Yascha Moun, Slate - In a recent academic article, Oliver Hahl, Minjae Kim and Ezra Zuckerman Sivan set out to figure out one of the central puzzles of the 2016 election: Why did so many people support Donald Trump even though he told so many blatant lies? ....
As Hahl and his co-authors show, most Trump supporters are perfectly happy to acknowledge that the president occasionally lies. Confronted with his statement about global warming being a Chinese hoax, for example, 2 out of 3 Trump supporters rated the statement as “highly false”; only 1 out of 20 rated it as “highly true.”
If that is puzzling, another piece of evidence is stranger still: Even though most Trump supporters were willing to admit that Trump lies, they also rated him as extremely “authentic.” In fact, Trump was rated as being much more authentic by his supporters than Hillary Clinton was by hers.
This, the paper suggests, is the key to understanding Trump’s success.
When the political system is widely seen as doing its job, somebody like Trump, who violates its basic norms, is seen as illegitimate. A politician who blatantly lies doesn’t stand a chance. But this changes when more and more people come to believe that the system is rigged and that most politicians don’t have their best interests in mind. Amid such a “crisis of legitimacy,” voters don’t particularly care whether a politician plays by the rules of the game. Instead, they long for somebody who bluntly states how rotten the system really is.
3 comments:
I think the reason is that Trump supporters are just smarter and better education than Hillary supporters. They're more mature, more knowledgeable about the way works, and better able to judge peoples' characters, something that comes with life experience. As better educated and better informed people they were more aware of Hillary's records, and in particular of her long record of constantly lying. Anyone who has taken the time to look closely at her past knows that she has virtually never told the truth. Never. So, even if Trump constantly lies, he still comes across as someone with more integrity than her.
Sad that people keep trying to find something wrong with Trump supporters, when at this point people ought to be focusing on what's wrong with Hillary supporters, and why these people simply were not able to view her objectively and see her for the fraud that she was (and is).
You assume that those who would not vote for Hillary somehow wanted Trump in there. At least half of those who did not vote, like yours truly, did not want to be conned into voting for Hillary in order to avvoid Trump. But to say that Trumpists have a higher level of education than do Democrats generally is considerable distorted. The base is equally ignorant on both sides... the highest competence going by and large to those who have given up on the political party system! Like yours truly as well!!
I think that this particular version of 'Anonymous' is a troll. Surely no one is dense enough to publish such tripe as a defense of him and critique of her. They both seem to be accused of lying but his is...... and, hers isn't... WTF?
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