What we have learned (so far) from Trump supporters

Over the next few months we intend to conduct several “bridging” conversations crossing the political divide. But we have already started exploring deeper understanding of Trump’s supporters through interview, discussions, and readings. Some in our group have family members who voted for Trump; others have gone out to the Washington Mall to talk to people at the right-to-life march; some have gone door-to-door in Appalachia; and we have conducted a set of interviews online. And we have found books that dig deep, most notably Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, which tries to cross the “empathy gap” between a liberal Berkeley sociologist and deep Louisiana Tea Party loyalists.

There are, of course, many varieties of Trump supporters. There are some hedge fund managers who want less regulation of their industry, and some highly educated people who have built an elaborate ideology around protecting Western civilization. But the vast bulk of Trumpists, as can be seen on any electoral map, are people in rural areas and small towns, with relatively little exposure to the cosmopolitan buzz of the postmodern world – at least until recently. Our efforts at understanding are focused on these people, whom we rarely interact with and whose lives are foreign to those of us who live in the big cities. To understand them, we find, we need to get behind the surface rhetoric to understand deeper motivations and experiences.

Hochschild provides a beautiful example of what comes from such digging:

At a meeting of the Republican women of southwest Louisiana, Madonna Massey, a a gospel singer, declared that she "loved Rush Limbaugh.."... I asked Madonna what she loved about Limbaugh. "His criticism of 'femi-nazis,' you know, feminists, women who want to be equal to men." I absorbed that for a moment. ... Then from there we went through Limbaugh's epithets ("commie libs, " "environmental wackos"). Finally we came to Madonna's basic feeling that Limbaugh was defending her against insults she felt liberals were lobbing at her: "Oh, liberals think that the Bible-believing Southerners are ignorant, backward, rednecks, losers. They think we're racist, sexist, homophobic, and maybe fat." ... In this moment, I began to recognize the power of blue-state catcalls taunting red state residents. Limbaugh was a firewall against liberal insults thrown at her and her ancestors, she felt. (p. 22)

This is one key theme that comes out in almost every interview and discussion we have had: Trump supporters deeply resent being called racist, believe that they are not racist, and feel that the establishment has used the term to demean and silence them.

Second, and related, they feel their way of life is under attack, and that they have been losing for a long time. They have little sympathy for the bright lights of the coastal cities. They value stable family relations, churches, neighborhoods. For the last few decades they have felt that these institutions are dying. A year ago a conservative lamented in the Washington Post: “The left won the culture war. Will they be merciful?” He noted:

Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, remarked to the reporter: “We are on the losing side of a massive change that’s not going to be reversed, in all likelihood, in our lifetimes.” In Mohler’s view ... “Christians must adapt to the changed cultural circumstances by finding a way ‘to live faithfully in a world in which we’re going to be a moral exception.’ ”

A third issue that has emerged rather strongly is that these Trump supporters are surprisingly open to dialogue. They, too, are distressed by the current degree of polarization and extremist rhetoric. Hochschild established deep connections to many ardent Tea Party supporters who cared for her and felt she cared for them. In our experience, we found that people often came out on their porches in the cold and expressed amazement and delight that someone from Washington would be interested in what they had to say. In our web interviews we got comments like:

“I’m hoping our country will move toward having a conversation. We can improve on the Founding Fathers, because they were human and made mistakes. But we have a unique opportunity as a country founded on an idea.”

and

“There needs to be more discussion, less rhetoric. We have to speak, and there needs to be less black & white. There is more agreement than people think.”

But, they feel, the progressives often shut the door:

“People think I am racist/homophobic/misogynist or whatever. It's easy to call names. I've seen it in school too; when you disagree with the school board, suddenly you hate kids? I love kids! It is hard to talk when people only call names.”

We progressives often condemn “microaggressions” against women and minorities; but we commit microaggressions every day against people who like guns and and steak and big cars and evangelical Christianity. The feeling of being looked down on generates powerful feelings of anger and hostility that may take many forms, such as Madonna’s criticism of ‘femi-nazis’; but the particular issues are far less important that the deep sense of insult and loss.

There are opportunities here to open the door.

Talking to Trump supporters: a cry from the heart

Much of the Left is feeling energized by opposition to Trump and the Republican agenda. It feels great to pull together in unity against a clear enemy. But we need to temper it. One of the most important things we can do, now, is to open real dialogues with people who voted for Trump. Pulling together against enemies is a universal and eternal human reaction; but humans haven’t actually done all that well over the millennia in dealing with reactionary movements, so we might want to rethink it.

