The Weekly Sift

Whenever I come across an idea that seems promising, I face a dilemma: Do I tell you all as soon as I start thinking about it, or do I wait until I’ve done the research to flesh it out properly? This blog’s most successful posts are the ones where I’ve taken time, done a bunch of background reading, and thought things through carefully. Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party is a prime example. I thought about it for months, and it has gotten more than half a million hits in the last six years. Around 200 people looked at it last week.

But at the same time, there’s the question of topicality: If I know a lot of you are thinking about a question right now, shouldn’t I let you know that I’m thinking about it too? And if I have some preliminary conclusions that you might find useful, maybe I should pass them on, even if I don’t have all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed yet. So that’s what I’m doing in this post.

The 74 million. As has been clear on this blog since Election Day, I was deeply disturbed to see 74 million Americans vote for a Trump second term. After everything he’s done these last four years, 74 million Americans — millions of whom didn’t vote for him in 2016 — said, “Stay. Get some more of us killed. Finish the job of destroying American democracy.”

Blessedly, 81 million Americans said, “No. Get the hell out of here.” And despite Trump pulling every lever of presidential power to defy the People and stay in office, the institutions of democracy have held. The Electoral College is voting today, and 306 electors are pledged to Joe Biden. On January 20, Trump will become an ex-president.

And yet, those 74 million Trump voters are still with us, and many of them are still believing every ridiculous thing he says, like that he really won in a landslide, but that Biden managed to manufacture vast numbers of fake votes — under the nose of a sitting president, whose Justice Department noticed nothing. In Georgia and Arizona, this vast fraud supposedly happened under the noses of Republican governors and secretaries of state, who also noticed nothing. Trump’s claims of fraud have failed to convince judges in over fifty lawsuits, including judges Trump appointed himself.

And still they believe him. Largely because of his influence over the base voters, droves of Republican elected officials have abandoned their integrity: Eighteen state attorneys general and 126 members of Congress signed on to an insane lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to throw out the 2020 election and hand Trump a second term in spite of the voters. (All three of his Supreme Court appointees refused.) If this suit had succeeded, if defeating Trump by seven million votes (in an election that Trump appointee Christopher Krebs called “the most secure in American history“) isn’t enough to take power away from him, then all future presidential elections would be meaningless. Democracy would be over in America, and quite possibly the Union would break up.

And that’s what the Republican Party supports these days.

So what do we do? How should we understand Trump voters? How should we talk to them? How do we manage to hang on to our constitutional republic in spite of them?

I’ve been thinking about those questions a lot this last month.

The too-easy answers. There are lots of explanations of the Trump voters that strike me as too easy and too satisfying to the liberal self-image. Like:

• They’re just stupid.
• They’re insane.
• They’re in thrall to a mind-numbing, reality-rejecting version of Christianity.
• They’re in Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”: racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and Islamophobes.

I admit, none of these explanations is entirely baseless. Trump’s support is concentrated in the less-educated portion of the population, and his supporters regularly swallow his incredible (and often self-contradictory) lies. Increasingly, they are taken in by Q-Anon or similar conspiracy theories that ought to sound crazy. White supremacists are front-and-center at Trump rallies, and Trump supporters in general love to demonize Black Lives Matter or leading women of color (like AOC). The Christian leaders who back Trump (in spite of his complete ignorance of Christianity and lack of any Christian virtue) are also likely to deny evolution, climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, and other well established aspects of reality.

Perhaps the best reason to believe these pejorative theories of Trump support is that Trump himself seems to believe them. Like conmen everywhere, he does not admire his marks. For example, whenever he needs a distraction from something he has bungled, he picks a fight with some prominent Black person, like LeBron James or Don Lemon, or he tells the Squad to “go back” where they came from. He knows that playing a racist or sexist is a good look for him.

Restoring democracy. I resist these theories, though, because they seem self-defeating to me. If 74 million voters are just stupid or crazy or incurably bigoted, then why exactly do we want to save democracy? Shouldn’t we just disenfranchise them before they disenfranchise us? If Biden could stage a coup of his own, ignore the anti-democratic Senate, and start dictating sensible policies to mitigate climate change, guarantee health care, and reduce economic inequality, wouldn’t that be a good thing?

I reject that scenario. Messy and inefficient as democracy can be, I want to find a way back to it. I believe that when you start cutting large numbers of people out of the process, it doesn’t turn out well, even if you get some good things done in the short term.

Restoring democracy in such a way that it survives into the distant future involves reversing the polarization of recent years and shaping some kind of national consensus about who we are and what we’re trying to do. (It also involves recognizing that we have to do more than just “restore” democracy, because large swathes of the citizenry were cut out of the governing process in whatever era we might imagine going back to.) We can’t do that if we begin by writing off 74 million voters.

