by John Hertz: (reprinted from Vanamonde 1228) May I, who voted for Trump’s opponent in the Presidential election, speak against the notion Trump’s supporters were “people … scared silly by the progress we’ve been making for the non-Christians, the blacks…. [who thus] don’t know their place anymore”? I hear that often. In an objection we on the Left are quick to raise in our defense, it’s dismissive. It waves away any possibility that Trump’s supporters have any creditable basis for their opinions – which unsurprisingly those folk maintain we lack. I think we on the Left have long been smug, self-righteous, arrogant about our opinions. That isn’t good argument. It isn’t good politics. It isn’t neighborly. It violates our own principles. Trump cried Aren’t you tired of all those left-wing people’s telling you what to think? Had we been better preachers, teachers, reachers, that would have been laughed down. A well-known man in November 1963 was wrong, I believe, to say “The chickens are coming home to roost”, but perhaps that’s a lesson for us now.
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Let’s grant the proposition as true.
I’ll take one example, partly because it didn’t play out much in the last election: global warming. I’ve seen those charges laid out before and not just at the left but at the scientific community in general.
smug: because of a predilection to rest the argument on scientific arguments.
self-righteous: because of a tendency to demand that something must be done about the issue.
arrogant: because of acting like the truth was on our side.
And I saw people trying to struggle with doing things differently. People saying that maybe spending more time discussing the ‘other sides’ point of view – except that other sides point of view was oddly nebulous. Trying to communicate the science on a more populist basis – for example, Al Gore’s attempts – only doubled the charges of arrogance or condescension, while (at the same time) simplifications or broad metaphors used by the popularizers were reframed as lies and deceit. I saw people trying to modify self-righteousness by looking for policy compromises – only to find that the policy debate then just shifted further right, and the ‘compromise’ of five years ago now being cast as politically extreme.
Perhaps the problem is the very opposite. People not saying what they think. People making themselves appear to be dishonest by not being direct and not speaking their mind. After all what was it people valued about Trump? Honesty? Hardly, even hardened supporters didn’t believe everything he said nor was it possible to given his contradictions. Clarity? Again, hardly possible given it was often unclear what he was saying. Forthrightness? Ah, now that makes more sense. Saying what was on his mind without a filter? Again, that makes sense. Not worrying about whether he was causing upset or offence and not (or rarely) apologising for what he said? Again, its what people seemed to like about him.
Not honesty in the sense of something connected to truth, but a lack of artifice and a directness. This is a quality people liked about George W Bush also. Reagan’s charm had a substantial dimension of the same kind. Being direct. Saying what you think. Not looking like the words being said were calculated or spun or massaged.
Now what are you suggesting? That to reach out to the people who found frankness refreshing and who found people speaking without filters convincing, we should be MORE careful in how we speak? That the people who despised careful messaging will respond better to MORE precisely designed speech?
This does not sound like a winning strategy.
If it matters, my take on this is that Mr. Hertz is saying that those on the left shouldn’t argue that Trump voters did so for (x) motivations, even going so far as to list a few of them.
I’ve actually run into some of this, reading a number of opinion pieces which call Trump voters racists, stupid, mean, hateful, vicious and so on. I know far too many people who voted for Trump and the vast majority of them aren’t any of those things and their motivations are not that easily pigeon-holed.
My brother is one of them. He voted for Trump because he considers Trump not as bad as HRC. He’s not stupid, mean, racist or any of the other things some call Trump voters. He’s apolitical. He just didn’t want HRC to be president. There was a lot of that this year.
I know Democrats who either didn’t vote for any candidate or actually voted for Trump, figuring that it would be easier to get rid of him in four years that put up with HRC for potentially eight years
I believe what Mr. Hertz is arguing, in part, is that it’s counter-productive to impute motives on Trump voters which don’t necessarily apply and that it might be a good idea to understand their motivations instead of insulting them or talking at them instead of holding a conversation.
Please understand, I don’t mean the likes of David Duke. I mean people like my brother. Calling him foolish, stupid and/or mean won’t convince him he should not have voted Trump. He’ll be convinced that you’re talking out your @**.
Robert Reynolds: My brother is one of them. He voted for Trump because he considers Trump not as bad as HRC. He’s not stupid, mean, racist or any of the other things some call Trump voters. He’s apolitical. He just didn’t want HRC to be president. There was a lot of that this year.
In other words, your brother may not be racist, misogynist, or homophobic, but he’s quite happy to vote for a president whose campaign was based on those things, if it means HRC not getting elected.
I see that distinction as hair-splitting, and I don’t see that it lets him or anyone else who voted for Trump off the hook because they knew what they were supporting, even if, according to them, they supposedly did not support it themselves.
The last thing I want is to be neighborly to people who have embraced evil, as Trump supporters have. It gives them and their views a respect they do not deserve.
@JJ: Indiana Jones agrees.
@JJ:
*SIGH* Here’s Exhibit A of the type of rhetoric Mr. Hertz is referring to, as I understand his argument-“Trump voters are guilty by association simply because they voted for Trump”.
Of course you “don’t see that it lets him or anyone who voted for Trump off the hook…”-because you’re convinced that you’re right and they’re wrong-without, so far as I can see, taking any time to understand that maybe, just maybe, they have views just as worth considering as your views are (and, no, I’m not talking about racism, misogyny, homophobia).
