Excuse me, but I’ve grown more than a little restless with the theory that the country’s stark, polarized divide would heal if only us snotty, overbearing liberals would stop and see things from the point of view of the 72 million Trump voters.
This notion, that conservatives, mainly white rural conservatives are largely reacting to the constant disrespect they feel from, you know, big city, New York Times-reading, Stephen Colbert-watching, Volvo-driving elites is getting a fresh work out after this recent election.
TrumpNation came out in unexpected droves. Therefore, say musty Libertarian op-ed pieces and countless commenters, liberals (and apparently only liberals) need to have a “tough conversation” with each other and finally atone for their misbehavior.
We heard this after 2016. There was, you’ll remember, no end of journalistic self-flagellation at how poorly “the mainstream media” understood the travails of the white working class, and how little effort newsrooms devoted to seeking out such people and “understanding” them. (As though your average newsroom has the budget for buying rounds of drinks at some rural bar and taking stenography as the locals bellyache.)
All that is back again. And it again it lacks one critical factor, if “healing” is actually the prize we’re focusing on.
Namely, where is any kind of “call” to, or “admonition” for TrumpNationalists to engage in a similar quality of self-criticism and behavior modification? Go ahead. Look around and get back to me when you find comparable demands aimed at that rather large and formidable crowd.
To put it bluntly, the over-weighted demands for “respect” and “understanding” from “liberals” toward “conservatives” screams “patronizing”.
Is it too much to ask if pundits and our sage culture counselors see only one group as adult enough to actually engage in therapeutic self-examination, and see the other side as so functionally immature that there’s no point in even posing the question to them?
There are a million theories for how 72 million people came to believe a reality TV performer and flagrant serial con man was a genuine self-made tycoon, and how they ignored a fantastic torrent of daily lies, blunders and scandals culminating in a demonstration of executive incompetence — his response to the COVID pandemic — that rivals when it doesn’t exceed the worst failure of government management in the history of the United States. But you can boil all of them down to two.
The 72 million either don’t know what is true, or they don’t care. So take your pick. Which suggests a higher level of adult function?
Their ignorance and/or indifference has been hardened — like epoxy glue — by 30 years of talk radio, 25 years of FoxNews and a solid 10 now of reckless disinformation via social media. The underlying message via all platforms is that … they are not responsible. Not only are they the victims of snotty, scheming, disrespectful liberal elites, there’s nothing they need to do to cool things down. In fact, the only thing required of them is to stay angry and resentful … and tune in again tomorrow for a booster shot.
I laugh every time I hear or read some Trumper yabber about “owning the libs.” The obsession of that crowd with, well, people like me I guess, (but really AOC and Ilhan and Hillary and all those other harridan socialist babes), is just not reciprocated. It may be fundamental to their “disrespect” grievance, but I don’t think I’ve ever considered “owning a Trumper”. It’s never crossed my mind long enough to register as a thought. Put another way, I (like other journalists) didn’t give them a lot of thought … until four years ago. Yes, they were out there and I heard the noise. But it was all so factually challenged and steeped in common, age-old grievances there was nothing to “engage” with, or really even “understand.” Certainly there was nothing to “agree” about.
One of the primary obstacles to “healing”, if that truly is the point of criticisms of liberal behavior, is the critical factor of judgment in social relations.
We may engage people as friends because we share interests, because they make us laugh or because they mix a damned good Mojito. But where the rubber meets the road in true, deeply-bonded friendships is a trust based in judgment. Because they know what is factually right, good friends will do the right thing when the right thing needs to be done.
Point being: supporting and voting for someone (and his craven enablers) who has proven himself beyond all doubt to be an unquivocal fraud, a racist and sociopathically indifferent to the suffering of millions of fellow citizens is a stunning demonstration of appalling judgment. In other words, it is not the response of a trustworthy individual to an extraordinarily serious moment.
