In my experience, the people who vote Republican/conservative/Trump do so out of a certain amount of philosophical and emotional laziness and denial. Confronting the roots of our societal problems is difficult and uncomfortable, and takes a degree of empathy and emotional intelligence that many people simply do not have. To be clear; it is rarely their fault and frequently a result of the external influences and education during their formative years.

The conservative viewpoint that has functionally become hereditary and contagious is that you are special and good, and the only people that are also special and good must have the same values, prejudices, advantages, and deficiencies that you do. This is why if you are nice and polite to conservatives they start spouting more and more bigoted bullshit. It’s because, in their mind, the only good people are the ones that agree with them, and they perceive you as “good” for extending basic decency to them.

This cognitive shortcut is how I have succeeded in planting a lot of seeds of progressive values in the minds of my classmates at the conservative, religious school I accidentally ended up in. Each one of them is a single starfish, so to speak, but each individual moves the needle a little bit. Small progress is better than no progress.