Blanks, Hearts, Faces & STDs
What you are about to read may seem like it was written by a Democrat but I’m not. Never have been.. I have been a registered Republican that for the most part has voted the party line for more than 30 years. The lead up to the 2016 Presidential election really opened my eyes and the years that followed had a profound affect on me. I just recently (2022) changed my party affiliation to Independent. I made that choice because I no longer felt the GOP represented my core values. In fact, my opinion of the party and its supporters had taken a hard left-hand turn (no pun intended).
It's easy to believe all Republicans are idiots, bigots, zealots or greedy rich people. It's clean, it's simple, and quite frankly it makes the problem appear a lot easier to solve than it actually is. The truth is most are smart. They know what they want, and they view the authoritarian style of the new GOP regime as a way to get it.
No. These people aren't idiots.
So, rather than being lazy and mistakenly thinking of all conservatives as “idiots”, I’ve tried to see things from their perspective. What I learned is there are really only 4 primary personas of American conservatives from my perspective. Each has unique characteristics while also sharing some overlap amongst them. Think of a Venn diagram. Human nature is far too complex to be as simple as firm/fixed categories. I’ve named the four groups Blanks, Hearts, Faces & STDs.
Blanks
Blanks are those people that simply are not intelligent enough to grasp many basic concepts, let alone, moderate or complex concepts. When faced with facts or information that does not align with their understanding or preference, they do their best impression of a computer that’s experiencing an error and blue screens.
In my opinion, these poor people are nothing more than cannon fodder to the Republican Party. Their primary value is their vote, followed closely by their blissful ignorance, unwavering loyalty, and a gleeful willingness to vote against their own interests.
Most Blanks don't even know what they're voting for nor do they care. Most have no real understanding or interest in what goes on in government or how things actually operate. The details are considered unimportant. In their minds, it's as easy as Republicans are Good and Democrats are Socialists which is bad. That’s about as deep as it goes… and God help you if you try to tell them otherwise.
I’m convinced that the term “Fake News” was created to obfuscate things for blanks.
Hearts
Hearts are people that have the ability to be completely tone deaf to reality and facts, when reality and facts don’t align with their views. When confronted with facts that conflict with their version of “truth”, these people can often be heard saying things such as: “Well, I just know it to be true in my heart”.
This group is particularly challenging for me. The willful ignorance is mindboggling. When I encounter people like this, I imagine them with their fingers in their ears while they shout “Lalala, I can’t hear you”.
Faces
Next we have the Faces. These are “The ends justifies the means” people. Faces represent the textbook definition of a hypocrite, and there is very little in this world that irritates me more than hypocrisy. They recognize bad behavior and wrongdoings but if the result happens to be what they wanted, they frown in disapproval or make an impressive grimace face regarding the methods used, but actually say or do nothing to address the actual bad behavior.
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. ”
Despite claiming to have a superior moral foundation and faith based core values, many conservatives, including a shockingly high percentage of Evangelical Christians, have chosen to turn a blind eye and overlook vile behavior, significant character flaws, blatant lies (I’m staring you in the face George Santos), rank incompetence, and worse, all for the sake of maintaining power, achieving broader policy goals, or just to simply “own the libs”.
A common phrase you will hear from people like this goes something like this: "I don’t approve of how we got here, but I'm happy with the results." These people know damn well that what is being said, done, etc. is absolute fuckery, and despite that fact, they STILL support the individuals and the behavior no matter what.
Sadly it seems that many of the voters that support the GOP have become comfortable with this type of selective morality and hypocrisy. This group makes up the majority of the Republican voters that I know personally, and it bothers me. Big Time. Why? Because for the life of me, I can’t comprehend the mental gymnastics someone must go through to somehow have this any of this make enough sense that an otherwise reasonable person would go along with this?
“If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
STDs
Finally, we have the STDs (Scared To Death) and as the name suggests, fear is a significant driver for this group. Additionally, that fear often leads to anger… especially when they feel threatened in any way…and feeling threatened is standard operating procedure for this crowd. They view the world with a fear-based bias and the result is an overly threat-conscious approach to day to day life and their political views follow suit.
They generally tend to worry more about threats (real or perceived), to their existence, their position in society, the status quo, religious values, traditions, or their very worldview, than how a particular policy may affect someone else. This would seem to explain why so many of their viewpoints tend to be rooted in fear… fear of the president, the government in general, immigrants, vaccinations, main stream media, etc.
This hypersensitivity to threat has a high potential to distort reality, fuel irrational fears, and absolutely makes them more vulnerable to fear-mongering messaging from politicians or unscrupulous media personalities (I’m looking at you Tucker Carlson). They believe that the progress we've made as a nation, including but not limited to cultural changes, civil rights and basic human rights progress, are so deeply threatening that many are willing to stage a coup to “set things right”. These people tend to be rude, belligerent, and overly aggressive assholes.
For many in this group, there is a connection between social order and authoritarian violence. Many STDs seem to want order in the form of in-groups and out-groups. The in-groups such as men, heterosexuals, Christians…and yes, for some, white people, are considered on top. Any threats to that order are met with justified, righteous, good-guy violence. I am confident that that is what we saw on January 6, 2021, “Justified, righteous violence to take back our country from, in the words of the QAnon Shaman, "the tyrants, the communists and the globalists," and showing them "this is our nation, not theirs." Freedom for us, order for everybody else. And when that order is violated, they feel like violence is the justified solution.