Your reply indicates that there’s probably not much point attempting to continue discussing this with you, because you’re absolutely convinced that you’re right on this. If someone with an open mind comments, I’ll reply. Your mind is clearly sealed on the subject. You likely do more damage to your side than you do to Trump’s.
Robert Reynolds: , Here’s Exhibit A of the type of rhetoric Mr. Hertz is referring to, as I understand his argument: “Trump voters are guilty by association simply because they voted for Trump”.
No, the argument is not that “Trump voters are guilty by association”.
The argument is that “Trump voters are guilty of voting to support racism, misogyny, homophobia, and hatred”.
When you say I don’t have an open mind, what you really mean is that I should be willing to agree that it was okay for Trump voters to vote in support of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and hatred.
And I can’t possibly agree that it’s okay.
I do have to say that I love how conservatives, who complain that people who receive public benefits refuse to take responsibility for themselves, refuse to take responsibility for what they supported with their vote.
Exactly what opinions? Because that is the basis of it. Almost every journalist that have traveled among Trump supporters have reported about their hatred towards immigrants, how they say that people without papers are stealing moneys from hardworking americans, about the evils of political correctness and so on.
Given, not all Trump-supporters are racists, sexists and bigots, but everyone who voted for him has by that vote shown acceptance for racism, sexism and bigotry. Thought that the racism and sexism, grabbing the pussies of women and forcing yourself on them is not such a big issue compared to other things.
I will not respect that. I will not accept that this should just be treated as opinions among others.
Robert Reynolds:
But why are you removing Trumps racism, misogyny and homophobia from the equation? Because that kind of proves that it is wrong to be a Trump-supporter?
I really think you are killing all your arguments by keeping your eyes shut to the elephant in the room.
@Robert Reynolds
But you’re not telling us your brother’s views. All you say is that he doesn’t have a political opinion – he just didn’t like Hillary. If his rejection wasn’t based on the differing policies of the candidates, seems to me it’s based on a reflex visceral response, which could well be because he was revolted by Hillary’s cankles or because of the subconscious impression that any woman who got as far as she did is untrustworthy in some way, due to bitchery and/or sleaze.
And I’m not judging your brother on his gender – my mom has only the haziest grasp of politics but she voted for Trump for similar reasons that your brother did – she just never liked Hillary, no further justification required to her. I love my mom, but I can’t say that I find that view just as worthy of respect and consideration as someone who actually THOUGHT about the politics of his/her choice before voting. I avoid the topic with her most days, but I do explain to her now and then when the news merits it why I think she was wrong. If you have some better idea to improve interaction based on your own brother, I’d be interested in hearing it – but I can’t see how we can extend it to the whole country. Tell me, why SHOULD I consider the views of a bunch of people who summed up their decision as – “no particular reason, I just didn’t like her, that’s all,” as just as worthy of respect and consideration as people who actually THOUGHT about their choice – especially when the candidate they liked more did openly espouse racist views?
Trump has rejected reality–not divergent option, but reality–on so many subjects critical to our future on this planet, that the only possibilities for his supporters is that either they are inadequately informed, or that they knowingly support that rejection of reality.
The planet really is warming. There really is broad scientific consensus on the causes, and mostly those causes are human activities such as burning fossil fuels.
The refugees really are fleeing terrorism, not major committers of terrorism.
Illegal migration across the US/Mexican border really is at an all-time low, not an all-time high.
Most African-Americans really don’t live in neighborhoods where there are daily shootings in the streets.
Trump isn’t going to bring back the coal mining jobs because The Evil Climate Change Cabal isn’t why those jobs are gone.
Trump doesn’t even want to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US. Any perusal of his own business history will show that.
What he is going to do is take their health care away, starting with Medicare.
And really, any discussion of the idea that Clinton lost the election because she’s so unpopular really has to deal first with the fact that she won the popular vote by a considerable margin, and the fact that Trump is even more unpopular than she is.
Those of you who think that “climate change” is a dire threat to humanity are hypocrites unless you:
a] Have no travel other than mass transit, by foot, or by bike.
If you fly to Helsinki for WorldCon you are a hypocrite. If you use a car, ever, even a taxi – hypocrite.
b] Live in anything other than the smallest possible dwelling. Having a large house, having multiple houses, or even a medium size house etc….. means you are a hypocrite.
c] Never eat meat. Meat production takes a lot more energy. BTW – if you eat “organic” you also are using more energy (unless you grow it yourself).
Don’t trouble yourselves with reading the past predictions of climate models published by alarmists where the date of the prediction has passed. That will only upset you when the inaccuracies of those models have become obvious. UN reports should especially be avoided.
I’ll let the true believers flail themselves now.
And don’t ever, ever talk with people who actually deal with long term climate in the real world to make a living – like forestry. They will also disappoint you.
IS there a word for a person who effectively said “Sorry, but I thought {abortion and/or gun control and/or jobs in my single town} was too important an issue to worry about whether he was saying nasty things about women, PoC, the Disabled and any and all news reporters who dare to cite his words accurately or fact check”.
Is there a phrase other than “But in the end this means you supported racism, ablism, sexism, homophobia and restricting the first amendment”
“But I don’t agree with any of those things.”
“But you voted for a person who does, and you KNEW IT.”
