I'm trying to support journalists with my subscriptions and the occasional email about good articles written. I wish I could do more.
Thank you! At least my paper is doing fairly well, relatively. Nobody's been laid off -- in fact, they're hiring. I heard just yesterday that there are now NO daily papers in North Dakota.
maybe these people Katherine was talking about have hate as one of their core values. Maybe they experienced childhood trauma that pushed them away from other people.[/b]
I think their core values are things like "People should have to work to support themselves, not expect support from others who earned what they have." Which is why they don't like universal health care, welfare, immigration, taxes, etc. "People should follow the law, and if they don't they should be punished." Which is why they like harsh crime bills and capital punishment, why they think Trump would have been a good "law and order" president who'd crack down on crime, why they were more alarmed by the unrest following George Floyd's death they were by the death itself. "The police are there to protect us and they have a difficult, dangerous job."
I could go on an on. They think people of color are more likely to be poor because they don't work hard and are disproportionately in prison because they commit more crimes, rather than that they have a harder time getting good jobs and are treated unfairly in the criminal justice system. They think the 1950s were the good old days because everyone lived pretty peacefully and shared similar values. They think society got out of hand in the 1960s and needs to go back to the traditional ways.
Of course, I think all these core beliefs have strong counterarguments. I think they're either wrong or don't see the whole picture. But those are their beliefs and they don't change easily.
Researchers have found that people who identify as Democrats or liberals and people who identify as Republicans or conservatives have very different core values when you take politics out of it. Respect for authority vs. questioning authority. Personal responsibility vs. societal support. Tradition vs. change.
This may be pollyannish, but possibly the act of admitting you're wrong could be reframed as changing your mind.
I think something like realizing you were wrong about your pills isn't as hard as some of these other things. And if you strongly believed that Trump is a good, smart, regular guy working on behalf of your best interests, it's hard to acknowledge he's just the opposite and admit you were fooled all along.
But another problem I've seen in politics is that when politicians DO change their minds, realizing some policy they supported had negative consequences, we label it flip-flopping.