>convenient targets for the less well-off to blame for their misfortune (immigrants, trans folks)
Immigrants maybe, but nobody in the rust belt thinks their town is being hollowed out and flooded with fentanyl because of trans people. That's not to say they have no grievances against trans people, but to think that the right think trans people are "to blame for this misfortune" shows a huge ignorance of the right's politics.
> to think that the right think trans people are "to blame for this misfortune" shows a huge ignorance of the right's politics
They're pointing out the use of Goldsteins to distract from the root cause of the issue (increasing wealth inequality) and get a significant fraction of the general population to believe the problem is more directly caused by immigrants than changes in legislation that allow for more corporate abuse. It's moot that trans people aren't a reasonable cause of economic problems because they are a distraction from economic problem.s
Evangelicals have expectations of very strict gender roles in the traditional family. The “collapse” of the traditional family is why we have social and economic problems in the United States. Trans-women are the biggest threat to their ideas gender roles, so an important part of the right absolutely blames trans people for their misfortune.
>The “collapse” of the traditional family is why we have social and economic problems in the United States.
You're making the same mistake as the parent comment, by conflating social issues with economic ones. Evangelicals have a lot to hate about trans people on the social front, but I'm not aware of any that thinks the decline of American manufacturing is due to trans people. At best it's something like "low birth rates is shrinking the labor force", but even that's more social than economic.
> but to think that the right think trans people are "to blame for this misfortune" shows a huge ignorance of the right's politics.
Then perhaps the right should stop spending a large portion of their political messaging on trans people?
I mean, for fuck's sake, nobody is making up the right's weird culture-war obsession with children's genitals. It's real, it's happening, and it's disturbing. Last election cycle Cruz was running ads depicting trans kids as big burly men who beat up little girls - literally. I'm not exaggerating. This is not hyperbole. This is actually their platform.
If your platform seems fucking stupid and completely devoid of any substance, then maybe you should not be aligning yourself with those people. Nobody should be expected to hand-hold and coddle you in the face of what can only be described as complete and utter idiocy. We're all very tired of this - you have played stupid for far too long.
This does not reflect in the actual party platforms and political messaging the right produces.
Again, that ad Cruz ran is real. He chose to use his very precious ad space on that. A cheap, low-intelligence blow to trans people. We have to acknowledge the reality of the situation we are in: the right is mostly focused on rage-baiting hard-working Americans with stupid culture war bullshit. And it works really, really well.
Not that conservatives were ever trans-friendly, but their current agitated fascination with the subject in US is mostly because Dems invited it by publicly supporting some related policies (sports etc) that don't poll well, to put it mildly. It's easy pickings, so of course they go there.
It doesn't neatly map to left/right politics globally, though. E.g. Sweden massively scaled back access to puberty blockers under social democrats.
Immigrants maybe, but nobody in the rust belt thinks their town is being hollowed out and flooded with fentanyl because of trans people. That's not to say they have no grievances against trans people, but to think that the right think trans people are "to blame for this misfortune" shows a huge ignorance of the right's politics.