As an addendum to my previous thread, let me tell you a story about when I realized that the on-the-ground 2016 Trump supporter was very seriously fighting a war the average Democrat didn’t even understand had already started.

This was August 2016.

I felt pretty confident about Hillary Pokémon Going to the White House & Trump ending the GOP.

But I had a Clinton/Kaine sign in my yard because I was worried & it felt important to make a statement—conservatives weren’t quiet so I didn’t want to be.

We spent the summer painting our house & borrowed a ladder from a neighbor down the street.

When we finished & he came to pick it up, he stared in disbelief at my Clinton sign & said:

“If I’d known who you were voting for, I wouldn’t have let you touch my ladder.”

He wasn’t joking.

He didn’t take it back.

I don’t live in a red state or district.

He didn’t say “don’t worry we can still be friends” or anything like that. He just got in his golf cart in stony silence & left with his ladder.

And I understood that this man, knowing nothing about me, seeing a white girl in an at least seemingly heterosexual marriage, would not have allowed me to do something as simple as borrow a ladder he didn’t need to work on the house I own purely because I wasn’t voting for Trump.

This man had no reason to think I wasn’t part of his tribe in a demographic sense (I’m not, but I sure look like I am. My husband was there too) & had felt so confident in his own dominance that he fully assumed I was.

It vanished in a flash because of my vote & nothing else.

He had no problem telling me flat-out that his micro-level everyday neighborliness was completely contingent on my macro-level loyalty to Donald Trump. That nothing else mattered, even in something so simple & inconsequential as lending a ladder in a small community.

In that moment I knew something was going on I hadnt understood, that I’d been too busy to notice

It may seem a jump, but this is the kind of person who listens to right wing radio, picks up a machete, & goes out to kill his neighbors

Tribal loyalty erases individual connection

And that guy?

That guy doesn’t change his mind in four years. That guy had already decided that anyone outside his new cult wasn’t worthy of altruism, before any of these years had happened.

He’d committed. He was his vote. He was perfectly happy alienating anyone over it.

And this is a very insular community. If you alienate people, you and your business is sunk.

But he didn’t care at all. Something bigger had come along & erased even his own self-interest.

If he wouldn’t lend me a ladder, no way would he allow me my human rights.

These people are with us, in every neighborhood. They aren’t going to go away because we acted extra nice & lent them *our* ladders

And if you don’t look like you belong with these xenomorphs, you already knew that

Surprise at these results is just the death throes of privilege