The answer I want. So before I even start, I have to confess that I’m looking for an answer of a certain shape: I want to find something in the Trump voter (or at least in a large number of Trump voters) that I can sympathize with and imagine making common cause around. If the core of what they want is to lock immigrant kids in cages, then I can’t go there. If the essence of Trumpism is restoring the patriarchy and sending gays back to the closet, there’s no deal to be made. But what if that’s not it?

Trump’s appeal. I view Trump’s appeal as being rooted in resentment and wounded pride, which Trump has exploited in destructive ways. Trump has turned that resentment against precisely the groups Hillary’s basket-of-deplorables quote describes: against Blacks, women, gays, immigrants, and non-Christians (especially Muslims). And Trump has offered his followers a restored pride in their race, their religion, and the power of their nation to bully other nations.

But what is that resentment and that wound really about? As I see it, Blacks, women, and the rest didn’t really do anything to the MAGA-hatters; they’ve just been offered as scapegoats. Same-sex couples haven’t harmed opposite-sex couples. Trans folk haven’t stopped the rest of us from identifying as men or women, if that’s what we want to do. Every American-Christians-are-persecuted story I’ve ever looked at has fallen apart under examination.

The key to bridging the gap — not all the way to the neo-Nazis, but to a lot of ordinary Americans who voted for Trump — ought to be finding an interpretation of that wound and that resentment that doesn’t demonize the people who feel it.

The progressive account. The progressive movement offers such an explanation, but I’m not satisfied with it. Bernie Sanders and his allies will tell you that the wound is economic: Trump supporters — particularly non-college-educated white people in rural areas — feel themselves slipping out of the middle class through no fault of their own.

The best description of that economic anxiety comes from Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book Strangers in Their Own Land.

You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black — beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.

There’s a long discussion about white male privilege to be had here. (The implicit assumption is that “you” deserved the spot you had in line, and so the Blacks and women and immigrants who got moved ahead of you are interlopers.) But the essence of the problem is the unmoving line. If you’re making good progress towards the Dream, and you know you’ll get there soon enough, then who really cares if somebody else gets there a little ahead of you?

So the progressive solution is to get the line moving again by taxing the wealthy and using the money to relieve the stresses of working-class life (through government-financed health care, a higher minimum wage, and a strong safety net) and to open more avenues for upward mobility (free college and revitalized infrastructure).

Do all that, the progressives say, and working-class people will realize that Democrats are back on their side, so the Trump movement will fade away.

That seems plausible, but I don’t see much supporting evidence. I think progressives were fooled by the support Bernie got in the 2016 primaries from working-class white voters in rural areas of, say, Michigan and Wisconsin. But in 2020, when Bernie was running against a man rather than a woman, those counties flipped to Biden. It was never about the progressive economic agenda.

Depleted social capital. Timothy Carney’s book Alienated America (which I did a mini-review of in a weekly summary in 2019) is a conservative look at the Trump phenomenon. Carney argues (with data to back him up) that the core Trump voters — the people who supported him in the 2016 Republican primaries over more traditional Republican candidates like Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio — were not the people struggling economically. Instead, they tended to be successful people in failing communities. Not the guy who lost his job when the factory moved to Indonesia, but the guy who runs the Chevy dealership that sold trucks to guys who lost their jobs when the factory moved to Indonesia, or the guy whose plumbing-and-heating-contractor business is surviving, but hasn’t been nearly as prosperous since the local factory moved to Indonesia.

So Carney’s solution to the Trump-voter problem is to shore up the social capital of the small towns and rural areas in America’s heartland. This seems a little closer to the mark, though exactly how to do it is a little trickier. (James and Deborah Fallows’ book Our Towns, which highlights successful small towns, might be a place to start thinking about that.)

When I picture the view from my Midwestern hometown (Quincy, Illinois), Medicare for All and free college are nice, but they don’t really solve the problem. They make it easier for people to survive as individuals, and to educate their kids so they can move away and succeed in places that still have opportunity. But they don’t provide a vision of how Quincy itself thrives into the future and makes opportunities for its children to put down roots without moving away.

What all of this leaves out, though, is the kind of resentment we’re seeing right now, directed at doctors and the government officials who listen to them. The people who make a scene at Target because they don’t want to wear masks — that’s not economic anxiety or even community-social-capital anxiety. That’s something else.

It’s related to the own-the-libs anger that shows up on social media. These are the people who positively rejoice when Trump makes fun of the disabled or claims that he couldn’t possibly have molested all the women who accuse him, because they’re just too ugly. That’s not about fear that immigrants will take your job, or concern that you won’t be taken care of if you get sick, or worry that your grand-kids will have to grow up in San Francisco.

