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Not an expert but it seems to me the most important thing is education. In the U.S. they've been chipping away at that since at least the eighties. I'm not "handing it to them" but the right has put in the long term work to get us where we are today, with only feeble liberal centrist pushback.
Lotta very well-educated MAGAs. Not sure if education cuts to the heart of the illness.
Also a lot of well-educated and intelligent people who are not happy and/or governed by their inner darkness. Education is important but I think there's something far more fundamental at issue
There are well-educated racists, but there's MORE uneducated racists. The well-educated racists spread their ideology and weaken their opposition by hurting education, then they get to rule over the other racists by using their education.
But the bigger issue is the racist part, there must be people in history who were vehemently racist who had a change of heart...
What does it take for that to happen, is there a way to nudge them to take off their jacket in the warm sun
Educate them.
Show them the world outside of their bubble. Let them interact with people different to them, expand their horizons, and enrich their personalities. A trip around the world can be useful, I think.
It's not guaranteed. Like I said, there are well-educated racists. There are people who don't even care about their own children, so why would you expect them to like minorities? They will never change. There is NOTHING you can do about them.
But the ones you can do something about? They could do with education.
I doubt many MAJOR racists changed their minds at all.
For the sake of definition, I'm going to say a major racist is someone who actively hates a group and will go out of their way to watch them suffer. A minor racist could be a child of a major racist. They won't go out of their way to make them suffer, but they are suspicious of them and less likely to treat the group with equal respect. They don't have personal reasons for their hate, but they've been raised to accept the group as inferior.
Minor racists either lean into the racism, or they get out of that circle and expand their perspective.
Progress is generational. Our kids are generally more accepting than we are. Young adults today are more accepting of LGBT+ than my generation was, just like we were less racist than our parents or grandparents.
Major racists don't change their mind, they die off. We sadly won't see major change in our lifetime, but as long as we instill our good values to the next generation, and are willing to learn new ones from the younger generation, we'll get there.
There's not one illness, strictly speaking.
Russia found a guy who appealed enough to the legacies of confederate know nothings who were about to become politically irrelevant if the GOP had died as expected in 2015.
The two illnesses are A) lawful evil, Roman republicans who are working to sell us out to Christian fascists. B) patriots of the Confederacy who think that if they lie to themselves long enough it will become truth. The stupidity of people in group B is profitable enough to turbocharge into political power for people in group A. The heart of the illness is the entire mass of B being held together by group A disinformation, you could call it propaganda but that would imply concern with truth. The hearts of the illness are the links holding them together.
I hope there's larger effort towards collecting case studies in terms of former MAGAs and what it takes to bring them back to reality
Being MAGA and being educated are mutually exclusive.
To believe in MAGA you need to believe there was a time in the past where America was great, but that that time has passed and that somehow there is a way to return to it.
Anyone with decent education realizes the myriad flaws with the very idea the movement is based on.
I'm sure you're correct. Just as a poor education along with lack of socio-economic opportunity and inavailability of mental healthcare might contribute to radicalization in the working poor, it stands to reason that a basic lack of empathy, whether taught or innate, likely coupled with greed must play a role for radicalization of the wealthy.
Like, the economic is huge, I've noticed strange impulses even in myself when I'm in a bad way financially...