Excerpt from this Substack post: https://nickrafter.substack.com/p/the-rent-may-always-be-too-damn-high
This has been my biggest takeaway of the past ten years. The electorate wants more social democratic policies, but they are afraid of the name. Fox News has made the mention of "social" anything or "liberal" anything toxic to a not-insignificant portion of the US population, and calling these policies by their generally agreed upon designations (be it from political science, philosophy, or academia), that group will just shut it down because those words just trip something in their brains.
Anecdotal as it may be, I got my MAGA mother to agree that a single payer healthcare system was better explaining in small words what "a common sense, good system" would look like. She was totally on board. Will she vote for "Medicare for All," now? No, because "that's socialism!!!!!1!1!!1," but an identical program that got explained was "just common sense."
In the end, I've found that MAGA people fall into three camps: bigots, idiots, and the selfish. Bigots will never be reasoned with; they're there to hurt people. The selfish are too rich to benefit from any good policies. Idiots, though, can be reasoned with, but you have to reason with them in the language of a 10 year old. It sounds condescending (and to a degree it is), but it's the only way to get through to them.
It seems insane from an outsider's perspective, but I think that we could get some European-esque policies passed in the US if instead of using "normal" terms, we use super mega-deluxe 'Murican cowboy names and just play into the quirks of American culture.