Caste. So there are two other pieces of the puzzle I’m trying to integrate in, and this is where I’m going to need some time to get the fit right. Both are related to books I finished reading this week. One is Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, which makes the observation that a caste system provides a sense of security to people who aren’t in the bottom caste, because they know someone will always be below them. That isn’t just (or even primarily) an economic security, it’s a social and psychological security.

So the guy who believes that he’s white trash takes comfort in the idea that he’s at least white trash. As long as whites are on top, he has some claim to self-worth.

Wilkerson raises the idea that poor and working-class whites whose votes for Trump seem to run against their economic interests (because Trump’s policies may take away their health insurance and won’t raise their minimum wage) may have a broader view of their interests than just economics. They may see their whiteness as a birthright they aren’t willing to sell.

Something similar might be going on with the Christians who refuse to sell cakes or do floral arrangements for same-sex marriages. It’s absurd to believe that God cares about these lines in the sand. (Neither cakes nor flowers play any sacramental role in Christian marriage rituals.) But if these people’s self-worth comes from the social supremacy of Christianity, then making a stand that says “We’re still on top” will be important to them.

This isn’t bigotry in the hating sense. The person who feels an attachment to everybody staying in “their place” may not have any conscious animosity towards people who are assigned to different places. But the current system gives that person a “place” somewhere that isn’t the bottom, and if the system falls apart, he doesn’t know where he’ll be.

So now the question becomes: What alternative self-worth do we have to offer such a person? And how can we communicate this offer to him or her?

Defining reality. One of the hardest things for me to accept about Trump supporters is their willing acceptance of all sorts of absurdities. As various Facebook memes have been putting it lately: The pandemic is a hoax, but Trump deserves credit for producing the vaccine that I’m going to refuse to take.

Bill Barr was wonderful until he refused to go along with the Biden-stole-the-election lie, and now he’s part of the Deep State. Amy Coney Barrett has gone from savior to villain in just a few weeks. The only way to know what’s real these days is to follow Trump’s tweets, and be prepared to change your mind as he does, from one moment to the next.

The 2019 book Democracy and Truth by Sophia Rosenfeld has some clues about what’s going on here.

Every society has some process for reaching consensus on what is real, what is possible, what categories people need to keep track of, and so on. (One key element of “wokeness” is recognizing the social construction of both race and gender. Yes, there is an underlying physical reality: Some people’s skin is darker than other’s, and some people have organs that other people lack. But the exact boundaries of these categories and what — if any — significance they have varies from one society to another.) Different people play different roles in this process, with some being more empowered than others. One of the not-well-understood aspects of Trumpism is that Trumpists feel alienated from the reality-defining class.

This has been an issue for years when it comes to Christianity and evolution. The scientific community had a debate in the 1800s, and settled on the consensus that Darwinian evolution really happened, while the young-Earth account of Genesis is just a myth. Lots of Christians don’t like that conclusion, and have tried for years to argue that their definition of reality deserves as much or more deference than the scientists’ definition.

The same thing happens with climate change and all sorts of other ideas that get less attention: There’s an expert class that defines the social consensus about reality, but lots of people are in rebellion against its conclusions. At a mundane level, this plays out on the front page of The New York Times every day: Some things are really happening while others aren’t. And some things are happening but aren’t worth noting.

In general, different people are involved in different reality-defining processes. And even if you’re not involved in any of them, you might feel some connection to the people who are. For example, I play no role in deciding whether the various Covid-19 vaccines are safe. But I have friends who are biologists, and they have friends are are involved. I’ve also participated in a different research community (mathematics), so I have a general grasp of the peer-review process, and so forth. In addition, there was a point in my life when I was deciding what field to specialize in, and if I had made a different choice, I might be working with Dr. Fauci today. (Or at least I believe that.)

But many people in society feel completely separated from that process. They have opinions on the subject, but nobody cares. In fact, nobody cares about any of their opinions about what’s real and what isn’t. They don’t know anybody who decides what’s real, and they aren’t aware of ever having had a chance to enter the reality-defining class. People like them don’t define reality. Somebody else does.

That’s the kind of alienation that makes you throw a fit in Target. This mask isn’t a moon rocket, it’s a piece of cloth. Why is your opinion about it better than mine?

That alienation will also lead you to conspiracy theories, where reality gets defined by an alternative community in alternative ways. The folks in Q-Anon care what you think. Dr. Fauci doesn’t. He thinks he’s better than you are.

Trump consistently stands up for these alienated folks by thumbing his nose at the reality-defining class as a whole. There’s a pandemic? Maybe, maybe not. Doctors say masks help, but I think hydroxychloroquine is better. My friend the My Pillow Guy has a theory; why don’t we listen to him?

So here’s a thought I’m still wrestling with: How do we make the reality-defining class more accessible? Or more transparent? Or at least less off-putting?