Do you have a word for a person who knew about those policies but had other priorities that acknowledges the harm that might come to minorities because of their priorities? So that if their uninsured neighbour dies for lack of health care, or the Muslim family is deported, they see the empty house in their own neighbourhood, and acknowledge, “I was part of the machinery that allowed that”? What word is there? What phrase can point that out that isn’t read by them as being an attack instead of an acknowledgement of consequence?
There have been HUNDREDS of articles talking about the [WHITE] working class and how we need to better understand their priorities and reach out to them.
Question: when has the demographic of Trump supporters made ANY attempt to reach out and better understand their opposition? Because maybe you saw it, but from up here, I witnessed no effort on the part of Trump’s supporters to do aught to the liberals, scientists, minorities, etc. but demonize them.
@Hampus Eckerman:
Trump’s racism, misogyny and homophobia are as irrelevant to many of his voters in the same way that Clinton’s being in the hip pocket of business interests are to many of her voters.
I know people, appalled as they were by much of what Trump said, nevertheless voted for him because they considered voting for HRC as more antithetical to their interests than voting for Trump was.
Ironically, while people continue to lose it over Trump’s tweets, his comments on the cast of Hamilton and the rest of his political stagecraft, they seemingly ignore some things which are much more disturbing because of the very real probability of damage implicit in their likely consequences. Trump’s selections for Treasury and State are appalling far more than rhetoric even Trump says was just political theater, I would have called Mnuchin the most frightening appointment Trump made if he hadn’t later selected Tillerson.
Trump didn’t get elected because he made crude remarks and behaved appallingly toward women. He got elected despite them. HRC lost more than Trump won because of the nature of US politics and presidential elections. She lost, in part, because Trump told a bunch of desperate people who feel like they’re being ignored/don’t matter that he’s going to bring the jobs they lost back. He can’t possibly do that, of course, but they believed him because, at this point, they need a lifeline and they felt he was the only one even making an effort to notice them, much less care. HRC’s position on coal doomed her in West Virginia, not racism, misogyny or homophobia.
The outcome of the presidential election came about for far more complex reasons than just racism, misogyny and homophobia and the people appalled by Trump’s success ignore that at their own peril.
Unfortunately, it’s much easier to seize on emotionally charged issues/rhetoric than it is to analyze the much more involved reasons he won in as many states as he did.
Hell, something as basic as “Clinton fatigue” was, in all likelihood, more material to the outcome of the election than anything Trump said or did. I would not have voted for HRC, but I would have voted for Sanders (or almost any other Democratic candidate) simply because I couldn’t stand either Trump or HRC. I suspect I’m not the only voter who felt that way.
That HRC ran a horrible campaign is actually the elephant in the room. But Trump’s rhetoric is far more desirable a topic of conversation on the left at this point. You do yourself no favors by not doing a thorough dissection of just where HRC failed in Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina, instead of just continuing to chant, “racism, misogyny and homophobia” as if it were a mantra.
Airboy:
Do you also believe that everyone who thinks poverty exists is a hypocrite unless they give away all their earnings?
And do you have an argument for avoiding UN reports apart from them being written by scientists instead of by political pundits?
Robert Reynolds:
I think you just defined Trumps voters as deplorables.
He got elected. People voted for him. And now they want to avoid responsibility for their vote.
Robert Reynolds: Any answer for my questions, then?
I don’t believe anybody who votes for a candidate is “apolitical.”
Apolitical voters stay home.
A brilliant rant on the ongoing tone arguments being made across the political spectrum that some of the commenters here may enjoy:
Red State Stupid, Red State Mean
So let me say this loud and clear: That woman is evil, and venal, and stupid and she’s not going to stop voting out of hate even if Democrats nominate another white man and even if he, what . . . ? What is it that the Democrat is supposed to do to win her vote? Wave the Confederate flag? Cheer about black people who don’t vote? I keep hearing this assertion that Democrats have to find the exact, magic, politically-correct words to “reach out” to people like this woman, although no one will give me, and I’m a woman who would recognize it, the magic incantation. Bernie Sanders, who’s not even a Democrat, can hardly look in the mirror of the third guest room of his lake house to shave every morning due to his shame that Democrats can’t, according to him, “talk” to people from what Senator Sanders calls the “white working class.”
People telling me I should be neighborly and polite to the Trump supporters have a lot of negative experiences to combat. I’m an out queer (and atheist) woman living in rural Texas. During my years at this state university, I’ve had pepper spray sprayed into my office late one afternoon (it got into the vents, and my colleague upstairs who has asthma had to be taken to the hospital). A passerby reported two young men trying to set up implements so that when I backed my truck out of the parking space, the tires might be slashed (they got away before the university police arrived). Graffiti accusing me of awful sex crimes against my students was put up in the women’s restroom. I’ve had three separate instances of online harassment: two before it was seen as a problem; the third came so recently that the police could so something, and did make an arrest. The arrestee hired the lawyer who provided free booze for the DA’s Christmas party every year, and the felony charge was dropped to a misdemeanor. Chronology is not causation, but still, it’s….interesting. About five of my white students over the years have told me, face to face in my office, that they or their family members belonged to the KKK (the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies 20 active white supremacist/KKK groups around where I live). In 2010, one of my doctoral students whose dissertation I directed was murdered by her abusive ex-husband (who was bailed out of jail that day by his mother–he was in jail for violating my student’s restraining order). This happened a couple of months before she moved out of town to a full-time teaching job.
