They believe that the status quo is better than any alternatives. They have not been exposed to other ways of living and those that have lock themselves to basic tribalistic thinking.
Imagine trying to get a sports fan to see the benefits of being a fan of another sports team. Even if they aren’t personally playing and their team isn’t winning they maintain loyalty. Some even bet on their loser teams and lose money just because of loyalty.
It’s all about team loyalty/ tribalism
Excellent answer and I’ll also jump off this to say this applies to marginalized groups just as much as anyone else, in a way I see a lot of people forget all about. Some percentage of marginalized people, through being in the right place and/or putting themselves there, do experience upward mobility through capitalism and therefore identify with it.
People forget that queer conservatives exist, but think about a gay couple with a lot of wealth, living a fairly standard nuclear family existence with an adopted kid or two, integrated into a society that probably still doesn’t fully trust them but sees enough signifiers of “normality” that they’re willing to let it slide. Which side of the political divide benefits them the most to align with? And what ideological principles will they come to internalize in the long term? Might they come to see themselves as somehow different or better than others in their marginalized community?
I’m getting tired of the fluff pieces expressing shock at the fact that some % of black voters are conservative, clutching their pearls at the thought of that number increasing, and speculating about black churches and “social conservatism.” While also completely disregarding the fact that black voters have always leaned left yet are also affected by some of the same political shifts that every other demographic is. Our first loyalty is generally to our class.
I think it’s like the old trope of asking a fish how the water is and they reply “what’s water?”
Often because they’re profiting from it themselves.
They don’t have to balls to think for themselves.
Liberalism doesn’t exist because of moral failures of individuals, but because the Mode of Production supports the laws, ideology, art, culture, etc. that exist from it.
Liberalism, its propaganda, and its consequences. Also a severe lack of class consciousness and knowledge of political theory.
I think more important than that, is the reason for liberalism, which is the base, ie the Mode of Production.
Propaganda
We’re raised by parents that must be obeyed for our own safety. Some people eventually learn to accept their parents are imperfect people and not gods. Many people do not. They look to kings and gods to protect and provide for them.
Those that have power negotiate with kings and gods. People without power attempt to use the only techniques they know to negotiate with their kings and gods: begging and/or pledging loyalty and service in exchange for scraps.
Of course this is but one of many reasons many people worship power.
temporarily embarrassed billionaires
Richard Nixon’s head : I promise to cut taxes for the rich and use the poor as a cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel!
[audience applauds]
Philip J. Fry : That’ll show those poor!
Turanga Leela : You’re not rich!
Philip J. Fry : But someday I might be rich, and people like me better watch their step
Interesting question. I don’t think I’ve ever defended either. I’ve also only lived in capitalist countries, so I have no personal experience with other economic systems.
Because propaganda is effective.
This might be relevant:
https://youtu.be/J_fZ9o6P0-A?si=-fl7rLryYZBDVgTN&t=194
Conditions here were deplorable by any objective measure. And if you’ll recall, one of the hallmarks of early Russian industrialization was: the workforce was often transient. People moved back and forth between their home villages and jobs in the cities, and this flux meant that the places people lived and where they ate and bathed and got medical attention were only ever temporary expedients. It was a bit like you were going off to some particularly crappy summer camp. It was only meant to be temporarily endured, not lived in full time, and so conditions just never got better. People were not just renting rooms; they were renting corners of rooms. You could rent not just a bed, but part of a bed. Sanitation was, of course, practically non-existent, and the food was disgusting. The work itself, meanwhile, was long and grueling. There were no safety standards in the factories. There were hardly any rights for anybody at all. And pay was literally inadequate. The ministry of finance itself surveyed conditions and concluded that a family of four needed about fifty rubles a month to purchase basic necessities (that is, food and shelter and heat) and then they found that 75% of the workers were making less than 30 rubles a month. The economic and moral math was just not adding up.
https://youtu.be/J_fZ9o6P0-A?si=FtaiY47HVyXXBeAP&t=340
The lower skilled, less educated, and still mentally “peasant” workers tended to remain culturally conservative. They were orthodox christian and believed strongly in the divine benevolence of the czar. And indeed one of the things reported by both social democrats and SRs back to their respective central committees was that they struggled to recruit among these workers because they were out there pitching “overthrowing the czar” and everyone was like “What? We… we love the czar, and he loves us too!”
To them, the czar was not a villain, but a hero. Not the devil, but their savior. It understandably made recruiting for a political revolution to overthrow their “hero and savior” very difficult.
https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/revolutions_podcast/2020/02/1033-bloody-sunday.html
Which is why the conservative mandate is to defund education and keep people as ignorant as possible.
I mean, to keep the common man as ignorant as possible – the children of the elites will always go to prohibitively expensive Montessori schools, which will better prepare them for critical thinking and bullshit detection so that they may better rule over and parasitize off the common man.
For the same reason people idolize the King.
Unfortunately many of us have been taught that being a good person and a good citizen equals being productive and accumulating resources. Things that are quantifiable and external to the actual person and their relationships.
Being productive and accumulating some resources can be good activities to spend time on, but they are practical necessities and not defining characteristics of existence.
Because the average person doesn’t have any real time to think deeply about politics. They believe whatever big media tells them. Some also can’t understand how evil someone people can get.
“Surely the basic logic of how things work must be very consistent in order to have such a large and prosperous country like the USA. I don’t understand it. Probably because I’m missing something not because it’s fundamentally flawed”
Because the average person doesn’t have any real time to think deeply about politics.
Because the economic elites have engineered it that way.
They flooded the workplace with double the workers (both men and women), thereby depressing wages and forcing both parents to become wage earners to survive. Then, with both parents working outside the house, childcare and chores sucked up all available free time, and even more household costs went towards outside help (daycares, etc.).
Then they began a tradition of kicking children out of the house when they became adults, thereby putting strain on infrastructure and increasing the demand for housing.
Then they began a push for higher education, thereby saddling young adults with ridiculous amounts of debt at the point of their lives when they could least afford to shoulder said debt.
All this makes us extremely time poor and resource poor, such that we cannot afford the head space to consider anything beyond where we put the next step or two that we make. As a society, the common man becomes far too busy just treading water to be concerned about in which direction they should swim.
As such, most people take massive amounts of cognitive shortcuts, relying far too much on things spoon-fed to them from the very news sources that should be unbiased and impartial, but which are nearly always owned by the Parasite Class, which favour deeply regressive conservative policies that benefit only themselves at the expense of the common person.
And most people don’t think deeply not because they cannot be bothered to think for themselves, but rather because they have far too much on their plate to afford to do so. They quite literally would mentally burn out if they were to do so.
It’s impressive that someone engineered the last century of economic history. That’s some Palpatine level engineering!
- Because it’s in their personal interests to perpetuate capitalism
- Because liberal ideology is hegemonic and it is what most people have been raised to believe
- Plenty of other reasons why people hold the political beliefs they hold, surely it’s obvious that there are many ways that someone can arrive at a belief system
I like how these pretty neatly map to the three I gave for defending billionaires, even though they’re worded very differently and probably thought of completely independently. We even ordered them the same way.
People who defend billionaires either have a vested interest, have actually bought that they’re 1000x smarter than normal people, or have some (possibly vague) abstract moral position that overrules the basic idea of fairness. Often it’s more than one.
I suppose the 1000x smarter thing isn’t the only propaganda reason given, but I’d say meritocracy is by far more pronounced than inherent property rights or red-baiting in today’s mainstream media. People who go with the latter two tend to learn it through personal connections.
Your username on a post about capitalism makes me giggle
You mean our post.
Yes comrade.
