A thought

As I look at the ongoing percentages of approval of Little Boots, which seem to hover at about 43% no matter what, I started to really think about it.

Admittedly there are a lot of factors and I would be remiss and specious if I were to attempt to categorize all of the approvers into a single category. After all, that is the very thing that I fight against, the stereotyping of individuals based upon a single classification.

But I cannot help but to give broad classifications nonetheless.

I know that many approve of him primarily because the “economy is going in the right direction”. My arguments that the economy was already going in that direction before he entered office and the economic growth was the result of the previous administration that they railed against falls on deaf ears despite the evidence that is overwhelmingly around them. It does not seem that the current evidence of economic problems that can be attributed to his administration without argument have any impact on his approval rating. It seems, once again, that political point-of-view has more to do with this approval than actual logical approval.

There are those that are so abashedly Republican/Conservative that they would follow and give approval to anyone who wears that label and I see that some of that is manifested in these approval ratings. After all, in their minds, he is a Republican so he cannot be all that bad, can he?

I know that there are a plethora of different additional reasons for approving this POS and I probably cannot even define them, let alone understand them. I will not even try.

The one that I do understand is the one that bothers me the most. That is the group of people that approve of him because they agree with him and his ideals. They are blatantly racists, xenophobes, religiously intolerant, and/or misogynists (even some women). They do not like the world that we live in and they are resisting it and they have found their champion. These are the ones that bother me the most. I am not surprised that they exist. I am surprised that there are so damned many of them. Even given the decades-old fundamentalist diatribes from the religious right in America coupled with the historical intolerance and hate-based attitudes, I thought we had progressed to a point that these attitudes were diminishing to a point whereby we could marginalize their impact. Obviously, we cannot.

They are a real force in the electorate and represent a larger voting block than any single special interest or minority block of voters. In the past, I do not think they coalesced into a single block of voters. They have now behind Little Boots, partially as a backlash against a minority President. Do not get me wrong, I think the issue would be the same if the outgoing President would have been a women because part of the objection/hate/fear was against change. This is what Little Boots capitalized on. After all, “Make America Great Again” is not about greatness but about a return to what is “safe” and “familiar”.

These are the truly scary people.