I’m not saying that’s the only thing to do. Talking across the divide – what I call “bridging” – would be ineffective by itself. We also need to fight and to help. Fighting in unity is certainly critical: the Women’s March, the protests at Republican town hall meetings around the country, the Democratic political mobilizations are generating much of the energy for action. Helping aims to provide assistance for those harmed by Trump’s policies. So far it has centered mostly on immigrants and refugees, and is already gearing up for those who lose health insurance or other benefits.

But bridging is a third piece of a strategy, and harder to mobilize. It runs against the grain. How can we talk seriously with people who support policies we find morally abhorrent? And why should we?

There’s a practical reason and a moral reason.

The practical reason is that the only way to have an effect on Trump’s policies in the short term is to win over some of his supporters. No matter how much we march, no matter how the Democrats in Congress maneuver, no matter how much the blue states scream, no matter how much awful Trump behavior emerges in the press, it will not have a bit of effect: they already know that we hate them. The only thing that will have an effect right away is if the Republicans’ base erodes – that will soften them and split them. Scandals and protests will be dismissed, unless and until a few Congresspeople and Senators begin to feel that their constituents don’t have their back.

But our – progressives’ – moral certainty prevents that erosion of Trump’s base. As a Trump supporter told Sam Altman:

“You all can defeat Trump next time, but not if you keep mocking us, refusing to listen to us, and cutting us out.”

Those who do talk to Trump supporters consistently come away with this theme: that they feel disrespected, put down by us. A typical exchange from one of our interviews:

Q: “What do people think about your politics that just isn't true?”

A: “Where to start?  That I am some sort of evil, terrible, racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobe.  I am not any of those things.”

At this point some of my liberal colleagues say: “Well, they really are ignorant and homophobic and racist.” But just on the practical level, that kind of talk can only hurt us because it cements the lines. No Trump supporter is going to join our movement on those terms. No matter what Trump does, they’re going to stick with him, because the alternative is to join with those who treat them with contempt. And that means that their representatives are also going to stand firm.

There are a great many people who voted for Trump but don’t like him. Many of them are feeling uncertainty, even remorse. But they are not going to abandon him as long as we refuse to listen to them and respect them. Given that we are unlikely to make  significant electoral gains for at least four years, this approach condemns us to a long period of reaction.

Now the moral point.

We should be ashamed to dismiss half the electorate as bad people. We should be ashamed. We talk about inclusion and diversity; but we feel comfortable dismissing huge sectors of the country. We don’t do that with those Muslims who treat women in ways far from our feminist ideals. We don’t do it with Blacks who resist gay marriage. With those groups, we say we need more understanding. Yet with whites who voted for Trump, we somehow feel it’s ok to not even try to understand – we are happy to assume that they are just morally bankrupt.

If we actually talk to these people, something different comes out. Most Trump supporters have been on the losing end of the economic and social developments of the last fifty years. They are the people of the heartland –  everywhere but the coasts. They live in rural areas and small towns. Many worked in manufacturing industries and have never been able to replace the lost jobs; others depend on fossil-fuel industries for their livelihoods and self-respect. They are frightened about their future because they are told that they lack the skills and attitudes to make it in the high-tech global economy.

Many of them have suffered economic harm; but that does not explain the Trump votes, which do not correlate well with income levels. The problem is deeper: these voters have lost their clarity of identity and values and self-worth. Their communities have been decimated by the decline of manufacturing and of many small businesses. They see gang violence rising in their home towns. There is a fundamental loss of trust. They have been driven to the margins of social discourse: the things they care about – strong families, strong churches, the sense of freedom to hunt and drive trucks in the open spaces – have long been under attack from us progressives. They are dying younger from drug and alcohol abuse. A depression has settled in – a depression that goes way beyond the economic.

In this situation, Trump offers hope --not because of any particular policies, but simply because he is against the forces that have brought them to this pass. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, I talked to a limo driver in the fall of 2015 who had voted twice for Obama but was now planning to go for Trump. “It’s not that I agree with him,” he told me; “but he’d be different. We need someone different.” In Youngstown, Ohio, which I remember as a Democratic bastion thirty years ago, even a Hillary  voter says, “I don’t mind Trump, although I do think he is crazy. He is jamming a stick in the beehive, and some think it will break their way.”

And we – we progressives – we have been the winners of the last half century. We have benefited from globalization, diversity, immigration. Our occupations, based heavily on the values of knowledge and innovation, are the ones that everyone sees as the core of the future. We are full of self-confidence. We’re not really worried about our careers because we believe that our education will protect us. We generally deplore the rise in inequality of  recent decades, but we and our party haven’t actually done much about it. We certainly have not persuaded those in Trump country that we understand and care about them.

Our values have been on the rise. We find the growing globalization and diversity of society a stimulating, enriching brew. We love the mixing of musical forms and cuisines from all over the world. We love seeing new and unexpected things in the streets, a festival or a dance by some group we hadn’t known of before.  Our essential humanism, or secularism, is increasingly validated by scholars and artists.