I’m all for “healing”. Only fools aren’t. But at some point social critics are going to have to invent “messaging” that requires modern conservatives/Trumpists to be as adult in their self-examinations as all the allegedly snotty, sneering liberals supposedly demeaning the 72 million via The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, MSNBC, NPR, TED talks … and on and on … at every point of the dial where, you know, facts get verified before they’re sold.
Anything less than an equal admonition to TrumpNation is definitional enabling. It’s treating Trumpists like children. The effect is equal to sanctioning the belief of 72 million that the only things that are truly real are the things they want to be real, and that everything wrong is someone else’s fault.
When I was 10 I used to think that way.
Failure of both Repubs and Dems to bring high quality broadband to every square mile of the US twenty years ago is one of the largest failings of our representatives in American history. Rural “sense of isolation” is real and could have been fixed, but all those corporate representatives have at base been more concerned with their selfish rising wealth than solving such a critical problem. Not only would such action have narrowed the cultural divide, it could have massively increased GDP.
One of the areas that could use broadband is the Iron Range. The IRRRB is sitting on, probably by now, $175M that it has collected in production taxes (really this is just part of it, but never mind). It’s in something called the Douglas J. Johnson (that name should be familiar to you) Economic Protection Trust Fund. But the IRRRB doesn’t spend it on broadband; it doesn’t spend it on anything, at least of the last time I checked a couple of years ago.
If you are a builder in, say, Hibbing, you can probably a grant for demolishing an old house or garage. The IRRRB also heavily subsidizes Giants Ridge. It also gives money to mining companies to improve their facilities.
Remember, the IRRRB was Harold Stassen’s idea in the forties, to prepare for the day that the Range would move away from mining: “rehabilitation” is one of the Rs in the acronym. You’d think it would be rehabilitated by now.
But instead, we have Appalachia only with eastern Europeans instead of thee Scots Irish.
The money the IRRRB does spend, a couple of examples above, comes from other funds also raised by mining production taxes.
And what is the state appropriating for broadband expansion statewide these days? $20 million?
I’m a big fan of an REA-type program for broadband. Hard-wiring is very expensive. So it seems some companies are looking a 5G (or better) cellular fix. Beyond that though I always remember a comment ex-CIA direcror, Gen. Michael Hayden made. He said (paraphrasing a bit here) “One of the most reliable indicators of a Trump voter is a person who is still living 25 miles or less from where they were born.” You are free to suss out the reasons for that.
Oh God, thanks for writing this. I spent my first 20 + years among the Baptists and I am hear to testify that it’s hard to have any kind of “healing” conversation with people who believe, as an article of faith, that they are right and going to heaven while everyone who disagrees with them is wrong and going to hell and hates The Lord and American etc
It’s a binary, immature, narcissistic mind-set that absolutely has to demonize their opponents. White evangelical Christianity is what happened when Protestant Christianity had to adapt to slavery over the course of 200 or so years. In order to avoid the injustice of slavery, white evangelicals turned the teachings of Jesus and the prophets to be all about right belief and a “personal relationship” with God. There’s no social justice. It’s an authoritarian culture that relies on force and violence to keep lesser people—i.e. non-whites and women– in check. This is theology of white supremacy.
So it’s not an accident that these folks went for Trump. It’s totally rational and predictable .
Trying to have an honest conversation with people like this is lost cause. There’s no reciprocity. They cannot and do not play well with others because they cannot and will not see others as equals. Which is why they always end up creating their own social bubbles with their own media, movies, celebrities, etc.
As a kid growing up in this culture; three things always struck me: 1) White evangelical heroes were almost always such mediocre men, people whose success depended on staying within the culture; 2) like all authoritarian groups, white evangelicals created really bad art: from music to visual art, it was always so schlocky; 3) the grifting was constant, from the endless appeals of tele-evangelists to the Amway groups and nutritional supplement stuff.
This the other day from Dana Milbank at The Washington Post.
