The liberal fights to convince themselves and the world that they’re NOT white supremacists, though. Their entire disposition is based on fakeness and lying to themselves and everyone else.
They were told to. If that very same person, with everything about him identical, was tied to the democratic party, they would be bootlicking him as hard as they bootlick Biden.
They wanna maintain the image of “politeness” so Trump being mask off makes them mad because someone isn’t playing along.
Liberal ruling class or liberal working class? Liberal ruling class has set up a good cop/bad cop situation for the country’s politics; the “good” cop has to pretend to oppose the bad cop. As for the liberal working class, they seem to be mostly well-intentioned folks who have unfortunately been duped by the good cop/bad cop thing.
He’s outwardly rude and has no filter
Some good answers here. We should remember that both republicans and democrats are just different types of liberals though.
I would say that the democrat voters are more likely to be the “true believers” in the “system” though, and Trump is an affront to that and they do see him as a threat in that regard. They really believe they can vote out the “bad guys” and their guys are “good” or the “lesser evil”. They are basically indoctrinated in this belief.
Dealing with more materialism, a lot of the petty bourgeoisie in the US are republicans. The petty bourgeoisie in the US right now are feeling the crunch of workers asking for more rights from below, and the big businesses above them outcompeting them, so they harken back to the old days. This obviously comes with things like regression in social and workers rights which are at odds with what democrat workers have been told to expect from society.
I think there might also be a split in democrat and republican bourgeoisie sources of capital (beyond the republican petty bourgeoisie, i.e. tech vs fossil or whatever), but I’m not familiar with that and have only read and heard of it briefly mentioned here once or twice. Imo that is actually the most interesting thing to investigate or read about and if anyone can provide some sources I’d be grateful.
Either way though, for big bourgeoisie on both sides red and blue, the dislike is largely theatrical as both sides know they benefit from the current arrangement (they’re the same class after all) and so democrats telling their voters to hate fascists in the republican party isn’t really endangering the status quo (since democrats themselves don’t threaten it).
“Decorum”
Some good answers delving into the foundations of ideology here.
But most people who describe themselves as liberal aren’t that consciously ideological. They simply see the Republicans and Trump camp to be cartoonishly evil. They see the Democrats as “trying” to deliver on their promises for social welfare, human rights and stronger worker autonomy. The media discourse is tightly controlled so as not to allow socialist perspectives to enter the conversation so what most people think is possible is only reflected within this discourse.
Not to mention people in America, liberal or conservative, are too overworked, alienated, or assaulted by a never-ending stream of pop media outrage bullshit to take the time to properly investigate their own ideology. There are a lot of avenues for escapism.
But IMO the #1 disconnect American work-class liberals have (I’m talking about the plenty who would even describe themselves as progressive or socialist) is that they fail to see America’s current foreign policy as a direct but evolved continuation of its settler-colonial doctrine. US citizens are so removed from the direct effects of war and violent imperialism that they simply can’t see the current propaganda and assaults against AES countries overseas as the same exact thing that drove Westward colonial expansion across North America and the displacement and genocide of native people that accompanied it. They see things like slavery and genocide as relics of America’s past that can be healed with enough “acknowledgement” rather than active processes the American state is continuing to pursue today and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…
Until Americans en masse can overcome this disconnect, there is very little chance of revolution happening. Because US rage towards their own ruling class can always be redirected into scapegoating other countries by politicians of both parties.
For sure, Americans have been psychologically oriented to never connect the pieces and see how the current system came to be and how it operates. They can only do it in a perverse way to “understand” their enemies and the global south
American politics can be understood as two competing versions of exceptionalism.
Denialist/reactionary versus guilt-pride/savior
The denalist rejects the criticisms of the US, capitalism, colonialism, racism etc. These things are either not problems or are basically good.
Guilt pride is accepting that there are problems, like racism, but because they recognize this they become self righteous so as to antagonize their denialist opponents. They basically co-opt anti racism into an American exceptionalist weapon. By taking pride in their guilt (white guilt from colonialism) they weaponize their guilt against reactionaries as well as the colonized. It’s like a virtue signal of guilt, not any guilt that can push someone to empathy, it is a chuavanism.
The two sides disagree on the oldest and most formative questions about America’s foundation. What do we do with colonized people? Reactionaries embrace that deep down you have to be white to be American and you can only assimilate so much so we may as well treat them as sub human and that if we actually let them in it could compromise the project by empowering them to break free–a slave revolt. Saviorists say that assimilation could strengthen the project because assimilation and the selection process will basically monitor and compromise colonized people into becoming better subjects, in fact the saviorist fears slave revolt will occur if they don’t try to accommodate colonized people.
You can see these dynamics all over the place. One example is the prospect of a Truth and Reconciliation Council in California. Reactionaries will balk immediately at any conversation about genocide. Guilt pride will lead saviorists to make it about how good they are for accepting something bad happened in California and will balk when it comes to action because it is a performance of exceptionalism that is tidally locked with reactionary views.
This relationship and discourse is what drives colonial discourse and is what protects the discourse from being compromised or stagnant. They both embolden the other which makes it difficult for colonized people to get anything done. You ask why libs feel this way about Trump and its because he is a denalist while they believe in there own guilt pride. Both are competing versions of white supremacy trying to prevent their nightmare of slave revolt.
Contemporary liberals are age of enlightenment liberals - they value “rationality”. Contemporary conservatives advocate for liberal policies using rationality, but they value libidinality over rationality. Trump communicates through libidinal means, not rational ones. This is a major problem for contemporary liberals who believe they are exclusively vely rational and don’t truck in libidinal politics.
They believe they are rational and yet advocate history’s most chaotic and hot-headed way to organise production?
Yes, because profit is a natural phenomenon and maximizing profit is “rational”
He says the quiet parts out loud…
I.e. when he held up the school project board of pictures of fighter jets and tanks they sell Saudi Arabia to do war crimes in Yemen. Put the same pictures in a McKinsey PowerPoint deck with some polite change of languaging Ctrl H “offensive” with “defensive” and “dead children” with “minimum collateral damage” and you have liberalism.
