It’s a difficult thing to articulate, so I’ve put off responding. Sorry. I think there’s a lot of daylight between how we view the US electorate for one thing - but perhaps not as much as I first thought. You’re right that the distinctive difference between left and right-leaning voters is that only one side is highly critical of their candidates and easily falls out of love with them, while the other is a lot more willing to be led and uncritical. That’s all pretty much what you’d expect from the research by Dr. Altemeyer on authoritarian personalities.

I do not mean to propose that we should be uncritical of self-styled leftist candidates, only that we should be more willing to forgive. I think of people like Al Franken and (across the pond) Jeremy Corbyn who were doing good things and were successfully ousted based on smears and vibes. I do not mean they are perfect or that we should vote ‘blue no matter who’, but that we should give grace to people who get smeared because we live in an adverse media environment where billionaire-owned news and social media clearly give preferential treatment to the right, and often silences or viciously smears anyone who might be a problem. And we let them rob us of the voices we need in politics. That’s all.

A lot of my thoughts revolve around the game-theoretic implications of elections under FPTP. I feel that the dominant strategy in that ‘game’ is a bipolar oligarchy of mutually complicit actors who, in lay terms, run a good-cop/bad-cop con on the voter. You see it in the US very clearly, and to a lesser extent in the UK (because it’s a different game, and the bipolar tendency is not as strong I think - though the chatter after the recent elections does seem to be reframing things in terms of Green v. Reform as a major upset, so it might just end up being a continuation of the same dynamic under different circumstances).

So in that situation of good cop/bad cop that I see happening, yes different things motivate different voters but - crucially - these two parties are operating on two sides of the same basic con (and I don’t think it’s a con that necessarily involves deliberate awareness of the con, I just see it as an emergent aspect of this game).

Basically I just hate the game, it needs to change. I don’t know how cogent you’ll find this, sorry I don’t have a lot of time to edit down. Until someone’s doing that, I’m going to advocate for being more forgiving. Still critical, but knowing that every time we cut someone loose we’re weaker, and they’re always stacking the deck against us.

There you go. Bad, weird opinions. You asked!