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Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

My theory on Trump supporters is that it's confirmation bias and sunk cost fallacy.

Centrist Republicans and independents supported Donald Trump in 2016 because Hillary Clinton was a weak candidate. They may not have agreed or liked Trump as a person, but they voted for him.

But then, as Trump said and did increasingly extreme things, they had to create a narrative that post-hoc justified their support.

And he made 'The world is out to get him. He's been treated unfairly. Everyone else is lying' easier than 'I was taken in by a con man, who turned out to be even worse than I thought.'

Which is how 'I don't like the man, but I support his policies' voters became 'Everything about Jan 6 was fine' voters.

And why I try to inculcate a 'I am not a member of any political team or identity' in myself. Politics should be about policy, not brand.

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I believe you underestimate the need for "brand".

You require a majority to institute a policy. Practically zero people believe in policies identical to yours. The only way for you to get any of your policy preferences is to find people whose policies you can live with, and who can live with yours. You will usually disagree with them, but they're better than the people who hate most of your policies and will do exactly the opposite.

That fact would seem to make democracy barely tenable at best. It becomes entirely untenable when you can't even identify your own brand any more.

There are tens of millions of people who would say "Of course I would never vote for a felon who attempted to overthrow an election." But they will find a "but...", for reasons that are objectively irrational but completely coherent in their own heads.

I point that out because, whatever policy you want, you're going to need brand-mates. A lot of them. The more you need, the more you people you'll dislike having on your side. But it's unlikely to be beneficial to say, "Forget it, I'll take the greater of two evils."

Brands need ads

Flags won’t hoist or wave themselves, red flags doubly so, and they’re a useful determinant of which way the political winds are blowing, and whether they’re shifting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-bearer

And relatedly, to mix a metaphor, often a dog wags its tail, and it’s not unheard of the tail wagging the dog.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_dog

Wag the Dog was also a pretty decent movie, as far as comedies about distracting the public during elections go. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=steA_PZPkc8

This was not lost on me.

Another movie from that same era I enjoy is The Pentagon Wars about the development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. It’s one of the better made for TV movies I can remember.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=steA_PZPkc8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars

complicating matters is that the world IS out to get him. it doesn't actually matter all that much that he deserves it, especially since to his followers, pretty much everybody in power deserves it, so the fact that all this stuff is only happening to their guy proves to them that the thing you ACTUALLY go down for, is being their guy.

further, if you trust the glowies post-Snowden, idk what to tell you. Trump said he'd drain the swamp, and the swamp fought back and won.

unfortunately for people who do believe in the corruption of the three letter agencies, Trump's tactic of undermining democracy itself (however much we do have) in order to appease his narcissism is actually worse than the career spooks in control of the government (and much of the media narrative; the FBI Agent / CIA analyst to "political contributor" pipeline is not hidden at all, you only need pay attention to the people the major news networks call "experts" on all sorts of topics)

> glowies

Definition?

It’s shorthand for agents of the state and those who do their bidding or act on their behalf directly or by proxy, especially federal agents. It was coined by the TempleOS guy, apparently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_slang_terms_for_federa...

> The term was coined by computer programmer Terry A. Davis, who allegedly believed that the CIA was stalking and harassing him. "Glowie" is often used in online forums to refer to government agents, especially undercover operatives who infiltrate online extremist spaces.

> "Glow in the dark" and its derivative terms have been used to refer to various groups: newcomers that do not fit in with the culture of certain forums and are thus suspected to have bad intentions, journalists who report on extremist groups, tech companies that collect users' personal data, and others.

My theory on Trump supporters is that they want to stop migration, reshore manufacturing, and redistribute power and influence away from D.C.

Any theory you have that treats normal American citizens as some sort of ‘other’ is just hatred that has been sold to you.

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