And even so, it’s worth noting that 43% of my “neighbors” in Texas voted for HRC (more than the 40% who voted for Obama) even after ongoing years of voter suppression including closing voting places.
But we’re still getting the hell out of this state when we retire, and we’re looking into whether we can retire a few years earlier than originally planned.
Robert Reynolds: Trump’s racism, misogyny and homophobia are as irrelevant to many of his voters in the same way that Clinton’s being in the hip pocket of business interests are to many of her voters. I know people, appalled as they were by much of what Trump said, nevertheless voted for him because they considered voting for HRC as more antithetical to their interests than voting for Trump was.
Well, then, they need to be willing to own that, don’t they? I’m quite willing to acknowledge that HRC’s policies are not “irrelevant” to me, that they are not everything I would like them to be, but I voted for her anyway, and I accept responsibility for that. Why aren’t your brother and other people who voted for Trump willing to accept personal responsibility for the fact that they voted to support racism, misogyny, and homophobia?
And they can hardly claim that Trump is less “in the pockets of big business” than HRC; he’s clearly far more so — he is Big Business, and his policies are certainly going to benefit his business interests.
So I think that is merely a feeble excuse, not an actual reason. I suspect that what a lot of Hillary haters actually hate about Hillary is that she’s a woman and just as strong as men are strong, that she’s speaking her mind just as men do, and is out there taking charge and getting things done, just as men do. But of course they can’t say that, so they complain that she’s “corrupt” (despite years of investigations by Republicans, and no proof found) and “in the pocket of Big Business” (when Donald is even more so) and “a warmonger” (when DT has already made great strides in starting a war with China and talks about using nuclear weapons).
Robert Reynolds: Ironically, while people continue to lose it over Trump’s tweets, his comments on the cast of Hamilton and the rest of his political stagecraft, they seemingly ignore some things which are much more disturbing because of the very real probability of damage implicit in their likely consequences.
And now you’re revealing the insularity of the news sources you consult. Because I’ve seen way more anger and fear and outrage — and justifiably so — over Trump’s administration picks than I have seen over his Tweets.
@Hampus Eckerman:
In point of fact, I did NOT define Trump’s voters as “deplorables”. If you look at the context of her statement, neither did HRC. She was specifically calling that subset of Trump voters supporting him precisely because of the racist, misogynistic and homophobic rhetoric as “a basket of deplorables”, which is the exact OPPOSITE of the people to whom I referred.
She called the KKK, Duke, the MRAs and the groups condemning same-sex couples which cheered that rhetoric “deplorables”-and it was precisely THAT rhetoric which drew them to Trump in the first place. That makes the rhetoric all too relevant to them.
That Trump won sickens, saddens and disturbs me. It doesn’t surprise me much. I grew up around a fair number of people who come from the demographic. They’d give someone the shirt off their back, feed anyone who comes to their door who’s hungry and don’t care about who anyone sleeps with or what color they are. But they feel ignored and abused at this point. One side doesn’t care what they think or feel and the other side only pretends to at election time.
They believed Trump when he made populist statements because they needed to and I shudder to think what could happen when they find out they’ve been had-again.
My thoughts:
Trump didn’t so much win the election as Hillary lost it.
She tried to pull out the same playbook she used against Obama – question your opponent’s temperament and qualifications. It failed as miserably this time around as the last.
Bill tried to tell the campaign to focus on the economy and got the brush off. Instead one of the least popular politicians in recent history focused on making her opponent even less popular than herself. It worked in aggregate for the popular vote but lost too many key States to win under the electoral college.
In the short term, I expect the dumpster fire the least qualified. (Both temperamentally and intellectually) president-elect in history is starting should generate enough backlash for the Democrats to bounce back.
In the long term though we need to figure out how to address the economic issues that have made a Trump possible.
There are too many communities that relied on a single economic source to survive. Those coal, steel, timber, etc jobs started going away 40+ years ago. They are dead and not coming back. Communities are dying with them. Those death throes are creating fear. People that are afraid are easier to manipulate. Throwing out scapegoats becomes a successful tactic – it’s the Muslims, the blacks, the gays, the intellectuals, the commie coasts, the welfare moms, the politicians, ad nauseum (plenty of nausea to go around).
Equally throwing out hope for positive change (which was also Obama’s winning message) is also effective. Based on Trump voters I know, I suspect desperate hope was even more a factor than fear and hated.
Either way, Trump tapped into both sides of this dynamic enough to win a narrow victory.
If we want to prevent another Trump we need to find a way to salvage those communities and give them economic hope. How we do that I’m not sure. It is imperative though that we try.
@airboy I have friends from Caltech who actually work in related fields, plus I read some of the literature myself, so I’m quite confident that climate change is a real problem and it’s being caused by people. I would agree that many of the most alarmist statements have been hokum, but I’ll add that I’ve seen them called hokum by real scientists too. Most likely, the effects will be manageable for the rest of the 21st century, although there’s a non-trivial chance of something worse. Reasonable people can debate the details of that. But the effects in the 22nd century will be calamitous (if only from sea-level rise), and, at this point, I don’t believe reasonable people can dispute that. Not anymore.
There’s lots of room for reasonable people to debate the correct response to climate change (e.g. maybe it’s cheaper to plan to move away from the coast in 100 years) but it’s impossible to have that debate when one side refuses to accept the facts. (And are you seriously citing forest rangers as authorities on this subject?)
