What is up with these people?

John Della Volpe is the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics's polling guru. He's been doing this a long time and is insistent that young men who are drifting to Trump have a consistent beef with American society and Democrats:

President Trump is winning their attention. Not because they love him, but because he talks about the things they care about.  Jobs. Inflation. Crime. Fairness. And most of all? Strength.

But this is about more than just politics. This is about confidence.

... Trump is winning young men not because they trust him—but because he fights.

Young men respect confidence. We respect leaders who stand for something, who don’t back down, who don’t flinch when challenged. Right now, Democrats don’t look like that. They look hesitant. They look unsure of themselves. They look like they’re waiting for permission to lead.

Obviously not all our young men are wired for this condition of insecurity veiling its fear of weakness. From that divide between aspirational identity and perceived fragility come preening and boasting. But I'm able to accept that this describes a large fraction of white young men; many young men of color might describe their grievances differently -- or perhaps not. 

Many of these young men of all races and ethnicities presumably have sisters or partners who are women; I'd be very surprised if most of those young women see the world quite the same way. (The gender gap in November's vote remains a complex phenomenon; in general, racial identities proved more powerful in determining voter choice than gender.)

But Della Volpe's account does seem plausible for characterizing Elon Musk's Muskrats who are ignorantly tearing up the U.S. government. Evidence keeps turning up about their sexist and racist enthusiasms. They are the kind of juvenile twits who don't know that complex systems -- superficially often less than rational systems -- sometimes got that way for good historical reasons that had to do with respecting the agency and diversity of citizens. They can believe that, in order to count, everybody should be smart hot shots like them. 

All of us who remember being young may remember feeling that way about our stodgy elders. 

People who acted as the Muskrats are acting in any normal context should be in jail or an insane asylum until they get over their delusions -- for the sake of the greater society. That goes for their ketamine addled billionaire leader too.

Yale historian and indispensable commentator on our descent into autocracy, Timothy Snyder, reports on his attempts last fall to warn mid-western voters about where Trump would take us.

Trump voters saw their guy as the outsider, even though he has already been president once, and has been very present in media for forty years. For Harris voters, the fact that she is Black and a woman make her an outsider; for Trump voters, or at least for many of the ones with whom I spoke, they make her an insider. And that notion that women and Blacks direct a deep state is a cultural construct.

For Trump voters, or at least many of the ones with whom I spoke this fall, Trump's (supposed) wealth also made him the change candidate. Anyone who is wealthy is seen as a daredevil who broke the rules. The image of Trump as a trailblazer was created by the man himself, not by actual earnings. More deeply, though, the notion of the wealthy person as a hero is an American cultural construct. It makes of voting a cultural act: I want to feel like I am a part of that.

... You never say: "hey, I am Elon Musk, and I care about you, therefore I am writing every American family a check for $5,000." You stay away from numbers and math. You tell a story about how the wealth of the wealthy somehow benefits everyone. And you reinforce the idea that the people who threaten the prosperity of your voters are those who threaten their culture. And so Blacks or immigrants or transexuals (or whoever) are always presented as threaten[ing] both prosperity and identity.

... The most powerful form of identity politics is Trump's, and it goes something like this: "I am a rich white guy who breaks all the rules and who therefore gets to make them, and so you should enjoy the feel of my hand in your pocket as I pick it."...

...Trump succeeded because of his identity politics, which brings race and class together in a certain way. By connecting the desire for change with emotions that make it impossible, he (and many others) generate, in the end, sadopopulism: a politics that works not because all benefit but because some learn to take pleasure in the greater suffering of others.

Agonizing over why some people might be eager to tell tear the country down is not going to get us out of this shit show. Those of us who want something better have to grasp whatever weak levers of power we have access to and meet the power grab with our power, skipping the agonizing for later.

The Trumpies, and Elon, and too many voters place their faith in nihilism; those of us defending the American experiment must keep faith with our history of striving toward justice, with generosity, with solidarity, with reality. Reality is a stubborn thing which has derailed the dreams of many an autocrat who thought they were invincible.