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In democracies, the opposite is true: the winning coalition is large, and the real selectorate is almost as large as the nominal selectorate. This

In democracies, the opposite is true: the winning coalition is large, and the real selectorate is almost as large as the nominal selectorate. This means that dictators can keep their jobs by handing out private goods to their cronies, whereas democratic leaders have to dole out public goods to maintain their power. That seems to square pretty well with observations in the real world. I'm not sure how to square this with recent US elections, where poorer folk increasingly vote for the party that openly pledges to give them the least, at least in tangible terms. I suppose that "dole out public goods" doesn't necessarily have to apply to tangible goods, of course. A lot of Republicans are happy to vote for Republicans simply because they have promised to ban things they find objectionable, like abortion. If preventing women from having abortions is one's biggest personal issue, then I suppose a guarantee to curb abortion rights would be seen as "public goods."

Arainach 5y ago
>poorer folk increasingly vote for the party that openly pledges to give them the least, at least in tangible terms. One of the keys is that they pledge to give other groups even less. As LBJ said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you"
- PathOfEclipse 5y ago
  You are completely missing the point as to why people voted Republican recently, and of course, doing it with an air of smug superiority and vague references to racism. LBJ's quote ironically applies in reverse to the democrats of today, especially and including some minority communities. He might have said: "If you can convince the lowest person that his situation is not his fault, he won't notice that you're making it harder for him to rise up. Hell, give him welfare and a system to blame, and he'll happily and loyally stay down forever."
  - Arainach 5y ago
    >give him welfare and a system to blame, and he'll happily and loyally stay down forever. So.....farmers? The welfare tropes are so exhaustingly played out, especially when all data shows that red voters get far more welfare. https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal-government/ https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal... This applies in most states at the local level too: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/why-are-we-exporting-billions-of-dollars-around-the-state-the-coming-showdown-over-seattles-money/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/why-are-w... Also, you're ignoring the voters who explicitly tell us why they're voting that way: "he's not hurting the people he needs to be": https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/trump-shutdown-voter-florida https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...
    - jonfw 5y ago
      The data shows that states with red voters also have high welfare rates. That's very different than showing that red voters get more welfare. Given that welfare recipients are among the minority in every single state, it's very possible that the welfare recipients are voting majority blue and still losing their state elections
      - PathOfEclipse 5y ago
        To support what you are saying, I found this article: https://wallstreetpit.com/89671-are-welfare-recipients-mostly-republican/ https://wallstreetpit.com/89671-are-welfare-recipients-mostl... "Hardly surprising, we see that in a two-party split, 60-80% of welfare recipients are Democrats, while full time Workers are evenly divided between parties."
        Arainach 5y ago
        That's a very narrow definition of "welfare". Farm subsidies are welfare, as are corporate loan guarantees, pro sports stadiums, tax breaks for the energy industry and so on, and those overwhelmingly benefit red states. And who can forget "don't let the government get ahold of my Medicare"? Conservative voters love to believe that the only good welfare is the welfare that benefits them (similar to how "cancel culture" is bad until it's time to ban books from school libraries and so many other hypocrisies).
KerrAvon 5y ago
It’s simpler than that: Fox News has been inculcating fascism in the USA for 20 years. We are transitioning rapidly from democracy into a dictatorship.
- rossjudson 5y ago
  Joss Fong investigated "How American Conservatives Turned Against Vaccines": https://twitter.com/JossFong/status/1496525152598777856 https://twitter.com/JossFong/status/1496525152598777856 It is really good.
jeffbee 5y ago
Perhaps you can’t resolve that contradiction because it doesn’t exist. By income, Democrats won the lower third and middle third income groups by 55-45 in 2020.
- MarkPNeyer 5y ago
  This trend has been changing over time, though. Democrats are losing poorer voters and gaining among highly educated, and higher earning voters.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Data? Pew poll says that trump won non-college-educated white men 4:1 in 2016 and only 3:1 in 2020. Isn’t that going the opposite direction of your claim?
    - LordDragonfang 5y ago
      I think that's more an effect of the gender of the opposing candidate than anything else. You can't deny that sexism played a huge role in the public opposition to Hillary Clinton's campaign. It was plain to see if you followed any of the discussion online, often becoming openly misogynistic. Edit: also, this source seems to disagree with you: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/11/11/once-again-less-educated-whites-spurned-americas-democratic-nominee https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/11/11/once-aga...
