What is wrong with the left?

This is really getting frightening. We have a truly terrible President who consistently proposes policies that will hurt his own voters, and a Congress from his own party that can’t get anything done; yet current polls suggest that if the election was held today Trump would beat Hillary again. Trump’s favorability numbers have fallen below 40%; but so have the Democrats’. A Republican in Montana who actually alienated Fox News by body-slamming a reporter still won decisively. We are 0-for-5 in elections this year. We on the left have gained no ground against perhaps the most incompetent and malevolent administration in history. Read Mike Taibbi’s recent piece in Rolling Stone, and weep.

Democrats are suffering from an astounding case of myopia and defensiveness. We have been casting blame everywhere but on ourselves: we blame Fox, the Kochs, racism, stupidity, ignorance. But a good deal of the stupidity and ignorance is ours. We make up caricatures of Trump voters because we don’t talk to any of them. Because our values are so threatened, we imagine that those opposed to us must be evil. Yet everyone who actually does talk with Trumpists finds that the vast majority are decent people who share many of our concerns and desires. It’s a contradiction we don’t know how to deal with; it’s a lot easier to accuse them all of racism.

Trump’s supporters have two strong feelings. One, they feel profoundly alienated from us. They think we have contempt for them – and they have plenty of reason to believe it. Meanwhile, they think we are self-indulgent, self-satisfied, narcissistic, hypocritical; that we hold no strong moral beliefs, just follow our desires. We say, “How can they believe such things about concerned, caring, upright people as ourselves?” But why shouldn’t they believe it, when we have done so little to connect to them?

Second, they feel the country has gone in the wrong direction for a long time, that they have been left out of the big developments of the last half-century. Again, they have good reasons: their lives have gone downhill. They just want to work hard and build a better life for their children, and they are finding that harder and harder to do. They draw a perfectly natural conclusion: since things have gotten worse during an era when globalization and multiculturalism have spread through the land, they want those trends to stop.

Those two facts – they don’t trust us, and they feel things have been getting worse – are sufficient to explain what’s going on. We can cite statistics and expert studies about policy and consequences all we want, but they don’t square with the experience of Trump voters; all it does is to make them feel that the experts and the studies must be somehow rigged and distorted, and to trust us even less. The more we use science to insist we are right, the more we delegitimize science in the eyes of those who find the conclusions repellent.

When we react with outrage and disgust to Trump’s actions, his core supporters take that as evidence that he is doing the right thing. Since we are (from their perspective) the cause of the problems of the last half-century, the fact that we are upset means that things may be turning around. And the more upset we get, the more convinced they are.

If we don’t care about them, they certainly won’t care about us. And too many liberals don’t care about them. Hillary didn’t campaign in the small towns and rural areas; she thought she could win with the cosmopolitan cities. And now I hear liberals saying they don't want anything to do with Trump supporters, can't even talk to them, just have to beat them.

If that’s how we think, we deserve what we will get. I am not a seer, but I have been writing about these patterns for years (e.g., here and here). They go deep, and they will not change because we are outraged. Indeed, we are feeding the rage against ourselves. It’s getting to the point, as Taibbi notes, where nothing Republicans do will turn off their supporters, because at least they’re not Democrats. That’s a very dangerous condition.

Let’s go back to our core beliefs. This is a democracy. We believe in inclusion. If people are suffering, we want to help. It is absolutely inconsistent with our beliefs to say that 35% or 40% of the country should be tossed aside, treated with contempt. I have heard liberals say they hope Trump voters will suffer from the policies he puts in; how is that consistent with our beliefs? How is it anything other than petty vindictiveness?

We need to do the work to understand what’s going on, to listen, to work together with people whom we do not agree with. We need to construct a vision of the future which most people can get behind and see themselves in. That will not happen by yelling louder; we need to engage in real discussion that helps us find real paths forward, towards dignity, for us all.

Like it or not, we are in this together: not only our nation, but the people of the world are now too deeply intertwined for us to go it alone. Nor should we want to. We don’t don't disown our family members over political beliefs. We shouldn’t disown our fellow-citizens either.

This blog is essentially an effort to explore how to bridge this gap, and to rebuild a modicum of trust, so that we can once again have dialogues in search of common ends.

Understanding the liberal elite

I have been realizing recently that while it may be hard to understand Trump supporters, it’s just as hard to understand myself and my tribe.

As a member of the liberal elite – Northeastern, a professor, upper-middle-class, an environmentalist, a believer in multiculturalism and globalism – I feel pain these days whenever I think about politics. It seems that everything I care about is being trampled. It’s hard to pick up the morning newspaper. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about Trump, Gorsuch, McConnell – how much damage they are doing to the country and to all the causes I’ve supported and worked for.

It’s distressing to read pro-Trump opinion, even online. When I pass by a screen playing Fox News, I feel agitated and miserable, at times literally sick to my stomach. How can anyone believe that? Those facts are just wrong! That logic is totally distorted! They started it!

What I would really like to do is to withdraw from all this craziness, find a place of safety. Sometimes I try. I put my head down and just focus on my job, ignoring the political scene. Or I get together with others who share my views and venting: Can you believe what Trump just did? Isn’t the healthcare bill terrible? Is he going to be impeached? Is he going to stage a military coup? – It’s a gloomy conversation, but it validates my feelings, confirms that I’m not crazy, makes me feel less isolated.

I could get away from all this by lumping Trump supporters into a category of bad people. If I could just say that they are ignorant or evil – racists, a “basket of deplorables” – I wouldn’t have to deal with them. I could be comfortable over here on the good side, while they’re over there. I could just focus on beating them in the next election; then I could go back to ignoring them.

But that’s deeply wrong.

First, I can’t really get away from them. We are all in one country, and one world, and we are interdependent. If I ignore Trump voters, they can harm what I care about. Some of my liberal friends say that Trump is “not my President”; but actually, he is. When he acts, and his supporters cheer, it has real effects on things we care about. If we’re going to deal with problems of inequality, climate change, racial justice, immigration we’re going to have to build broad support and work together. This is a democracy; we have to deal with those who see things differently.

Winning the next election wouldn’t fix things, either. Yes, stopping the destructive policies is essential, but it’s not enough. We should have learned from thousands of years of history that if you suppress groups with different views, they become only more hardened and resistant, digging in, fighting back whenever they get an opening, even after many generations. We have to find ways to build a future together, for all our sakes.

And there’s something really twisted, especially for a liberal, in dismissing a large chunk of the country as not worth dealing with. If there’s any belief that defines us, it’s a belief in inclusion. We believe that we should work hard to include blacks fully in society, even though it’s a difficult process that often leads to tension and conflict. We believe in including Muslims, even though many of them have views of women’s roles that we find disconcerting, and some of them don’t want to have anything to do with us. We believe in rehabilitating murderers, giving them opportunities to rejoin society, rather than keeping them in prison forever. So how can we simply say that huge swaths of white working- and lower-class people, men and women, are so ignorant or evil that we just have to defeat them, or wait for them to die?

We have learned in the last decades that inclusion of others requires changes in ourselves – that it’s not just a matter of them becoming like us, but rather of our making a sustained effort to understand their perspective and finding ways to build together. We need to apply the same principles to our fellow citizens.