I wish I knew :( I am uber white according to ancestry and most of my family votes Republican no matter what. I have tried to talk sense into them multiple times. Usually their #1 topic is “save the children!”. To them every trans person is a pedophile and Fox news is the word of God. Last year my aunt told me in front of her 12 yr old grandson without flinching “there’s a difference between a black person and a N*****!” So… racism is the core? That’s it. Republicans are racist. I came to the conclusion on my own.

I am not sure. I’m white (enough to have benefited from it anyway) and progressive and most of the people at my work are not conservative regardless of race. My mom and dad and Dad’s family, all were progressive, I grew up in a household that was not conservative.

When I ask people who are Republican still (some older people did shift after Trump 1) the way they talk about politics doesn’t make any sense to me. My guess is that now they live in a different media ecosystem and absolutely believe some things that most people don’t, and that fear is leveraged by the Republican politicians. They talk about things I’ve never heard of, and when I say it sounds like not real things that just makes them feel like they are better informed, it doesn’t occur to them that they are being fed nonsense.

I wouldn’t discount racism and sexism, those are still around and so some people may think they will benefit if others are held back, may see the economy as a zero sum game. So they think being on the winning team might benefit them somehow.

But mostly, at least with the younger set, I think they are brainwashed in a different direction than the rest of us and honestly believe that somehow reducing regulations on business, forcing more social conformity, that those things will make a better world.

I was fairly conservative as a teen and young adult. Looking back, the only thing we can really pick out as a cause is the echo chamber. There was no internet, but everyone I knew looked like me, talked like me, had a very similar life to me. It was all I knew.

• I went to parochial school. For a few years the only non-white was a smoking hot Filipina so that was cool. However as the school started having money troubles, it accepted more “troubled” students … several of whom had darker skin. That just reinforced negative stereotypes I had been taught
• in high school we had very few non-whites, but stereotypically the valedictorian was Chinese and half the football team were dark skinned.
• in high school, “Health” was a required class, and I first met someone who was not at least middle class. Wow, that hit the negative stereotypes
• my town was rural to suburbs, with few town services wanted or needed. However we did fund a good education system, while being fiscally prudent. Why couldn’t everyone else?

So, how do you think I felt seeing headlines of massive budget deficits, welfare queens, crime-ridden cities, slums, racial unrest, the evil empire? Yes, I was conservative: so many scary things in the world could be fixed if they were just like my town.

Then I went to college and got much more exposure to different people, different ideas, different walks of life, preferences, culture. Most of all I learned much more about the world and from more perspectives. I learned how naive and sheltered I had been. I learned that people different from me were people just like me, doing their best in a world from a wide range of starting points, with a wide range of obstacles and opportunities, toward a wide range of expectations.

Do conservatives tend to come from small towns where everyone is just like them, as I did? Is the outside world scary and different? Have they never left - when I went back for a reunion, my best friend from then was small minded as ever and admitted he’d never been more than fifty miles from town

Edit: to add to the development of stereotypes when I was a kid, and possibly offend everyone ….

I was good at math, and computers. So were a few other guys. Girls were not. I tutored so many girls that couldn’t do math, gave so much help to the woman who couldn’t teach computers. Everyone grew up with traditional roles and developed toward those expectations.

Heck, that was before Title IX, so there were very few girl athletes. I certainly was not either, but almost none of the girls were (shout out to Renee, an outstanding athlete and friend, the girl athlete, the exception that “proves” that stereotype)

Most people weren’t intentionally racist or sexist, but we lived in a society where so many negative stereotypes appeared true, where ur small town was great but the outside world had all sorts of scary problems that everyone blamed on those stereotypes

Here is a positive way to look at old school republicans (right now, I have no idea):

• It was a good counterpoint to keep spending down. There was a meet in the middle kind of thing, negotiating and discussing.
• It was entrepreneur friendly (to white people, but they may or may not knew that.)
• If you’re too busy to check, you read the headlines or get your info from friends strongly worded arguments.
• In the olden days, there was no easy way to verify things like “trickle down economics” or “war on drugs.” No one felt any push back from people they knew or respected online.
• Loyalty is passed down through generations since you generally lean towards your parents.
• The class system has everyone living in their own bubbles.