      - jeffbee 5y ago
        That source seems to agree with me. The graph shows less-educated white voters with a 10% swing to democrats between 2016 and 2020. Also I completely agree that irrational animus towards HRC was a big cause in 2016.
        LordDragonfang 5y ago
        I understand how you came to that conclusion, since those graphs are extremely confusingly designed*, but the 10% change is the predicted change in margin of victory (which the article is examining because said prediction was wrong), and the actual change is more or less negligible, trending slightly towards more Republican. Behind the paywall, the article text confirms this: >However, there was scant evidence that white voters without degrees preferred Mr Biden to Mrs Clinton. Mr Trump’s margins of victory in white working-class counties this year were just as large on average, and in some places even bigger, than in 2016. * Honestly, they're astoundingly bad, to the point of being actively misleading if you're not looking carefully. I highly suspect they were thrown together by someone without statistics training using bad autofit at the last minute.
bsedlm 5y ago
the way I think about what's happened in the USA is that primarily by means of "lobbying" it happened that the public (i.e. the citizenry) stopped being made out of human individuals and became corporations and other large businesses. this implies that giving out public goods is actually about giving tax breaks and subsidies to campaign donnors and lobbyists both of which are really for-profit companies. ...or something like that.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Yeah, that makes sense. There's kind of a dance our politicians have to do. They have to keep the corporations and PACs happy first and foremost, but they also have to... well, not necessarily keep the people happy, but say the right things so that people will actually go vote for them.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    Basically yes. About 20% of the population is highly politically engaged and partisan (mostly the upper-middle class). The rest are neutral or lean Republican or Democrat, but are really more concerned with day to day things. If you piss of your ideological base in the 20%, you will get primaried. If you screw something up so badly that it affects the day to day life of the other 80%, you will be destroyed in the general election. So the winning strategy is to go as far as you can to please your base without pissing off the main population too much. An example of this is "defund the police." Perfect for the Democratic base, but absolutely toxic to the unengaged middle watching SF shoplifting videos on Youtube. See how quickly they backed off that?
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > See how quickly they backed off that? The Democratic Party never adopted it at all. The activists that did were largely outside of the Party and opposed by the elected Party officials from day one.
andi999 5y ago
This quote also suggests a failure mode: if the people expect more than the people are willing to give plus maximum debt increase. Like you want low tax/social security payments and retirement age of 50.
UncleMeat 5y ago
Poor white people vote Republican. If you actually look at the entire population, Democrats consistently win the lower class.
- glitchc 5y ago
  This has to do with immigration and equity among races more so than a direct transfer of wealth.
  - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
    In one of the most contentious elections in the last 100 years, the racial voting lines were not quite as stark as I expected. While black voters voted in the ratio I expected, I honestly expected this type of ratio along all racial lines except white given the Republican rhetoric in the latest presidential election: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184425/presidential-election-exit-polls-share-votes-ethnicity-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184425/presidential-ele... TBH, this was an election for the Democrats to lose, when it came to non-white voters and the ball was dropped. I'm not sure why they keep chasing these edge-case voters and ignoring the lower and middle class, base. They assume they're "gimme's" I assume - but voter turn out will, and does, drop =[ Full disclosure, I live in the Seattle area, so the rhetoric bubble here is strong EDIT: typo
- cosmojg 5y ago
  Just to add to your comment, here's a chart showing how college education (probably a good proxy for socioeconomic class) correlates with Democrat/Republican leanings across racial groups: https://assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2020/09/16184318/200916_race-plus-education_fullwidth2.png https://assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2020/09/1618431...
0xCMP 5y ago
I would square it by looking at the rhetoric which often focuses on "big government paying cronies and the 'swamp'". It's important to distinguish what they're actually doing from what they're saying to get support. Also see a huge amount of research that who gets part of the public goods is almost important as the fact that they're giving out public goods. Which often falls along nationalistic and racial lines. I personally doubt that most in GOP vote along those value lines, but there are very vocal and organized segments that do which I think explains why it'd seem that way. Source: personal experiences and anecdotal evidence (e.g. take with a grain of salt)
MarkPNeyer 5y ago