I think people are trying too hard to find “THE” reason for this last election. I think there were multiple reasons and not always what someone’s particular world-view thinks it was.
Blame the Republicans who spent decades demonizing the Clintons.
Blame the Bernie version of the Red Guard who collaborated in demonizing her because their messiah wasn’t chosen.
Blame the media for trying so hard not to be seen as partisan, that they ended up being partisan.
Blame that section of the public that is sometimes too stupid to live–Trump is just an earlier version of the Kardashians and look how popular they are.
It’s easy to make it a race thing because 58% or whatever of white voters chose him–but how does that explain the black, asian and hispanic voters who also did? I haven’t seen any articles talking about how they’re racist.
My own personal pet peeve has been that there weren’t people across the political spectrum simply saying “Why are you lying?”. It seems like Trump (and other Republicans) were too often given a soft benefit of the doubt. ‘Why do you say that?’ or ‘ That’s a misrepresentation’ or ‘You’re mistaken”. I was desperately wanting someone to just say “You’re a liar!!!!!” and keep saying it. Why are you lying? Why are you lying?
What I took away from the article was that all too often, when you ‘know’ you’re right and righteous, you become a scold and alienate whoever it is you’re correcting. And it’s continuing.
To me, Robert, when you boil down your brother’s views to “he’s apolitical, he just didn’t like Hillary” you haven’t provided any proof for your assertion that that view is worthy of respect and consideration. And no, your opinion that your brother is a fine fellow is not proof that his view is worthy of respect and consideration when from your description it bases such a tremendous decision on such slender motives.
To me, it sounds like you’re saying that because your bro is awesome and not racist or misogynist, we must therefore publicly proclaim that he did not vote for a racist misogynist candidate even though that is exactly what he did. I fight against that, because the next step is normalizing Trump’s views that registering and maybe expelling an entire religious group while having your surrogates babble about how internment camps for Nisei show there’s precedent for it is totes okay and the new business as usual – on the specious logic that lots of decent people voted for Trump and therefore the policies they voted for CAN’T be that bad because such decent folk would never vote for anything so bad.
Robert Reynolds: But they feel ignored and abused at this point
… so they deliberately chose to vote for a man who is eminently unqualified to be President, who campaigned openly on a platform of racism and misogyny and homophobia and hatred, as a way of saying “FUCK YOU” to the rest of the country.
In other words, they behaved like spoiled, bratty, petulant 6-year-olds because they insist that things should stay the same as they’ve always been, despite the fact that this is simply impossible — globalization and the loss of manufacturing and mining jobs in the U.S. aren’t going to stop, so some other solution needs to be created — and what they want isn’t going to happen, so they threw a huge tantrum and said to everyone else, “screw you, if I can’t have what I want, then I’m going to make sure that you don’t get anything you want, either!”
So now maybe you can explain to me how rational adults are supposed to be able to reason effectively with people who behave like spoiled, nasty children — and are proud of, who actually brag about, doing so.
Robert Reynolds:
You are putting lipstick on a pig. Because these are the people who voted for a candidate whose absolutely loudest message was that you shouldn’t have to listen to people of colour, those have most in american history been ignored and abused. That you shouldn’t have to listen or care about women. They voted for the candidate of greed, the candidate for fuck everyone else, the candidate for throw them out, the candidate for homophobia, sexism, islamophobia and more.
Needed to? NEEDED TO? WHAT THE HELL?? The poor still voted for Democrats. Those who voted for republicans were still more well off than those who voted for the democrats and this with a large margin. Don’t come here with bloody needed to. You don’t need to walk with the fascists.
Don’t come here and talk about that they didn’t feel listened to. Because we know who they voted for. The person who wanted to shut people up, by threats and by violence.
I’m actually willing to accept that not all Trump voters define themselves as racist, misogynist, homophobic and islamophobic. I’m also willing to accept that they voted for Trump because he promised to bring manufacturing jobs back or because they view renewable energy as a threat or because they hate Hillary or because abortion is a sin or whatever other justifications they have.
However, Trump’s promises about bringing jobs back or withdrawing support for renewable energy or the fact that he was not Hillary Clinton or whatever it was that made some people vote for him came part and parcel with his xenophobic, racist, misogynist, homophobic and islamophobic views. Nor was Trump trying to hide those views – on the contrary, he was quite open about them. So anybody who voted for him knew exactly that they were voting for racism, sexism, homophobia, islamophobia, that their vote might would their neighbours and friends health insurance, that it might get people who have been living peacefully in the US for a long time deported. They simply did not care. And that makes them complicit.
Of course, the US voting system makes it difficult for people who dislike both leading candidates, more difficult than voting systems elsewhere. When I hate both big parties and their candidates (and that has happened, more than once), I can always vote for a smaller party that matches my views better and have a reasonable chance that my vote is not wasted. Americans do not have that option. However, they could still have voted for Jill Stein or that gentleman from Utah whose name I forgot or the guy who’d managed to run for president without ever having heard of Aleppo. They might even have written Cthulhu into the blank field. However, they chose to vote for Trump, fully well knowing what he stood for.
@airboy
I don’t consider myself an environmentalist by any means and actually have issues with Greenpeace and organisations like that (long story). However, I also live in a house with solar cells on multiple roofs, our furnace is a cogeneration unit, there’s a battery system in the basement to store the generated power and pretty much every light in the house has been switched to low energy bulbs or LEDs long ago. I also have a vegetable garden and eat very little meat.