“White evangelicals are only 15 percent of the population, but their share of the electorate was 28 percent, according to Edison Research exit polling, and 23 percent, according to the Associated Press version. Though exit polls are imprecise, it seems clear that White evangelicals maintained the roughly 26 percent proportion of the electorate they’ve occupied since 2008, even though their proportion of the population has steadily shrunk from 21 percent in 2008.
“This means White evangelicals turned out in mind-boggling numbers. Because they maintained their roughly 80 percent support for Republicans (76 percent and 81 percent in the two exit polls) of recent years, it also means some 40 percent of Trump voters came from a group that is only 15 percent of America.”
Well said Brian. I agree and like that you call the “It’s all up to the libs” approach patronizing.
So two days ago I had a conversation with an old guy like me who was taking down his Trump flag in his front yard (he left up his Drain The Swamp sign but in Florida this could be hydrological).
Let’s you and I each try writing a graf or two of how we would deliver your point to a live human, a decent man six feet from us on a sunny day in our neighborhood who buys the Trump line, and we have to keep him listening rather than dismissing what we say and walking away. We don’t have to get him to agree but we have to get him to listen. I truly believe we have to understand him or it’s 1859 again. And I agree with you that he has to understand us.
This approach puts the responsibility on us two commie libs to open an inviting conversation, which kind of circles back to your main point. But I don’t think my neighbor is going to open the conversation with me, and somebody has to. Or else we’re doing what my friend Dennis McGrath said: It’s like pissing in a dark blue suit. It makes you feel warm all over but nobody notices.
Wanna try a couple of paragraphs?
I strongly agree with Brian’s post about Trump voters not being held to account for much of anything.
Bruce, to your question: The post linked below lays out what I try to do, when I can manage to keep my cool. It rarely works, but it also rarely results in escalation, which just about every other approach I try does. For that reason, I hope that in their quieter moments some might give my point-of-view more consideration than if I simply call them the names bouncing around in my head. https://www.wrywingpolitics.com/democrats-want-win-need-stop-scolding-trump-voters/
Good stuff Joe.
Absolutely the right start. But when you say “the fact is,” not many trumpers would believe your facts. Maybe the persuadable ones, but how big a slice is that? What’s the next sentence when they say “Trump has cut my taxes” or “Trump will keep us from having socialized medicine”? I wonder how we can get along with those who will never agree that the tax cuts screwed them. They’ll have facts to counter our facts. Can we get them to look at the transfer of wealth since Reagan from them to the upper 10%? If they say they’re not better off because the Democrats give money away to people not like them through social programs that don’t work? How do we connect across a shallow and contradictory pool of facts? Most people won’t go down with us to the detail level. The only thing I saw in this campaign that I thought might connect was the Lincoln project (I think it was them) who showed what a teacher pays in taxes, what a firefighter pays in taxes vs Trump’s payments. But it should have been not what Trump pays but what the average 1 percenter pays, in percentage. Can we change anyone’s mind? Should we try? How do we keep talking? And how do we serve on the same school or zoning board? Or work with a colleague who isn’t a PLU?
I’ve been counseled a lot by people who say “you can’t use facts.” Certainly, alternative facts from right wing propaganda outlets is the biggest challenge we face. At the same time, if you take factual assertions out of the response, what are you left with? Name-calling. Unsupported claims? That is precisely what conservative trolls do, and going eye-for-an-eye with them with troll tonality isn’t effective either.
As I said in my post, the vast majority of Trump voters are unpersuadable. But keep in mind, if you only flip a percent of two, you can change election outcomes. (e.g. Exit polls show men without college degrees gave Trump a 42% margin. That’s depressing, but the fact that it was down from a 48% margin in 2016 is a big reason why Trump was defeated.)
Give me day to mull this. Like most sneering, venomous liberals my usual response is to … say nothing and turn away so as to hide my eye roll. I’ve got to come up with something better. I’m guessing a common set of facts isn’t going to happen.
Two things: Listen to them, and find things you have in common. right wing people work on trust — as someone said, “left wing people want to know what is true, but right wing people want to know who to trust”. Most people are concerned about their kids, Their jobs, taxes, their kids’ education. Start with those, sympathize, start with what you have in common.