This framing carries the kind of contempt that propels poorer people to vote Republican. They consistently feel contempt from democrats. Should it be surprising why?
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  I observed that many voters value their morals/values (for example, Republicans who place a high value on preventing abortions) more highly than they value tangible goods. Many would consider that a compliment. I am such a person, or at least I strive to be. I understand well that there's a "poor Republicans are so dumb that they consistently vote against their own interests" narrative out there. It appears to me that's plainly something you brought to the table here. That trope wasn't present in my observation, either explicitly or implicitly.
cpopw 5y ago
I think it’s more nuanced than that. People are just skeptical of government especially in rural areas. Aside from access to healthcare, I don’t think many poor people have faith in government help. And living in a major city like Los Angeles is even worse. The government’s spending billions of dollars for 600-800k apartments for the homeless, when the cost of living for regular people goes up and up. And with little support for small businesses. The trope that poor Republicans are just “too stupid” to vote for Democrats to save them, or are blinded by social issues, seems largely false. They view the government as causing their problems via cheap labor, “free trade”, unfair regulation and inflation.
- 8note 5y ago
  Free trade and cheap labour are republican policies though. That's what the republican god Reagan was all about
  - brimble 5y ago
    Republicans and Democrats alike bought into neo-liberalism entirely, no later than 1990 (though, yes, it did start on the R side). The leaders and presidential candidates of the big two parties have consistently been on board with it, with the only big exception being... Trump. Meanwhile, neo-liberalism has been and remains unpopular with the electorate on "both sides" (which is why Trump was able to leverage that gap between voter preferences and the standard party platform)
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  The trope that poor Republicans are just “too stupid” to vote for Democrats to save them, or are blinded by social issues, seems largely false. I know a lot of Republicans who are very smart, but they value vastly different things than I do (to put it mildly) and vote accordingly, thus my observation.
- rurp 5y ago
  > People are just skeptical of government especially in rural areas. I would be more convinced of this if rural and conservative areas weren't net takers of federal funds. In the US at least, urban areas subsidize rural ones by quite a lot of money. In addition, take a look at the federal deficit under each partie's leadership for the last 100 years. It's quite a coup that Republicans get to pretend that they are the party for small government and fiscal responsibility.
georgeecollins 5y ago
The fundamental misunderstanding is thinking that people vote to implement their wishes as opposed to express their values. Why don't people vote for policies that help them-- the rich as well as the poor btw? Working class people vote against social welfare programs, professionals vote for tax hikes. The reality is that people know that their individual vote has a tiny chance of changing policy so the material reward for it is very small. The psychic reward for expressing your values is greater. So the working class person may vote to reduce social welfare, but won't tear up a child tax credit. The professional who votes for higher taxes won't donate an extra $5k to the government. In both cases when those people vote they are expressing their values, not their interests.
- gwbas1c 5y ago
  > If an autocrat’s “inner circle” feels that their future is insecure, they will be incentivized to improve the lot of the nominal selectorate in case they someday find themselves on the outside. "The professional who votes for higher taxes" probably fears that someday they won't be a professional, much like the autocrat who fears they will someday be on the outside.
- LordDragonfang 5y ago
  While to a large extent that is true, I think a larger part of the issue is that people actually have different foundational mental models of how the world "really" works. Conservatives, for the most part, believe that a hierarchy of haves and have-nots is not only natural, but inevitable. It is consistent for them to therefore extrapolate that anyone claiming to work on flattening the hierarchy (by giving to the have-nots) must really be trying to get their in-group further up the hierarchy, at the expense of those currently benefitting from it. That's why "He’s not hurting the people he needs to be" can be rationalized as in their self interest. In their view, there is some constant, immutable amount of "hurt" that some demographic has to bear. "No such thing as a free lunch" and such. So deep down, conservatives interpret any calls to reduce that harm as instead being an existential threat to redirect that harm to their group. I really recommend Ian Danskin's videos on the subject, they explain it better than I can in one HN comment, with plenty of scholastic sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMabpBvtXr4&list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ&index=10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMabpBvtXr4&list=PLJA_jUddXv... (Linked is "Always a Bigger Fish". Many of the historical sources justifying the argument are discussed in the "endnote" video that follows, but this video is the one that lays out this particular argument, along with the later video "I Hate Mondays")