And what have you done for the environment lately?
@Lenora Rose:
Your first question-there are people for whom one issue does, indeed, make everything else immaterial. Single-issue voters have probably existed as long as elections have been held.
I know people who will vote for Jack the Ripper, provided he hold an acceptable position on abortion, gun control or the gold standard.
I know people who were “yellow dog Democrats” when I was growing up. They voted straight party Democrat every election and they were thick as fleas on a hound. All the rest is “white noise” to them.
Telling them they supported racism, misogyny and homophobia would be like telling them they voted for the Red Sox because their candidate was a Red Sox fan. It doesn’t have anything to do with their viewpoint, so it’s moot.
President Obama kept Bush the Younger’s warrantless wiretapping program after decrying it repeatedly during the campaign. He’s supported reauthorizations of the Patriot Act. Yet Obama voters by and large reelected him despite those and other actions taken by him over four years. By your logic, those voters supported those actions because they voted for him in 2012. I see it as more a case of making a choice to live with or ignore negatives because the reasons for supporting him again outweighed those points.
As for understanding their viewpoint, if you don’t understand it, you can’t accurately say you understand their reasons for voting as they did. I contend that we all need to understand other viewpoints if we are to survive. That holds just as much for whites understanding just why blacks have very reasonable fears with regard to “Driving While Black” as it does for HRC supporters understanding just why a white blue-collar worker who’s voted all his/her life for Democrats suddenly voting for Trump. We neglect understanding things like this at our peril.
@Hampus Eckerman:
“The poor still voted for Clinton”-oh?
Some of the poorest counties in the United States are in states like Kentucky and they are overwhelmingly REPUBLICAN and voted for TRUMP, not Clinton.
They voted for the candidate who said he’d reduce competition for scarce jobs by deporting the illegal entrants who undercut their wages by working for far less than they would. They voted for the candidate who claimed he’d bring their jobs back by making coal more profitable by reducing regulations. They voted for the candidate who claimed he’d penalize employers who off-shored jobs.
To ignore that indicates that you’re woefully underinformed about reality with regard to the last election.
@Stoic Cynic, Harold Osler:
Bravo! I wish I’d said that half as well as you two did.
It’s my time to wind down for the evening. No more tilting at windmills for me tonight.
Robert Reynolds:
You do whatever cherrypicking you want, but the facts are still that the Trump voters on average were better off and that the poor tended to vote democrat as usual. That is a fact, however you desperately try to hide it. You don’t need to become a fascist. That is a choice.
Yes, they voted for a candidate that lied and lied, that spouted all kinds of hatred for people with different colour or sexuality, that woed every base feeling of humanity, that came with unworkable solutions based on pure emotion and wild fantasies, that spouted hatred towards everyone else.
That is who they voted for.
So lets remember this. It was not the poorest working class that voted Trump. It was mostly the white middle class. It is people who want to define others as outsiders to destroy them. They are the people who live where racism is most abundant:
Stop putting lipstick on the pig.
And he was lying when he said it–a fact easily determined before Election Day. They’re not losing their jobs to illegal immigrants; they’re losing their jobs because the 1%, like Trump, and Including Trump, are exporting those jobs overseas to people who are working, quite legally, in their own countries.
Ivanka just announced she’s exporting jobs from China to Ethiopia, because the Chinese workers get paid too much and have too many rights. Bigger profits in exploiting the even more downtrodden Ethiopians!
@robinareid
That’s a great and very accurate link about how some people who vote for far right candidates and parties think. There is a certain percentage of people who absolutely hate the fact that somebody else might be getting something for free that they don’t get. And yes, not all Trump/UKIP/AfD/Front National voters are like that, but plenty of them are.
Some time ago, a brave journalist ventured out among the xenophobic and islamophobic PEGIDA protesters in several East German cities (and he had to be brave, because the PEGIDA folks hate journalists for refusing to paint a picture of the world that matches their prejudices). One of the people he interviewed was an old woman. No, she was not rightwing or a Nazi, she insisted. But those refugees coming into Germany, they got a free washing machine from the state, while she had to pay for hers. And that simply wasn’t fair. She’d worked hard all her life and she still didn’t get a free washing machine, while some people from Syria who hadn’t even been in the country for two months yet did.
Never mind that those refugees had lost everything in the war in Syria and risked their lives to come here. Never mind that the “free washing machine” was probably shared among ten families or so. Never mind that it was either donated or the cheapest crappiest washing machine available at the big box electronics store. Never mind that the hardworking old woman probably had enough of a pension and savings to buy a washing machine, should she need to, and that if she was too poor to afford one, the state would help her just as it had helped those refugees. Someone had gotten a free washing machine and she didn’t.
There is a certain subset of people out there who are absolutely terrified that someone out there might be getting something for free/cheap and they aren’t. And these people will vote for anybody who tells them they’ll make sure that nobody else gets something for free/cheap either.
Coincidentally, I recently saw a report that a lot of Front National voters in France used to vote for the French Communist Party before switching to the far right Front National. A similar phenomenon has been observed in Germany, particularly former East Germany. Voters switch from the Left Party directly to the far right AfD. These people vote for whoever they think will give them the most free stuff, while denying free stuff to other people.
