@bobsal u1553115,
bobsal u1553115 wrote:
An anguished question from a Trump supporter: ‘Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid?’
Before I read this thread, I thought this was a real question about why liberals and republicans think differently, so I was going to give an example that I've been thinking about lately, which is that liberals hold a simple view about Obamacare, which is that the government should just subsidize more coverage so more people can have healthcare, while conservatives, the compassionate ones at least, tend to look more at the the structural economic problems that would be exacerbated by retaining Obamacare and see how those ultimately make Obamacare a self-defeating policy.
Still, to a liberal who think about the world in terms of there being plenty of money to do all these things, only the rich are too chintzy to cough up the money to 'level the playing field,' anti-Obamacare rhetoric just seems like a bunch of propaganda to prevent some people from getting health care.
Then, because they don't look at the bigger picture about the problems subsidies/stimulus cause, they view conservatives as conspiracy theorists who read more into things than there really is, hence their view that conservatives are stupid.
This is really a problem, because it makes it impossible to have a real discussion about how insurance drives up prices and costs generally, and especially when it is subsidized; and really many people should be upset about the fact that insurance, subsidized or not, drives up those costs and then medical training becomes so elite and expensive so that lower-cost providers can't enter markets to serve people for lower prices, plus the corporations that make drugs and other healthcare supplies drive up prices in those markets as well, all because there is so much money to be made from health insurance companies.
I would say that you could sum up Dems/libs as having good intentions with wanting to help those with lesser means, but to do so, they want to allow business to make as much money as possible by having high prices and costs, and then find ways to either tax them or require them to hire and insure more people and thus spread that money around more.
Conservatives, on the other hand, honor the idea that if people make money, however much or little, they should be able to keep it and it should have stable value and not inflate. To achieve that, you have to think harder about how people can achieve things without government, or with a minimum of government assistance and/intervention. That is a difficult challenge, one that Dems/libs tend to blow off as totally unrealistic and thus they see it as an excuse by the rich not to help the poor.
So there are just these different worldviews and assumptions about how things work and what's realistic that have turned into both parties blowing the other off as being totally devoid of sense.