Arainach 5y ago

>poorer folk increasingly vote for the party that openly pledges to give them the least, at least in tangible terms. One of the keys is that they pledge to give other groups even less. As LBJ said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you"

PathOfEclipse 5y ago
You are completely missing the point as to why people voted Republican recently, and of course, doing it with an air of smug superiority and vague references to racism. LBJ's quote ironically applies in reverse to the democrats of today, especially and including some minority communities. He might have said: "If you can convince the lowest person that his situation is not his fault, he won't notice that you're making it harder for him to rise up. Hell, give him welfare and a system to blame, and he'll happily and loyally stay down forever."
- Arainach 5y ago
  >give him welfare and a system to blame, and he'll happily and loyally stay down forever. So.....farmers? The welfare tropes are so exhaustingly played out, especially when all data shows that red voters get far more welfare. https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal-government/ https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal... This applies in most states at the local level too: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/why-are-we-exporting-billions-of-dollars-around-the-state-the-coming-showdown-over-seattles-money/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/why-are-w... Also, you're ignoring the voters who explicitly tell us why they're voting that way: "he's not hurting the people he needs to be": https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/trump-shutdown-voter-florida https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...
  - jonfw 5y ago
    The data shows that states with red voters also have high welfare rates. That's very different than showing that red voters get more welfare. Given that welfare recipients are among the minority in every single state, it's very possible that the welfare recipients are voting majority blue and still losing their state elections
    - PathOfEclipse 5y ago
      To support what you are saying, I found this article: https://wallstreetpit.com/89671-are-welfare-recipients-mostly-republican/ https://wallstreetpit.com/89671-are-welfare-recipients-mostl... "Hardly surprising, we see that in a two-party split, 60-80% of welfare recipients are Democrats, while full time Workers are evenly divided between parties."
      - Arainach 5y ago
        That's a very narrow definition of "welfare". Farm subsidies are welfare, as are corporate loan guarantees, pro sports stadiums, tax breaks for the energy industry and so on, and those overwhelmingly benefit red states. And who can forget "don't let the government get ahold of my Medicare"? Conservative voters love to believe that the only good welfare is the welfare that benefits them (similar to how "cancel culture" is bad until it's time to ban books from school libraries and so many other hypocrisies).

KerrAvon 5y ago

It’s simpler than that: Fox News has been inculcating fascism in the USA for 20 years. We are transitioning rapidly from democracy into a dictatorship.

rossjudson 5y ago
Joss Fong investigated "How American Conservatives Turned Against Vaccines": https://twitter.com/JossFong/status/1496525152598777856 https://twitter.com/JossFong/status/1496525152598777856 It is really good.

jeffbee 5y ago

Perhaps you can’t resolve that contradiction because it doesn’t exist. By income, Democrats won the lower third and middle third income groups by 55-45 in 2020.

MarkPNeyer 5y ago
This trend has been changing over time, though. Democrats are losing poorer voters and gaining among highly educated, and higher earning voters.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Data? Pew poll says that trump won non-college-educated white men 4:1 in 2016 and only 3:1 in 2020. Isn’t that going the opposite direction of your claim?
  - LordDragonfang 5y ago
    I think that's more an effect of the gender of the opposing candidate than anything else. You can't deny that sexism played a huge role in the public opposition to Hillary Clinton's campaign. It was plain to see if you followed any of the discussion online, often becoming openly misogynistic. Edit: also, this source seems to disagree with you: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/11/11/once-again-less-educated-whites-spurned-americas-democratic-nominee https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/11/11/once-aga...
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      That source seems to agree with me. The graph shows less-educated white voters with a 10% swing to democrats between 2016 and 2020. Also I completely agree that irrational animus towards HRC was a big cause in 2016.
      - LordDragonfang 5y ago
        I understand how you came to that conclusion, since those graphs are extremely confusingly designed*, but the 10% change is the predicted change in margin of victory (which the article is examining because said prediction was wrong), and the actual change is more or less negligible, trending slightly towards more Republican. Behind the paywall, the article text confirms this: >However, there was scant evidence that white voters without degrees preferred Mr Biden to Mrs Clinton. Mr Trump’s margins of victory in white working-class counties this year were just as large on average, and in some places even bigger, than in 2016. * Honestly, they're astoundingly bad, to the point of being actively misleading if you're not looking carefully. I highly suspect they were thrown together by someone without statistics training using bad autofit at the last minute.

