Post
by red assassin » Sat, 30. Nov 19, 14:02
I think the thing that confuses me about the "I'm just looking out for myself" pro-Trump argument is that it's manifestly not true. One might naively separate left and right wing supporters broadly into the following two categories:
a) I will accept some impact to my personal prosperity in order to make things better for the less fortunate; this is the fairest approach.
b) Policies which allow me to make the most use of what I have are the fairest.
I don't agree with position b), but I think it's a defensible and intellectually consistent position, and I think it's useful to have some people who will argue that position in society, for reasons I'll come onto presently. Trump and his ilk, however, represent a third position:
c) I will accept some impact to my personal prosperity in order to make things worse for people who are not like me.
We can apply the three categories to some major political issues:
Firstly, healthcare.
a) says "of course I'll pay more taxes to provide healthcare to everybody in society!"
b) says "I have to pay for health insurance regardless, because unless I'm Jeff Bezos, a serious health issue can bankrupt me. The US per capita healthcare spend is catastrophically higher than any other first-world nation, yet the quality of outcomes are middling at best. Therefore, I get better care for less money with some form of socialised medicine."
c) says "I'm happy to pay four times as much in health insurance as any other first world nation to make sure poor people keep on dying of preventable issues."
Secondly, immigration.
a) says "of course we should help immigrants!"
b) says "there's strong evidence that immigrants contribute significantly to GDP, pay more in taxes than they cost in government spending, commit as few or fewer crimes than existing residents, and integrate into their new home nations within a couple of generations. A stronger economy is good for me and there are no significant reasons not to."
c) says "I'll happily pay taxes to build a pointless symbolic wall and build and run concentration camps to stick immigrants in."
Now, I'm certainly cherry-picking issues where there's a persuasive self-interested argument for not doing what Trump et al are doing, but they're both major current issues where the divergence from rational self-interest in favour of harming other people at cost to oneself is significant and extremely hard to argue against in any sort of evidence-based manner. In both cases I think it's useful to have somebody make the self-interest argument, because the obvious counter argument to position a) - however persuasive I find that myself - is "but how can we afford it?", whereas position b) is "how can we afford not to?".
(In case anybody thinks I'm picking on the right here, I think a lot of current socialist parties are utterly terrible at picking policies that are actually effective interventions, versus ones that just sound good but support the status quo or make inequality worse, but that's a discussion for another thread.)
A still more glorious dawn awaits, not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise, a morning filled with 400 billion suns - the rising of the Milky Way
So they get born stupid with no chance of redemption, now who is the pessimist! 
Anyway, i was talking more in terms of going forward and preventing new Trumpians from beeing created, i agree the current generation of Trumpians aren't likely to change, it's the basis of my reasoning why they won't be going away any time soon, and will be causing many problems in the time to come.
