Lessons from conversations with Trump supporters

I have been talking to Trump supporters whenever I could. It isn’t easy, since people generally shy away from talking about politics; also, polarization is so bad now that there there are no admitted Trumpists in my usual friend networks. So I’ve had to actively seek them out. Here are a few things I’ve learned.

The first thing is the very strong temptation to stereotype. Maybe that’s obvious, but I hadn’t felt it so strongly. Trumpists have an image of liberals  as self-centered, spendthrift, disloyal, heedlessly amoral; some of them also think we are power-mad and dangerously manipulative. After a bit of conversation they may become convinced that I personally am not like that, but that doesn’t stop them from continuing to use the stereotype. And I, meanwhile, have to fight my urge to assume that conservatives are narrow, intolerant, and ill-informed – despite the fact that the ones I am talking to usually don’t fit. Part of every conversation skates along the edge of this strange shadow world, where everything makes sense but nothing reflects what is going on in the real interaction.

Yet for all that, in my conversations I have found something that felt very strange and positive to me: there is a great deal of common ground around particular solutions, even when the ideological framework is highly polarized. When you focus on broad, ideologically charged issues like climate change and health care, you get stuck in well-worn grooves. I have often been drawn into trying to fight about facts, but when I do that the response is just to throw in another fact from another right-wing source. There’s no engagement.  

But when we start poking at actual solutions to actual problems, surprisingly often we find significant areas of agreement. On health care, for example, the conversation may start out about with attacks on Obamacare and inefficiency and crony capitalism vs letting people die and the suffering of those without insurance. But in one conversation someone suggested the Singapore healthcare system as a model; and by God, there seem to be some things there that we might all like. As we dig into the actual combination of structures and incentives, there is clearly a path for constructive discussion. Yet this doesn’t mean that the hurling of insults and grenade-facts stops; the two type of discussion continue at the same time.

Or on climate: you can go down endless rabbit-holes trying to knock down every denial theory. A Trumpist may raise “Climategate” – a set of emails by one set of researchers that appear to be  trying to shape the findings to alarmist ends. If you reply with a careful analysis of why the emails don’t actually say that, the conversation just veers off in a different direction to a different  claim of malicious science. But when you shift your focus to solutions, the idea of renewable energy draws a lot of support across the spectrum: it’s economically sensible, and it has a local rather than “big” feel. Here, too, we can find a path for a different and better kind of discussion.

On gun control, my conversations and polls indicate that there are several important issues on which there is wide agreement – including background checks at gun shows and banning “assault-style weapons.” Similarly, there are many points of broad consensus on immigration. For inequality, a Universal Basic Income has drawn interest from Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek as well as many on the Left.

Most people, aside from small batches of professional ideologues, have mixed views on issues. So there is surprising room for shared exploration; and that exploration can itself build a sense of trust that enables further progress.

Another point is that this has not been one-way: I have learned a good deal about the issues in these discussions. I knew almost nothing about guns, which is why gun owners don’t trust people like me; now I know at least a little more about the difficulties of defining assault rifles, the deep commitment of most gun owners to safety as well as to nature, and some techniques to reduce the danger of unwanted use. I learned about the Singapore health system, which was news to me even though health care a field I have studied. I have learned that the problem of “political correctness” is actually more serious than I had thought: there is now quite a lot of student support for restricting “undesirable” speech on campus, and a very strong feeling by rightists that they can’t speak their minds.

It’s possible to talk while ignoring the conspiracy theories and insults, resisting the temptation to answer in kind. If you do, it turns out there may be paths that can be walked together. So far the battle is still raging around us, and we’re just catching glimpses of those paths through the smoke. I don’t know whether we could in time just walk away from the trench warfare and the grenades, towards a future that can include the vast majority of Americans.