i had typed up like, several paragraphs in response to this (very eloquent and clever, i swear) and then lost them so now im frustrated
but the short version: i would argue that its not a matter of "stupid". its a matter of scared.
people are watching the decline and collapse of the american empire - staggering inequality, stagnant wages and rising costs, selfish and unpredictable leadership, and just.. an overwhelming feeling that something is wrong.
a commie like me might argue that this is the profound alienation that is inevitable under late capitalism as the system consumes itself like a dying star, burning heavier and heavier elements until it blows, but most folks on the right-wing obviously aren't gonna agree there. And one easy answer that a lot of them believe instead is that, well, if things were good Back Then, we need to go back to the social structures of the imagined leave-it-to-beaver past, and, well, make america great again. Which means blaming the problems of the present not on systems or on the structures of capital that funnel resources and power to those with the most resources and power the begin with, but on the gays and the blacks and the feminists and the immigrants - all the people they don't think about when they picture that halcyon past. if we could just make society look more like it did when it was "great", things would be better.
i was reading somewhere recently about how the rise in cults and conspiracy theories in the late 70s and early 80s was a direct response to the cognitive dissonance of seeing failure in vietnam, gas rationing, recession, rising crime, etc, and having to reconcile that with the knowledge that America is great, that our system works. the solution provided by conspiracy theories was that its not our fault or the system's fault that things are bad, its the jews, or the lizard people (they mean jews), or the round earthers (they mean jews), or the illuminati (they mean jews), or its aliens (they mean jews..... they always mean jews, when it comes to conspiracy theories about shadowy cabals manipulating the world, because almost every single "mainstream" conspiracy theory is at its core anti-semitic nonsense), and its not hard to see the parallel in qanon bullshit. Most of the country, i think, agrees that this country has been in decline for years if not decades, and its so tempting to blame a conspiracy of evil globalist child traffickers that our savior leader is tirelessly working in secret to defeat, than admit the whole system is complicit or worse, broken.
i think the most common trait among the "mainstream" far-right republican populace isn't stupidity, or even hate, its unease. its feeling like something is wrong, fundamentally wrong, and not knowing what to do about it. and people who are worried like that, who can see the broken pieces of a system but can't bear to look at the system as a whole to see that it's broken all the way down, are very very easily convinced by arguments that the real problem is everyone else. that if we just make us great again, and realign ourselves to the values of an imagined halcyon past, we can stop feeling like things are so fucked up all the time.
(edit to add: and the thing is, like, 90% of this is just as true of democrats too. its just that instead of looking to the past, they think that if we can just reform a few bits of this around the edges, we could fix everything, if it weren't for The Other Side)
(second edit to add: and obviously not all of this is true about the rapidly growing far nazi edge of the right wing. they are also mostly not stupid, and are also obviously scared, but when your solution to that is the final one, when you just want a white ethnostate, you've moved a bit beyond this level of good-faith assumption. fascism is fundamentally capital's response to the struggles of late capitalism, but its loudest and most openly nazi proponents know that they are wrong, and prey on the former group to recruit. they go hand in hand - i pretty firmly believe its hard to have widespread fascism without having the sort of widespread social issues and sense of doom described above - but above i'm talking about the average folks who go along with fascism rather than those who knowingly seek to institute it, a distinction worth making before the formers become the latter)
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