Stop saying Republicans are acting against their own interests.

[YoungDemCA]

11. It's not really individualism IMO....

It's really a form of tribalism, "Us vs Them", "Don't let Them Take Our Jobs", etc.

One thing that has always struck me about right-wingers is that they often consider themselves the "true" Americans, the "silent majority", yet they still complain about being oppressed by liberals, who, in their minds, are the elitist snobs who want to change the "natural order" of social relations in America, and do it by displacing and attacking "real" Americans (generally, white middle-class Christian families).

There's this implication that the America of the pre-1960s era, which was wholly dominated by white, straight Christian men of means, was somehow nobler or better than the current America.

Liberals, in my (admittedly biased) view, tend to see expanding individual rights and opportunities and working towards social justice as being essential to maintaining collective cohesion, while conservatives tend to see the opposite: we shouldn't expand those rights and social justice if threatens the existing collective cohesion.

It's hard to work around that philosophical difference.