Helplessness
Many people are wondering how come so many people vote for Trump/Poilievre/Milei/ <or insert your local conservative leader here> . The answer I believe lies in all those ads that are everywhere. My better half has seen ads from our local white supremacist yahoos Take Back Alberta on Wordle, a word game by The New York Times.
Those ads are written by marketing specialists who know how to sell anything: cars, cruises, beauty products. It's interesting to consider exactly how they do it with politicians.
Conservative messaging is simple:
Your life sucks. Your country is broken, your economy is broken. You are angry, and rightly so. (See also On uncertainty);
You are a strong individual, and your life wouldn't suck if you were free;
Individualism is good, working together with others is bad;
Your life sucks and it's somebody else's fault: immigrants, feminists, Justin Trudeau, Democrats, woke people, unions, gatekeepers, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, muslims;
If you elect the conservative candidate, he will attack those responsible for the fact that, remember, your life sucks. You will be free from them, and that's all you need to enjoy life again.
Argentina's self-defined anarchocapitalist president Javier Milei has a name for all the people responsible for your misery: la casta, the caste. The good guys, people like you, are personas de bien, honorable people.
A word about the idea of individualism in conservative messaging. You are an individual all right, but a helpless one. Look at all the people that are holding you back: immigrants, feminists, etc. You can't do anything about them. (Well, you can buy a gun and pretend you're doing it to protect yourself from them, and while you're at it get yourself as big a truck as you can afford. But really, you know you're helpless, and only Donald Trump can make your life great again).
My idea of an absolute individualist is someone who goes into the desert and builds a house with his bare hands out of mud, generates electricity by pedalling on a stationary bike hooked up to a generator, and grows his own food. This is the exact opposite of the individualism preached by conservatives. You are a helpless individual, attacked from all sides. Fortunately your local anarchocapitalist defender is here to help.
Helplessness is also built into consumer technology, perhaps not altogether coincidentally since the same marketing gurus are involved there too, but that's a topic for another day.