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.