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I think that it depends on the person. I’ve heard of enough people who voted for Donald because they like that he “says it like it is”, or “he’s a businessman”, or because they just want lower taxes. Some people are so exposed to rage-bait social media/news content and are always being told what to be afraid of and they vote emotionally based on that fear. My grandfather votes the way he does because he’s TERRIFIED of immigrants, even legal ones - because all he does is sit and watch fox news. I think most often, people are busy with their lives, paying their bills, taking care of their kids, etc. and don’t have a lot of energy left over for politics. People treat voting like it’s team sports. A ton of people voted for Donald because they thought tariffs were paid by the other country, not American businesses. I don’t exactly blame people, it’s a lot of information and life is probably a lot more relaxed for people that don’t follow it.

Ignorance and gullibility. I fall for misinformation all the time, especially when it confirms my own biases and it takes real effort to maintain a mindset of “yes this sounds true, but is it actually?” It is also terribly inefficient. If someone tells me, when I was a kid, that daddylonglegs spiders are the most poisonous, I am likely going to just go “neat” and now I think that and say it. If you stop and verify EVERYTHING EVER you have no time to do anything in life. This makes the filter of critical thinking…critical.

Also, it isn’t about being stupid (though that helps). Some of the smartest people I know are conspiracy theory nutjobs. They can easily draw parallels between disparate facts, but can’t filter their findings or understand correlation doesn’t equal causation.

Manufactured consent

Usually this happens when you dont have a democracy. Establish a system with rank choice voting and a few dozen candidates, and you’ll see votes closer aligned with voter interests

• Because propaganda works. If propaganda didn’t work, companies would not advertise products and politicians wouldn’t run campaigns. Rich sponsors fund politicians who promise to look after their interests. Well-funded politicians run better campaigns and win.

• Because politicians are, nearly without exception, above middle class, if not outright rich. They won’t act too radically against their own class interests.

The only solution I know comes from ancient Athens. Sortition -> you hold a lottery to draw representatives. A few extremely stupid people will be drawn into parliament, but idiots are far better than sociopaths, and the current system gives undue representation to sociopaths (willing to climb over bodies if that gets them to power). If one then dislikes the idea of a considerable percentage of bumbling fools (as opposed to cunning predators) in parliament, one must feed everyone well, treat all childhood diseases and educate everyone as well as possible. As if their rational decisions were needed tomorrow.

There’s a substantial assumption that the wealthy know best how to manage wealth and the economy but it’s all predicated on the notion that those wealthy people are willing to act in the interest of everyone, when in fact they tend to act on their own personal interest (I mean, if someone has a net worth of over a billion dollars and they’re trying to accumulate even more money, that should give you a good idea how their policy will affect people who are making 40k/yr). They tend not to want to create jobs or increase wages more than they want to improve quality of earnings, because they stand to lose a lot and they somehow want more

Because powerful people turned politics from a policy / representation in to politics as an identity. People will almost anything for their two minutes of hate.

False consciousness.

Do we actually vote to benefit the rich?

Many vote for leaders that openly cater to the rich, but I don’t know that we actually consciously vote to deliberately help the rich.

Those elected people are the ones telling everyone that the rich are the job creators. They used to feed us the farce that trickle-down was viable, they don’t even bother with the lie anymore. The rich are just squatters on wealth. They get that wealth by consolidating businesses, hoarding assets like real estate, creating artificial scarcity, enshittifying everything, and squeezing labor for more productivity while expending massive effort to minimize overall compensation.

And they own the media. All of it. Even the “liberal” media is mealy at best about taxing wealth or anything critical of the uber-wealthy, anything right of center is openly against tax, particularly of anyone with wealth, making the wealthy the “victims” of the left’s ideas while the wealthy are just parasites victimizing us all.

All that aside, the real crux of the issue is identity politics. Being a sycophant of the rich is no longer any different than being a evangelical supply-side Jesus CINO, pro-gun, anti-government, anti-tax, anti-environmental regs, blah blah and all the rest of the mulish conservative BS.

They don’t actually care if we cater to the rich. They care that their team says we should bend over and give the rich everything. Just like their team says school shootings are an acceptable price for having your own personal arsenal, or spreading a potentially deadly disease is better than being inconvenienced by closed restaurants.

Obstinate tribalism has gleefully supplanted critical thought.

A lot of people have aspirations of themselves being rich and if they can vote like rich people they participate in the rich aesthetic.

It all boils down to education

Because they’ve been fooled into thinking it will either benefit them, or benefit people they feel “deserve it.”

Because the rich do a LOT to make it turn out that way.

• News is largely controlled by capitalists.

• Education has been gutted in a lot of places to make way for private schools.

• Corporations can contribute tons of money to candidates. Setting aside the possibility that these are effectively bribes, even if that weren’t the case, the candidates who get that money get to put out more ads and have more campaign infrastructure such as travel funds, staffers, etc.

• Various kinds of voter suppression.

• From the very founding of the country, the election system and government has been set up to hamper political participation. Obviously there was the fairly narrow franchise at the start. But even with that expanded, we have the electoral college, unequal apportionment, gerrymandering, first past the post, closed primaries, a court that’s specifically there to slow down popular will, etc.

• Just being a representative “democracy” puts a barrier between people and the policies they want. You rarely if ever get to vote on policies. You have to vote for a candidate. And the candidate is a whole bundle of policies, but also a record, a personality, etc. So there can be all sorts of political messaging about candidates which has nothing to do with what their policies are. Because of the duopoly party system that is all but ensured by the aforementioned voting system, you aren’t even going to have a candidate you can vote for that will represent your interests. And after all that, even if you manage to vote for someone who says they’ll do the things you want… then they get into office and you’re back on the sidelines. They go and do whatever it was they actually wanted to do, and you have fairly limited recourse for holding them accountable. The most you can do is decide to vote against them next election, but now you’re back to square one.

• Broader, more participatory forms of political organizing have been violently repressed. Just look at the history of union busting or the police violence during the civil rights movement or even now, etc. In the workplace, where you’re most likely to find others who share your class interests, your boss has a lot of control over you and it’s in their interest to make sure employees don’t talk politics and view each other as competition rather than potential allies.

• Along similar lines, racism has been used as a tool to divide people who would otherwise share class interests so they wouldn’t focus their attention on capitalists.

Moral of the story: There is a long history of people struggling against capitalists for a better life and an equally long history of capitalists using every trick in the book to keep them from that goal. The political landscape you see today is the result of that history. Learn from it.

https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about

its not about red vs blue states. It’s About The Country Vs. The City

A successful propaganda campaign by the owning class.

And a quote from an anonymous mutual:

many people will unfortunately need to learn this the hard way it seems at the expense of those who take the time to see the writing on the wall those ignorant to their exploitation will seldom listen to those who try to tell them how horribly theyre being fucked “if it were really so bad id notice” theyll say “this isnt so bad” theyll say, standing on the peak of the mountain that is dunning-kruger unknowing all we can do is wait, and watch to find out what what it is that throws them into the valley of unfathomable uncertainty in the meantime we must work for each other, for those who do see how good things could be. maybe then, our greener grass will coax them into giving us a fair listen