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.