It’s because they’re small-minded assholes. My paternal grandparents were republicans (they’re deceased now) and they, especially my grandma, loved to shit on anyone who wasn’t a white cishet “christian.” I’ve heard them say a lot of heinous things behind closed doors and I can tell you that when republicans say they vote red for the economy it is only because it isn’t socially acceptable for them to say the real reason why they vote red.

They are stupid, and stubborn about it. Source: whole ass family of white inbred pricks with more confidence than knowledge. Quite a few grandparents under 40, meth addicts, lots of childhood cancers, and everyone on public assistance. All Trumpy morons. We don’t talk much anymore.

One party is offering the status quo of a continuous decline in quality of life, the other offers an attractive fairy tale about an ideological war where you (white men) are the ubermensch (gigachad) victims who will get their vengeance.

America’s particularly strong mythos of ruggard individualism and private enterprise has prevented class consciousness from forming. People (the majority of whom are white) are far more likely to feel a bond with and admiration for the successful (most of whom are white) than anything else. They aren’t living the lifestyle of their pioneer ancestors of course, but emotional mythos is massively important in driving politics.

Which means in a place like America, taxes and government programs are always going to be a tough sell, no matter how justified they are. Services run by faceless bureaucrats in Washington are always going to provoke suspicion. There’s hypocrisy in this of course, but it’s because it’s an emotional thing. White people can feel a swell of emotionalism about the military, that’s easy. Feeling the same swell about food stamps in high crime areas is more complex.

Although racism plays a big role I think it’s more complex than that. I think the aspirational bond trumps ethnicity. So I should think there are many white people who’d respect the success of Michael Jordan, Kanye, Tiger Woods and so on even while they despise the culture of poor black communities to the point of it being indistinguishable from racism. This lets them give themselves a veneer of respect. And accusations of racism bounce off them as being “woke”.

Given there’s an expectation of personal struggle (again, many times illusory, but it’s an emotional argument) many white people simply find things like DEI to be unfair. They are already struggling as hard as they can, “why should a black person jump the queue ahead of me?”

Religion obviously plays a role. Christianity provides a vehicle to channel American emotionalism - even though many of its values are plainly at odds with the American right - emotionalism wins because people have a greater hunger for it than self reflection. It’s far easier to get incensed at the idea that “abortion is murder” than enter the complex nuance of “who’s my neighbour?”.

Finally, and this is something I think has only grown with time, running America is complex. It’s slow and decisions and policies can easily feel unfair or out of touch even if huge thought has gone into them. Sadly over decades that’s created a disillusionment with politics in general and Washington as a whole (scandals aside). In that atmosphere a general malaise and frustration easily channels itself into wrecking balls like Trump. “The system’s stunk for years I don’t care if he wrecks it - it would be an improvement!”.

Trump channels raw American emotionalism. A bully, a “winner” (cheating seen as a form of “power”), and as disinterested in structured political discussion as most other people. Rational self reflection had a time but has gotten worn out over the last decades. Now a surge of pure emotionalism is breaking through and it will supercharge whatever mythos is available (military, Christian, traditional whiteness) whilst stomping on people along society’s familiar fault lines (race, gender, poverty).

As a white man, I also don’t understand this

I think it’s usually a smug sense of superiority and a fear that they will lose the benefits that come with being in a privileged class. For most white folks, all of this is deeply internalized and they are in denial that these factors drive any of their behaviors. They cling to the notion that they are ‘good’ and will latch on to any rationale that relieves them of personal responsibility for the imbalances in our society. The Republican Party is extremely good at catering to that desire and feeds them a steady stream of evidence that they are part of the ‘good’ group. This is why they get support consistently despite pursuing policies that frequently hurt white working class constituents. Instead of delivering material improvements, they cater to the emotional desire to feel good/safe. For a group of people that desperately want to believe that they aren’t actually subject to the same dehumanizing economic dynamics that plague ‘those other people’, that emotional hug is enough to get a vote.

Turns out, that when your entire platform is “White people and men are bad”, they tend not to vote for you.

It has nothing to do with Republicans and their platform - it’s simply that Dems are toxic toward those demographics, so voters don’t feel like its the party for them.