bsedlm 5y ago

the way I think about what's happened in the USA is that primarily by means of "lobbying" it happened that the public (i.e. the citizenry) stopped being made out of human individuals and became corporations and other large businesses. this implies that giving out public goods is actually about giving tax breaks and subsidies to campaign donnors and lobbyists both of which are really for-profit companies. ...or something like that.

JohnBooty 5y ago
Yeah, that makes sense. There's kind of a dance our politicians have to do. They have to keep the corporations and PACs happy first and foremost, but they also have to... well, not necessarily keep the people happy, but say the right things so that people will actually go vote for them.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- fallingknife 5y ago
  Basically yes. About 20% of the population is highly politically engaged and partisan (mostly the upper-middle class). The rest are neutral or lean Republican or Democrat, but are really more concerned with day to day things. If you piss of your ideological base in the 20%, you will get primaried. If you screw something up so badly that it affects the day to day life of the other 80%, you will be destroyed in the general election. So the winning strategy is to go as far as you can to please your base without pissing off the main population too much. An example of this is "defund the police." Perfect for the Democratic base, but absolutely toxic to the unengaged middle watching SF shoplifting videos on Youtube. See how quickly they backed off that?
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > See how quickly they backed off that? The Democratic Party never adopted it at all. The activists that did were largely outside of the Party and opposed by the elected Party officials from day one.

andi999 5y ago

This quote also suggests a failure mode: if the people expect more than the people are willing to give plus maximum debt increase. Like you want low tax/social security payments and retirement age of 50.

UncleMeat 5y ago

Poor white people vote Republican. If you actually look at the entire population, Democrats consistently win the lower class.

glitchc 5y ago
This has to do with immigration and equity among races more so than a direct transfer of wealth.
- UnpossibleJim 5y ago
  In one of the most contentious elections in the last 100 years, the racial voting lines were not quite as stark as I expected. While black voters voted in the ratio I expected, I honestly expected this type of ratio along all racial lines except white given the Republican rhetoric in the latest presidential election: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184425/presidential-election-exit-polls-share-votes-ethnicity-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184425/presidential-ele... TBH, this was an election for the Democrats to lose, when it came to non-white voters and the ball was dropped. I'm not sure why they keep chasing these edge-case voters and ignoring the lower and middle class, base. They assume they're "gimme's" I assume - but voter turn out will, and does, drop =[ Full disclosure, I live in the Seattle area, so the rhetoric bubble here is strong EDIT: typo
cosmojg 5y ago
Just to add to your comment, here's a chart showing how college education (probably a good proxy for socioeconomic class) correlates with Democrat/Republican leanings across racial groups: https://assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2020/09/16184318/200916_race-plus-education_fullwidth2.png https://assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2020/09/1618431...

0xCMP 5y ago

I would square it by looking at the rhetoric which often focuses on "big government paying cronies and the 'swamp'". It's important to distinguish what they're actually doing from what they're saying to get support. Also see a huge amount of research that who gets part of the public goods is almost important as the fact that they're giving out public goods. Which often falls along nationalistic and racial lines. I personally doubt that most in GOP vote along those value lines, but there are very vocal and organized segments that do which I think explains why it'd seem that way. Source: personal experiences and anecdotal evidence (e.g. take with a grain of salt)

MarkPNeyer 5y ago

This framing carries the kind of contempt that propels poorer people to vote Republican. They consistently feel contempt from democrats. Should it be surprising why?