Science has been good for us; so it’s easy for us to say we should listen to evidence and scientific consensus. But science has not been good for the Trump voters. The changes wrought by the growth of knowledge in recent decades have disrupted rather than helping their lives. So Trump supporters are ready to believe that the so-called scientific consensus is somehow partisan, that it is serving the people on the coasts rather than them.

So we should be ashamed to feel so morally superior. If progressivism stands for anything, it is for widening the circle of inclusion and understanding. To declare nearly half the county outside that circle indicates our failure. Trump may be building walls against Mexicans, but we’re building walls against large sectors of our own citizenry.

So what can we do?

This is the bridging part, and it brings together the practical and the moral. We need to engage Trump’s supporters with genuine respect. If we can build some trust there, we will weaken the polarization that is locking even reasonable people into unreasonable positions, and make it less likely that this terrifying moment in our history will spin out of control into true disaster.

Many people that I have talked to, on both sides of the divide, find the deep polarization of the nation distressing and harmful. There is a widespread deep desire to overcome it. That desire is in conflict on both sides with the desire to fight, and it also offers no clear course of action; so it is hard to mobilize. If we want to bridge, if we want to build unity, we need a course of action.

The problem is to find centers of community with the credibility to draw politically diverse people. I can think of two. In much of the country, churches are the key community institutions, main centers of loyalty. And while some churches are highly intolerant and fundamentalist, many are struggling to reach out. The Southern Baptists, for instance, have apologized for their past support of slavery, and in 2012 they elected a Black leader; they are currently vigorously debating their attitude toward Muslim mosques and even toward the most hot-button of issues, homosexuality. And many of their leaders and congregants deplore the national divide; many of them are very uncertain about Trump.

The second candidate, especially in the old industrial Midwest, might be union halls. Many unions have been caught off guard by the large number of Trump supporters in their ranks. Thus they too are facing internal struggles and have an urgent need to work through the differences.

I can imagine a network of dialogue throughout the country, centered in churches, synagogues, mosques, and union halls, wrestling through the differences, starting with listening to the other side, trying to identify elements of a shared vision that would give hope to more people, and even starting to do things together. It’s not easy to have such conversations: it requires a kind of humility that is in short supply. But one thing that we have learned in recent decades is that good leadership and facilitation can generate good conversations even in such circumstances.

The great philosopher Hans Gadamer counseled, “Listen to others in the belief that they could be right.” That’s the true road to progress, and to progressivism that lasts.

Coming to understanding: building a web of civil conversation

We are caught in an extremely dangerous circle of mistrust.

The depth of political polarization is obvious, but what is really frightening is that people on each side now use the other as an automatic indicator of what’s right and wrong: If they’re for it, then I must be against it. These emotions feed on each other. They can reinforce increasingly irrational behavior. It’s a dynamic that historically has often led to internal violence and external wars.

How can trust be restored? Many people nowadays are attracted to notions of “dialogue” or “conversation” – as in a conversation about race, about the environment, and so on. This is a moment at which such conversations could have a great impact. A large segment of the country – my estimate is at least 50% – has not yet dug in to the ideological polarities. If we don’t do something, they may get pulled into the walled camps of the ideologues. But for the present, when people from the other side engage them respectfully, they can listen and understand, and often find that they share more than they expected. They can even work together on some projects.

Such experiences and relations can be extremely powerful in cutting through the vicious circle of mistrust. People can begin to build visions of shared futures and to work together towards it. They are less likely to accept tribal groupthink, and thus less likely to be be driven towards violence.

But how could it work?

Government is clearly the wrong sponsor now for such bridge-building. A locally-sponsored network of conversations working outside the political institutions  could have a much greater effect.

Churches might be the most effective organizing centers. There is no other institution so deeply embedded in so many communities, and crossing so many ideological lines. In recent decades many churches have engaged in interfaith dialogues, including Southern Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Jews, Muslims, and even modern megachurches. A coalition of such churches, by sponsoring a web of conversations, could be a profoundly constructive force in healing the wounds of our polarized politics.

There has been a great deal of progress in the last half century on organizing cross-group discussions. They have focused on three kinds of conversation:

• understanding: exchanging perspectives, learning about each other’s pasts through stories, sharing experiences
• visioning: building shared images of the future through exploring possible scenarios
• collaborating: reaching judgments and commitments that everyone can agree to, and acting on them.

Together, these three sets of practice can deepen relations and build a sense of community among highly diverse actors. Getting people of different beliefs in a room; having them talk to each other about their backgrounds and experiences; working to build visions of the future that they can share; defining some tasks that they can work on together – that could open space to help rebuild a sense of unified destiny and cooperation.