much better than I did.
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So how do we determine who the rabid ones and who aren't?
Should we, for instance, stipulate that you're only one of the "rabid" Republicans if you support things like building militarized concentration camps for people you think shouldn't be in the country?
Anyhow let's can this notion that Trump supporters are the lowest of the low, the forgotten dregs of the working class, and that the rest of us have cruelly left them behind. They're not. Most of them are economically doing just fine. At the moment the richest man in the world is one of them.
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I wish someone would build a ShitBag Collider and fire Trump and Musk at each other at Near Light Speed.
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TBH, I don't think many of the self procliaimed liberals on this thread are far off demanding different types of Republican are forced to wear symbols on their clothing for ease of identification. Leaving aside your rhetorical question. My first recommendation is that you recognise 74m of your fellow Americans voted Trump in 2020.
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You mean like garbage bags? They wear those on their own accord.
That's a nice try at deflecting the question by slurring most of the commenters but perhaps you could answer my question.
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I am giving a stress reliever today for the science crowd.
A great deal of human behavior, perception, and even inner feeling, functions like a gestalt. AKA, figure-ground. Both are equally real but we of course focus on the figure but can, focus on the ground. It's a simply cognitive operation.
It is identical to the function found in a Necker cube. There is one way to focus on it, and then the other. Schoolkids have doodled Necker cubes in margins for untold years, striving to find something more engaging that the lecture.
This thread is a perfect example. Find the way to flip this (eminently democratic) gestalt in this thread.
I am fairly sure even the mightiest of fascists cannot eliminate this fundamental and saving nature of human consciousness.
[edit: Newton's laws can be seen as gestalt structure. For every action... ? You can't beat it. You can't defeat it.]
A great deal of human behavior, perception, and even inner feeling, functions like a gestalt. AKA, figure-ground. Both are equally real but we of course focus on the figure but can, focus on the ground. It's a simply cognitive operation.
It is identical to the function found in a Necker cube. There is one way to focus on it, and then the other. Schoolkids have doodled Necker cubes in margins for untold years, striving to find something more engaging that the lecture.
This thread is a perfect example. Find the way to flip this (eminently democratic) gestalt in this thread.
I am fairly sure even the mightiest of fascists cannot eliminate this fundamental and saving nature of human consciousness.
[edit: Newton's laws can be seen as gestalt structure. For every action... ? You can't beat it. You can't defeat it.]
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It is the right of every citizen to choose association. The law partitions the criminal from the law-abiding citizen. Civilization then partitions further, but now via various modes of social shunning. "Cancel culture" as it is alliteratively called, as if it is new.
Conservatives fail to realize this isn't a conspiratorial Maoist purge as much as a predictable reaction of a democratic people to a neo-royalist political movement. Some didn't vote for Bush Jr and Hillary Clinton because of the royalist whiff to it all.
Some people read Edmund Burke too literally! (Burke was against democratic revolutions, see, but that is diff from being a monarchist. Today we got a strong monarchial thing going. Russia will transition as a way of escaping war crimes.)
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I know this idea hasn't come up on this thread before, but have got tried talking to them? It may not be easy. It may not be pleasant. But it may be important. Speaking as a member of "the rest of the world", it'd be nice to think people would try.
Of course, easy for me to say. I'm not in the US, and I strongly suspect most people I know there (at least well) are Democrats. The nearest I've had is actively trying to get along with (casually) racist family of friends, or friends who voted for Brexit (and I did have to take a moment when they said "I didn't expect the Irish border to be complicated").
I suspect a "rabid" position on one thing doesn't universally mean the same on something else, although I'm sure there are correlations. I disagree with most people about something. But, even if I find a position on something else particularly heinous and I don't like them as a person, I usually also agree with them about something. Sometimes that's not worth the effort; sometimes it's what makes people doubt that the militia dragging someone away is actually doing the right thing.
Sure. I'm repeating polls that state what issues are most important to Republicans, and "the economy" might not mean "I can't put food on the table", it might mean "I need to sell the farm", "I need a new car", "my kids can't go to the nice school" or whatever. There are generally a lot more people struggling to make ends meet than living in luxury, even in an affluent society like the US, but you might say that a lot of voters could afford to tighten their belts for the sake of society. I don't claim everyone can justify self-interest with genuine hardship. But those that are in that position, and are ignored, mean that even the self-interested can claim to be thinking of others when they vote.
You can't please - or even help - everyone all of the time. But you can listen. Trump has a lot of people who think he's listening to their needs, even if he's clearly not. It would be nice if politicians would consider explaining, too - "I'm sorry we have to put up migrants for free in your back yard, but it's only for a few weeks until we can get them the poorly-paid jobs you don't want to do, then we can get them to pay for housing and tax them; in the meantime people have been shooting at them, so please be patient - oh, and they really don't eat pets, why would you possibly believe that?" feels like it ought to be an easier sell than just arguing the numbers, however self-evident it seems.
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"The economy" to Republicans is bad every time a democrat is in office, no matter what the facts say. The facts say Democrats are always better for the economy, and this has been true for 50+ years. Their opinion of the state of the economy flips the day after a new president is inaugurated from their party, even though nothing has changed from the week prior.
It's the same with other issues like immigration. Obama and Biden both deported more people than Trump, and unlike Trump, have tried to actually solve the root causes of this problem. These are not serious people, and should be treated as such.
We SHOULD ignore the opinions of people who choose to ignore reality. We don't need to listen to lies or their fantasies they use to scare themselves.
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There are a lot of points to respond to here. I don't accuse you of Gish-galloping -- it's a complex subject -- but it's going to be easy for one or both of us to get drawn off course here.
