I do agree we can not and should not absolve people of the responsibility of their choices, my point was that to boil the discussion down to "They're stupid and racist. End of story." is both lazy and politically useless. If the goal is to actually change things, then just blaming voters for being dumb and racist ignores the larger forces at play that shape their decisions. People have agency, but agency isn’t exercised in a vacuum. Utah’s union workers, for example, aren’t just making individual choices independent of their environment, they are living in a deeply entrenched conservative political and media ecosystem that has spent decades conditioning them to vote against their own material interests. Simply lecturing or ridiculing them isn’t a political strategy. If people are enabling their own exploitation, the question isn’t just "why are they so stupid?" It’s why does the alt right's message resonate more than the Dem’s, and what can be done to counteract that? You don’t fix a broken political consciousness by scolding people, you fix it by offering an alternative that is stronger and more emotionally compelling than the one they’re currently following