Why do people vote against their own interests?Fear is one reason. Some otherwise intelligent people are afraid of what might happen if they stand up for righteousness and compensate for that fear by consuming more goods and services. Eating up conspiracy theories. It’s weird. But it happens.

You hear it all the time now. The electorate has never been so diametrically opposed.

How can our cherished experiment in Democracy go so far south? By not learning from the past. Primed to believe anything that an if-so-ever charismatic leader will tell them. Looking for the least protected amongst us and clamping down on the poor and downtrodden. Punching down.

Donald Trump attempted to overthrow the last free and fair election through acts of domestic terrorism. The justice system in its measured pace has not caught up to him. The Supreme Court retrofit the Presidential powers to suit his personal interests.

After an elongated litigious war of attrition, it’s left to a choice to the People as to whether Donald Trump should be absolved of all wrongdoing in the events of January 6, 2021, and free to pardon himself and unleash a sea of traitors who’ve committed crimes against the state and found or pled guilty to walk among the rest of the American public.

Many people have fallen prey to the man’s bullying tactics and his persistent ad hominem attacks on his political opponents. He has declared the fourth pillar of our Democracy, the Free Press, an enemy of the state. He’s taken to demonizing immigrants as if we weren’t a country of immigrants. He’s called for the incarceration of political opponents as if the United States were a banana republic.

Disinformation is his strategy, if you can discern a strategy amongst the hatred he spews. His goal is to turn everyday Americans against each other. Divide and conquer. Beat his counterparties into submission and find a way back to power. These are his transparent aims.

Some people vote against their own interests because they’re scared. It’s understandable.

Bullies are tough to stand up to. They’re mean and coarse and, of course, they do everything they want to for their own gain. They disdain public service and instead look to power itself to solve their problems.

Bullies are spiteful and full of vitriol.  It resonates with a voter who’s dissatisfied with their own hardships. Even though the hardships they face are largely the effect of the Trump Administration’s failure to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. The Trump Administration's negligence is look to casting blame at the working poor as if they’re some class of indentured servants.

You can make your own mind up. The Ambidextrous Economist isn’t telling you how to vote. He’s merely pointing out that that particular asshole is all that stands between you and Democratic Rule or the descent into tyranny. He cheats at everything. Elections. Marriages. Golf scores...

He’s wound people up into a fix thinking that “state’s rights” are a way to settle the abortion of his own construction, the chaos following the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade, instead of the rallying cry of the confederacy that it is. The three handpicked, litmus-tested judges conspiring against their oaths of office and perjuring themselves to go against so-called Superprecedent paving the way.

The campaign trail — a call to arms from a depraved lunatic who has been boxed into a corner by his own vices and deeds. He’s a wounded animal looking to strike out. And his targets are the most susceptible among us. I suspect as November 5 draws closer, he will become more aggressively divisive and obsessed with power to save himself from paying for his traitorous acts. His actions more perverse. His words wielded all-the-more recklessly. His treason more strikingly apparent.

Now American women, our sisters, our mothers’ reproductive autonomy and the health and safety of at-risk populations are close to being subjugated to what privileged white men feel they can dictate for the rest of us. They call for a national ban on abortion. They call for the end of free and fair elections. They call for what the history books have shown led to all the fallen empires of the past.

No, sir. You have failed.

☞ AE ☜ — 10.04.2024

The Ambidextrous Economist is on your side.