JohnBooty 5y ago
I observed that many voters value their morals/values (for example, Republicans who place a high value on preventing abortions) more highly than they value tangible goods. Many would consider that a compliment. I am such a person, or at least I strive to be. I understand well that there's a "poor Republicans are so dumb that they consistently vote against their own interests" narrative out there. It appears to me that's plainly something you brought to the table here. That trope wasn't present in my observation, either explicitly or implicitly.

cpopw 5y ago

I think it’s more nuanced than that. People are just skeptical of government especially in rural areas. Aside from access to healthcare, I don’t think many poor people have faith in government help. And living in a major city like Los Angeles is even worse. The government’s spending billions of dollars for 600-800k apartments for the homeless, when the cost of living for regular people goes up and up. And with little support for small businesses. The trope that poor Republicans are just “too stupid” to vote for Democrats to save them, or are blinded by social issues, seems largely false. They view the government as causing their problems via cheap labor, “free trade”, unfair regulation and inflation.

8note 5y ago
Free trade and cheap labour are republican policies though. That's what the republican god Reagan was all about
- brimble 5y ago
  Republicans and Democrats alike bought into neo-liberalism entirely, no later than 1990 (though, yes, it did start on the R side). The leaders and presidential candidates of the big two parties have consistently been on board with it, with the only big exception being... Trump. Meanwhile, neo-liberalism has been and remains unpopular with the electorate on "both sides" (which is why Trump was able to leverage that gap between voter preferences and the standard party platform)
JohnBooty 5y ago
The trope that poor Republicans are just “too stupid” to vote for Democrats to save them, or are blinded by social issues, seems largely false. I know a lot of Republicans who are very smart, but they value vastly different things than I do (to put it mildly) and vote accordingly, thus my observation.
rurp 5y ago
> People are just skeptical of government especially in rural areas. I would be more convinced of this if rural and conservative areas weren't net takers of federal funds. In the US at least, urban areas subsidize rural ones by quite a lot of money. In addition, take a look at the federal deficit under each partie's leadership for the last 100 years. It's quite a coup that Republicans get to pretend that they are the party for small government and fiscal responsibility.

georgeecollins 5y ago

The fundamental misunderstanding is thinking that people vote to implement their wishes as opposed to express their values. Why don't people vote for policies that help them-- the rich as well as the poor btw? Working class people vote against social welfare programs, professionals vote for tax hikes. The reality is that people know that their individual vote has a tiny chance of changing policy so the material reward for it is very small. The psychic reward for expressing your values is greater. So the working class person may vote to reduce social welfare, but won't tear up a child tax credit. The professional who votes for higher taxes won't donate an extra $5k to the government. In both cases when those people vote they are expressing their values, not their interests.

gwbas1c 5y ago
> If an autocrat’s “inner circle” feels that their future is insecure, they will be incentivized to improve the lot of the nominal selectorate in case they someday find themselves on the outside. "The professional who votes for higher taxes" probably fears that someday they won't be a professional, much like the autocrat who fears they will someday be on the outside.
LordDragonfang 5y ago
While to a large extent that is true, I think a larger part of the issue is that people actually have different foundational mental models of how the world "really" works. Conservatives, for the most part, believe that a hierarchy of haves and have-nots is not only natural, but inevitable. It is consistent for them to therefore extrapolate that anyone claiming to work on flattening the hierarchy (by giving to the have-nots) must really be trying to get their in-group further up the hierarchy, at the expense of those currently benefitting from it. That's why "He’s not hurting the people he needs to be" can be rationalized as in their self interest. In their view, there is some constant, immutable amount of "hurt" that some demographic has to bear. "No such thing as a free lunch" and such. So deep down, conservatives interpret any calls to reduce that harm as instead being an existential threat to redirect that harm to their group. I really recommend Ian Danskin's videos on the subject, they explain it better than I can in one HN comment, with plenty of scholastic sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMabpBvtXr4&list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ&index=10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMabpBvtXr4&list=PLJA_jUddXv... (Linked is "Always a Bigger Fish". Many of the historical sources justifying the argument are discussed in the "endnote" video that follows, but this video is the one that lays out this particular argument, along with the later video "I Hate Mondays")