Regarding the economic problems that are supposedly persuading people to vote for Trump/Brexit/the AfD/some other rightwing jerk, it has been glaringly obvious for thirty to forty years that coal, steel and manufacturing jobs are going away and that they aren’t coming back or at least not in the way that they once were. I have spent all my life (and I was born in 1973) in the shadow of failing and dying industries and I’ve been aware of that since at least the early 1980s. And since I had the misfortune of coming from the smallest of the German states, I also saw that most politicians didn’t give a damn about our dying shipyards and the vanishing jobs of our parents and relatives, but pretended to care about some failing coal mine or steel mill in the Ruhr area, because their state had a lot more voters than ours. So if I could see this as a kid, anybody could.
And the US isn’t much different. Those Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel songs about dying industries in the rust belt are thirty to forty years old. Jobs were vanishing then and people could clearly see it. And whatever you do, however much you rail at women and immigrants and people of colour, those jobs aren’t coming back.
And yes, politicians – including those on the left – are to blame, because they spent too much time trying to shore up that one big, increasingly unprofitable employer rather than offering incentives for smaller and more nimble companies to emerge. But it isn’t as if people couldn’t see the writing on the wall. And if you’re my age or younger, it has been on the wall all your life.
Cora:
Our right wing party in Sweden has around 13% of the votes in Sweden and have been estimated to at the most reach around 20-25%. The people who vote for them are different from other voters in that they don’t trust others. In a poll it was clearly shown that they stand out from all other voters in that they don’t trust politicians at all, don’t trust mass media, but that is merely an extension of them not trusting people at all.
They believe that people in general are egoists and untrustworthy, have negative view of people and do not think it is important to live in a democracy. They think there are more evil than good people. They differ from all other parties (six others in parliament) in this way.
Some while back, I ran across an essay (which I cannot find now) whose thrust was, “It’s not that black people aren’t listening to Republicans. It’s that we ARE.”
Something very similar applies here. It’s not that we’re making up assumptions about what Trump voters think and why they supported him. It’s that we’re listening to what they say, in their own words.
My brother is one of them. He voted for Trump because he considers Trump not as bad as HRC.
So, your brother considered overt white nationalism, homophobia, religious bigotry, and vicious misogyny less bad than… what? What did he think Clinton stood for which made all those things about Trump — things that Trump made no effort whatsoever to hide — not be deal-breakers? Why was he willing to support all that? He won’t say? Too bad, so sad. He did a racist thing, and has to deal with the consequences thereof. I don’t have to look at his thoughts, only his actions.
Clinton HAD a solid plan to bring jobs to poor white rural areas. She outlined it in detail. Trump’s supporters didn’t want any part of it. Why? Who knows, they don’t say — or, if they do say, they couch it in terms of misogyny and racism. Again, listening to them in their own words — no assumptions here.
Anybody claiming that Clinton lost because she “ran a horrible campaign” needs to be willing to address vote suppression, Russian hacking of the election process, and an apparently-suborned director of the FBI before saying one thing about Clinton.
They believed Trump when he made populist statements because they needed to and I shudder to think what could happen when they find out they’ve been had – again.
So do I, but I don’t think it’s for the same reason. I shudder because all that rage is going to be poured out, not at the people who took them for a ride, but at the people those people told them to hate, gave them open permission to hate and harass and threaten and kill. I think a lot of people I care about are going to be hurt, traumatized, and quite possibly killed by the people you’re telling me that I should feel more sorry for. I have good reason to think that, because I’ve been listening to what they say in their own words.
But really, what it all boils down to is that they voted for an overt white nationalist who is viciously misogynistic, homophobic, and a religious bigot. They VOTED for that person. They made that choice. When you choose an action, you also choose the consequences of that action — and in this instance, the consequences were easily predictable. They can’t say they didn’t know.
Some of the poorest counties in the United States
In California, they were the farthest-north, most rural counties in the state: the counties that can’t afford to maintain their own roads without money from the rest of the state. But they fantasize about seceding and forming their own state, because they think they can do better without “big government” – even though the only reason they have services at all is because of Big Government. If they want to go it alone, I say find them space somewhere, and let them try. We shouldn’t do anything more than provide land for their experiment in libertarioid fantasy.
(I’ll add that three of my grandparents were born and raised in Kansas, and the fourth in extremely-rural Kentucky. I am annoyed that people who are not, in fact, stupid, prefer to believe comfortable lies over uncomfortable truth.
The Trump stickers I saw were on European luxury imports, not on lower-priced Japanese cars and trucks. The Trump billboards were sponsored by irrigation districts who have been blaming the Democrats for every problem they have, for years (including the drought). These are not people who are reasonable, they are people who are greedy. They think anything that those people get (whoever they don’t like), is so very much less for them. And you will never, ever convince them that it isn’t like that.)
The people who voted for Trump are going to get what they voted for. And, unfortunately, so will the rest of us. A lot of us may not survive.
Some insights on Trump voters from Politico a couple months back:
What Trump voters want now
@Hampus
Same here. There is a bunch of people – and a suspect most countries have them – who distrust others and hate the idea that anybody might be getting something they don’t, never mind if they actually need it or could pay for it, if necessary. We also have the added complication that 26 years ago we absorbed a chunk of land and approximately 16 million people, many of which both hold such views and have issues with democracy and also cannot handle that the protections the state they claimed to hate offered to unprofitable jobs and industries are gone for good along with their cosy little monocultural world.