Beyond that, there is a paper that explains it all very well, called the Two Moral Modes. It explains that most of us on the left are in moral mode 1, in which we believe that we should treat all people morally. the Trump followers are in moral mode 2, where they believe that they are obligated to treat morally only those in their in-group, and everyone else they are entitled to use for their convenience or cruelty. (this is where slavery comes from). the author further explains that most moral mode 1 people are unaware of moral mode 2, but moral mode 2 people are aware of moral mode 1 and resent it and feel oppressed by it, but know that they have to keep somewhat hidden because the mainstream culture is moral mode 1. What has happened is that Trump gave them permission to come out as moral mode 2 practitioners, he made it okay to be cruel in public, to think that putting kids in cages is a good idea as long as the kids aren’t in their in-group. the confusion from this divide is very significant in our culture.
The Two Moral Modes https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/2016/03/31/
I was just elected to my fifth term as a county commissioner and I have no idea how. I live in a county that voted about 2 to 1 for President Trump and I’m a bleeding heart liberal who had a Black Lives Matter sign under my mailbox for the past three months. You’d think that would give me some sort of insight into reaching hard core Trump supporters and…I got nothin’.
Really.
No clue.
But you’re a good neighbor … and you live … there.
Brian, you’ve nailed it. I never understood why Dems didn’t stand their ground in 2000 and again in 2016 and stick up for the majority of voters who in fact had stuck by them. Everybody should circulate this column as far and wide and quickly as possible!
As for how to get the cultists back within shouting distance of reality, so that we can manage to start conversations from some fragment of shared premises, that is the key question, I suppose. I don’t pretend to have the answer. Fox News isn’t going to put Bernie Sanders on a show where he can take phone calls from people and have a chance to listen to their grievances and then supply rational responses.
The obvious place to prospect for cognitive dissonance among the Trumpery cultists may be seen in the election returns. Montana, South Dakota, Arizona all voted for legalizing cannabis; Mississippi voted for legalized medical use of cannabis.
Perhaps the “stone” that was rejected—by all and sundry, for lo these many years—could turn out to be the cornerstone of a shared new edifice raised on a foundation of trust, peace, joyous visions, honest labor, and reggae music.
We’re at the point where one entire political party has abandoned the very basis of democracy—accepting the results of (propaganda-saturated-but-still-theoretically-) free and (comparatively-) fair elections. Last time this betrayal happened was in 1860.
Just about the last hand reaching out across the abyss, above the chasm, is the one that’s passing a joint, instead of a judgement.
“Let’s get together, and feel all right.”
A new green deal.
The percentage of the 72 million who are “socially liberal”would be an interesting thing to know. Thing is though, in my experience I doubt the majority of them can even explain a conservative policy other than “lower taxes” and “more cops.”
I don’t know much about what the short term solution is, but the long term solution is to improve our education system drastically all over the US. If we can get back to teaching kids how to think critically and tell truth from lies, eventually it will have a wonderful effect, but it will take years.
In my previous comment, I seem to have tripped over my own convoluted syntax. Sorry about that!
It wasn’t clear that I meant specifically to denounce the party-formerly-known-as-Republican as the one that has chosen to reject the foundation of small-d democratic government. That foundation consists of the selection of governing officials through (supply appropriate modifiers) free and (insert suitable qualifiers) fair elections.
And now, to quote the infamous William Marcy Tweed,
“What are you going to do about it?”
Well, I guess I’ll start with a hit off the bong.
The Lost Causers are really cranking it up. Trying to sing Kum Bah Ya with them is futile. They gut you like a trout at the first opportunity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/opinion/trump-religion-authoritarianism.html
I was going to quote a friend of my wife’s, a gentle-as-a-spring-breeze retired high school teacher. Asked about “reaching out” to seek “healing” she replied, “Fuck that kum ba yah shit.”