“The vast majority of conservatives do not draw a distinction between USAID and foreign aid in general.” Not sure I’d go this far, though I do think it is relatively easy to get many elite conservatives angry if they think EAs or anyone else is suggesting they personally are obligated to give to charity. My sense is that what most conservatives object to is public US government money being spent to help foreigners, and they don’t really care about other people doing private charity. I know that on twitter there are a bunch of bitter far-right Trump-supporting racists who think helping Black people not die is automatically bad (“dysgenic”), but I highly doubt they are representative of the supporters of a major party in a country where as recently as 2021, 94% of people said they approved of interracial marriage: https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx My vague memory is also that US conservatives tend to be more charitable on average than liberals, mostly because they give to their churches.
(Having said that, people who read this forum who think liberals just unfairly malign conservatives as racists in general, should look at the data from that Gallup poll and re-evaluate. Interracial marriage had under 50% support as late as the early 90s. That is within my lifetime even though I’m under 40. As late as around the last year of the Bush administration (by which time I was nearly finished my undergraduate degree), 1⁄5 Americans opposed interracial marriage. By far the most plausible interpretation of this is that many conservatives were very racist even relatively recently*.)
*Yes I know some Black people probably disapproved of it as well, but given that Blacks are a fairly small % of the US population, results of a national poll are likely driven by views among whites.
“The vast majority of conservatives do not draw a distinction between USAID and foreign aid in general.” Not sure I’d go this far, though I do think it is relatively easy to get many elite conservatives angry if they think EAs or anyone else is suggesting they personally are obligated to give to charity. My sense is that what most conservatives object to is public US government money being spent to help foreigners, and they don’t really care about other people doing private charity. I know that on twitter there are a bunch of bitter far-right Trump-supporting racists who think helping Black people not die is automatically bad (“dysgenic”), but I highly doubt they are representative of the supporters of a major party in a country where as recently as 2021, 94% of people said they approved of interracial marriage: https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx My vague memory is also that US conservatives tend to be more charitable on average than liberals, mostly because they give to their churches.
(Having said that, people who read this forum who think liberals just unfairly malign conservatives as racists in general, should look at the data from that Gallup poll and re-evaluate. Interracial marriage had under 50% support as late as the early 90s. That is within my lifetime even though I’m under 40. As late as around the last year of the Bush administration (by which time I was nearly finished my undergraduate degree), 1⁄5 Americans opposed interracial marriage. By far the most plausible interpretation of this is that many conservatives were very racist even relatively recently*.)
*Yes I know some Black people probably disapproved of it as well, but given that Blacks are a fairly small % of the US population, results of a national poll are likely driven by views among whites.