Robert Reynolds:
I’m still not seeing an answer on times when the right wing people who voted for Trump have tried to understand, or reach out and open a genuine dialogue, with anyone they have been villainizing. It always seems to turn into demands that the liberals must understand, be open to, etc. And it always seems that “mutual understanding” has to start with the liberals, the minorities, being the ones who have to do the labour of reaching out, opening dialogue; all that emotional work. Tell the black person to offer a hand to the person who voted for the guy endorsed by the KKK. Tell the woman to reach out in dialogue to someone who heard the “grab ’em by the…” remark and still voted FOR Trump.
Or have you seen the Trump voters doing any of the emotional work of reaching for a middle ground, not with that one odd family member so they can get along at Thanksgiving, but to some significant group within the whole demographic of effete elitist pinko socialists?
Ummm, point of order —
What’s the context of this post on the File?
I have great sympathy for the basic thrust — you know me, Mr. Cycle of Outrage. I think it’s poorly aimed, in that it does nothing to break the outrage cycle. It’s firmly accusatory and poorly supported, making it just another step in the groove.
But more to the point, is there any particular reason this particular op-ed snippet has been nabbed as a File770 post?
Every self-confessed Trump voter I personally know has one of two characteristics: they’ve either been inhabiting a right wing bubble (of one stripe or another) for years and are now (seemingly) mentally incapable of free-thought when it comes to political issues (reality is what Limbaugh, or Hannity, or Beck or Coulter say it is), or have some kind of viscerally negative reaction to “Hillary” that, upon analysis, has no basis in reality, but is an entirely emotional reaction, drawn from I know not where.
(I will note that of those in the latter category for whom I am aware of employment history, not a one of them has ever worked for a woman who had a higher mgt role than themselves, and I am aware of personal remarks and statements regarding relationships with women that suggest a general level of disdain for the female of the species.)
That’s not the entire set, but it is the set of Trump voters for which I have background information.
As a general rule, many, many, many Trump voters are tired of having to try to keep track of complex issues and/or are tired of being asked to “sacrifice” for others with whom they feel they have little to no connection to.
To my mind, the election boiled down to two things: better play of the Electoral College game by Trump’s team (may Conway forever have this administration hung around her neck) and voters being offered a simple choice: vote for not having to concern yourself with “issues” or vote for someone who will expect you to have to think about stuff. In other words, vote for the guy who promises to take care of everything for you, or vote for the woman who wants you to have to be involved.
It really was a rejection of intellectualism and of voluntarily taking on the world’s issues.
And it really was a good – and sad – revelation of the degree to which willful ignorance has become a major player on the stage.
As opposed to all those open-minded Trump voters in rural America who are so solicitous of outside opinion and people living differently than they do in regard to matters such as sexual orientation, gender, religion, abortion or gun control?
I’m tired of this election being framed as if only one side exhibits arrogance and insularity. I don’t remember any efforts by Trump to reach beyond his own base. Instead, I remember a lot of hateful rhetoric about Hispanics, Muslims and black people and his refusal to condemn the growing white racist movement he has emboldened with his rhetoric. His voters own all of that.
Trump was the second choice of the American people by a historic margin of 2.8 million votes. He divided us and can now suffer the consequences of that division.
Unfortunately, the rest of us must suffer them too.
John Scalzi wrote a pertinent blog post:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/11/10/the-cinemax-theory-of-racism/
My brother is one of them. He voted for Trump because he considers Trump not as bad as HRC. He’s not stupid, mean, racist or any of the other things some call Trump voters.
Yes, he is all of those things. You are simply in denial of that fact. You need to deal with the reality of the situation and stop trying to deflect because you don’t want to admit your brother is a terrible person who did a terrible thing.
John Hertz, who has been writing for File 770 for decades, sends me things from time to time and I nearly always post them. His instincts for what people want to read about are even better than mine. I’ll wonder, “Who wants to read an exposition about a Chinese poem?” And then it gets a flock of hits. QED.
Here John is advocating the radical and shocking idea that he thinks there’s a way Democrats could get more votes.
John actually was among the first to ask why I was introducing overtly political material at all. It’s an experiment. However, you can hardly say it’s a radical departure, since there has been volumes of political discussion in the comments here ever since I started the roundups. And the parameters of my editorial experiment are more in the nature of accepting op-eds from people who regularly write my fanzine or blog, usually about sf and fandom.
@rcade: +Some-very-large-number
“Trump voters are guilty by association simply because they voted for Trump”.
That’s not what guilt by association means.
Guilt by association is attacking someone who supports gun control by alleging that the Nazi’s also supported gun control. Everyone knows the Nazi’s were bad people, therefore anyone who supports policies they favored must also be bad.
Pointing out that voting for a candidate who espoused racist, sexist, homophobic, and misogynistic positions is an act that supports racism, sexism, homophobia, and misogyny is not “guilt by association”. It is guilt by action. Voting is an action, a choice. The guilt is in the action itself.
All this salt is delicious.
I thank you for the wonderful meal.
The next 8 years are going to be a joy.
The next 8 years are going to be a joy.
You keep thinking that.
Few people are going to be more screwed over the next couple of years than Trump supporters. You just don’t realize it yet.
Aaron, I was one of the few people to correctly predict a Trump presidency, and that was two years before the election. With that and all of my other correct political forecast I believe my political assessment to be far superior to your own. So no, I rather doubt I will be screwed.