(1.) Of course I talk to people. Doesn't everyone? I'm a straight white guy, I can talk to anyone. Most people are nice to me, and I'm nice to most people. That's kind of beside the point. We're talking politics here.
(2.) I'm asking you this question because you're the one who suggested that yes we can't expect to reach the "rabid" ones. Well, again, what makes someone rabid? It can't just be whether it's possible to have a casual conversation with them, because it's been my experience -- again, at least as a straight white man -- that it's quite easy to have very friendly conversations with a lot of very far-right people as long as it doesn't skew into politics. Which, increasingly often, it does seem to. And when it does, you run into a thicket of conspiracy theories and policy ideas that frankly can't really be compromised with, and then you either have to confront them head-on after all, or try to save the conversation by changing the subject.
(3.) Once again, the idea that the typical Trump voter is some kind of woebegone struggling salt-of-the-earth yeoman is wrong. Yes, there are plenty of poor and unemployed people who will be voting for Trump today, and also for Harris. But the typical Trump supporter has a job (or, her husband does). They're doing fine. They think they deserve better.
https://www.vox.com/politics/369797/trump-support-class-local-rich-arlie-hochschild
(4.) Democratic politicians say these kinds of things all the fucking time, to zero appreciable effect. You would think it would be an easy sell to point out that immigrants don't eat pets, and yet... I don't know. When I was growing up kids used to joke that you had to be careful going to a Chinese restaurant because they served dog there. These jokes weren't invented out of nothing in 2024.
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True. Darwin would have understood people prioritising their family, their tribe, their country. Humanity has, barely, evolved far enough that not every day has to be a battle against someone that you can define as "other" - but if we didn't feel an innate need to do so, we wouldn't have invented sports as a low-repercussion alternative to warfare. It does make it very easy to pigeonhole voters, just as one party's narrative considers all illegal immigrants the same (while, for reasons I'm still struggling to understand, staying popular with related minorities).
People you disagree with on a lot of principles (and beliefs, in the "alleged facts stated by the media" sense) are unlikely to be your best friends. But you can still try to see them, and make them see you, as people whose lives have value, whose redeeming features probably do exist. That's what seems to be missing in the current political rhetoric (especially in the US, but also globally), no matter what today's outcome.
Trump is quite possibly a genuine psychopath, or at least deluded. I could probably get something of value even out of a conversation with him, however abhorrent and how brief I'd like to make it - and I'm not about to forgive him for the damage he's caused, let alone suggest people vote for him. But I'd still shove him out of the way of an oncoming train. Surely most Republican voters are more tolerable?
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I am sorry but this is nonsense. The idea that life would be better if liberals cared more... Seriously? People are getting whipsawed here between conservatives who mock liberals for caring about everyone too much and supposed aloof centrists complaining that liberals don't care enough.
Last I checked the only side that was publicly calling for the other side to be arrested, forced into combat, beaten up, etc., were the other side. I wouldn't tell a victim of domestic abuse "Maybe you should just try talking to him more, I'm sure he'll come around. Have you tried not being so angry with him?"
Except for a handful of particularly angry people I doubt anyone on this thread or anywhere else actually thinks conservatives aren't human or that you can't talk to them. This isn't about whether you can have a casual friendly conversation at a personal level. It is about the political level.
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No. It is about proportion or magnitude. We partition ourselves, but then there is absolute exclusion, absolute partition.
We keep absolute partition for the worst criminals. The air outside is too free to make it likely. Yay historical precedent.
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Not deliberate, I'm just not blessed with concision.
Do they? That's a relief, and not the impression I've got from this thread, or a lot of media reports. Most of my argument is that people dismiss the needs of those they see as "other" - because they misunderstand them or create an opinion based on harmful stereotypes. Just treating each other as fellow human beings is an antidote to that. It didn't sound like a step some posters were willing to take. If they were merely exaggerating for effect, my apologies for overreacting with platitudes - I don't have boots on the ground to fact check my own media coverage.
I don't think I originated the phrase on this thread, but I'm sure there are people so indoctrinated in misinformation, or so desperate to latch on to a Messiah figure, that there's no way to have a rational discussion about any current political topic. I'd like to think that, even if someone is irrational in defending their beliefs on some topics, they might be willing to entertain a scintilla of doubt about others, and eventually form cracks in the edifice. And some will devolve into shouting - or shooting - at you before you can find that ground. As you say, it's not easy, or always productive, but it's got to go better than not engaging at all. But it sounds like you already are, which is all I really ask.
Fair, and perhaps I'm trying to ascribe more rational behaviour to Trumpists than they deserve. My news sources seem to be reporting that Trump's base is not entirely affluent, but they could be mischaracterising it. I'll read.
Then they may be doing better than politicians in the UK. We rarely hear "I'm sorry, you need to put up with a temporary inconvenience while we help these other people, it'll come back to help you". We get "stop the boats", because it's pithier. It doesn't help that governments have been willing to take taxes from immigrants for years while not investing it in infrastructure to support an expanding population. In the UK, they've learned the hard way that blaming Europe for everything for forty years is coming back to bite them now they don't have that excuse.
And yes, casual racism, a sense of self-superiority, and offensive stereotypes have been around indefinitely. We're now at the point where humanity can share enough global information that we should be able to unpick more of it. It would be a good start if some countries would decide that "communist" or "capitalist" weren't synonyms for "wants to destroy me".
That said, dog meat is (decreasingly) a thing. Not so much in restaurants in the west, though. I was pretty concerned to find whale in the menu during my last trip to Japan...
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