Note: this is the second of a series of Toteboard post-election reflections.
Even without the benefit of flash polls and scientific surveys, it’s pretty clear what many people in the Toteboard’s orbit have been experiencing since last month’s election.
Shock.
Bewilderment.
And fear. Yes, there are many, many reasons to be fearful.
But also, a lot of anger. A friend of a Toteboard reader summed it up very succinctly: “If you voted for Trump, then fuck you.”
Whether or not the Toteboard echoes this sentiment exactly, it does lay bare the question of what to make of the seventy-seven million American voters who thought it was a good idea to return Trump to the White House. This is, of course, not really a new question, as the Toteboard puzzled over it a week before the election, at the conclusion of its discussion of Trump’s dishonesty and systematic abuse of other people: “Actually, the truly perplexing question is why tens of millions of Americans are okay with all of this, why tens of millions of Americans think it is, in fact, a good thing that a lying sociopath who has brought so much destruction may once again become president. Is the Toteboard missing something?”
In a guest post a few days later, a Toteboard reader offered an unsettling explanation, i.e., that Trump and the MAGA movement are in some ways, an inevitable product of American history: “There have always been fascist forces in the American body politic from the very beginning of this experiment, and it seems that we can only hold these underlying currents of darkness at bay for so long (about 250 years!) before they overwhelm the platitudes we tell ourselves about being defenders of democracy, and the dark underbelly becomes manifest.” In short, Trump is a fascist, and he has successfully tapped into the fascist sympathies of an abundance of American voters. Seventy-seven million of them.
On the other hand, another Toteboard reader privately opined that writing off Trump voters as fascistic or irrational or evil is, in fact, “really bad for the country,” in much the same way as it is for MAGA-ites to dismiss democrats as communists or Marxists. “I think, with small exceptions, people are nice, care about their families, and the future of the country, and are not evil. While it's hard for us to understand how they could vote for Trump, it's also hard for them to understand the reverse. I think the Manichean beliefs are very dangerous and should be fought against for the society to make it.” In short, it should simply boil down to us all respectfully agreeing to disagree. Perhaps passionately, perhaps angrily, but still within this basic framework of respectfully agreeing to disagree.
And so where does the Toteboard stand on this? Should we regard the seventy-seven million Trump voters as foot-soldiers in a fascist takeover of the country? Or should we view them as fundamentally decent countrymen and countrywomen with whom we have legitimate ideological differences?
Intellectual Housekeeping
In the interest of intellectual honesty, it is necessary to preface this part of the conversation with a pair of caveats.
First, apart from the obvious absurdity in trying to generalize about seventy-seven million people, it is important to remember that it is not appropriate to divine people’s motivations and ideologies from isolated acts, i.e., to draw conclusions about what are fundamentally historical or empirical matters through abstraction and speculation. It is simply poor logic to say “anyone who votes for Trump must be a fascist,” just as it is poor logic to say “anyone who buys German cars must be anti-American” or “anyone who practices nudism must be an exhibitionist.” Yes, any given Trump voter may, in fact, be a fascist, but that alone is not sufficient evidence to prove that. Of course, it is not sufficient evidence to prove that the person isn’t a fascist either. Rather, such a determination would require real, concrete examination and study of the person at hand, conducted without ideological bias or preformed conclusions. As the protesters on the streets were heard to chant in response to religious threats to school curricula: “What do we want?” “Evidence-based science.” “When do we want it?” “After peer review.”
Second, such a discussion must confront the tricky matter of definition, i.e., the fact that “fascism” is not some ideal Platonic form, but is a constructed category that is not always employed rigorously or consistently. At the very least, those making claims about who is or is not a fascist are obligated to articulate exactly what they mean by the term and what criteria they are using to apply it. Responsible historians and political theorists do have the expertise to take such steps, but admittedly, the Toteboard really doesn’t have the chops for this enterprise. It is one thing to employ a “know it when I see it” approach when assessing a public figure like Trump, but it’s quite another thing when talking about seventy-seven million fellow citizens.
And so, perhaps the Toteboard will, at least temporarily, punt on the question of whether Trump voters are all fascists, irrational, and/or evil. But we are still stuck with the original question from the beginning of this post: What do we make of the seventy-seven million American voters who thought it was a good idea to return Trump to the White House? Are we able to live under the same sky with them?
Cognitive Dissonance
As the Toteboard is wont to do, it will first try to sort this matter out through a pair of anecdotes, one fairly recent, one from quite some time ago.
The first story is about an African-American friend who was out and about with his family in a fairly redneck-y part of Georgia. When they had some difficulty negotiating a group selfie, an elderly white couple offered to help them out. The friend described the couple as warm, friendly, genuinely interested in the kids – all in all, a very pleasant encounter. And yet, he was also convinced, based on the demographics of the region where this occurred, that these people were almost certainly Trump voters. Of course, he may have been wrong about this specific couple, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that at least some elderly white couples in that region were Trump voters who would also have interacted pleasantly with his family. In any event, the philosophically trained educator in him just could not wrap his brain around the idea that the people who seemed so kind to his family could embrace a man who is so blatantly racist and who promises policies that are disadvantageous for people of color. In short, the equation simply would not scan. Were they sweet, because they were nice to his family? Or were they racists, because they voted for Trump? Or perhaps they were "sweet racists?"
The second story goes back more than fifty years, when a pair of fifteen-year-olds had the occasion to interact somewhat superficially over a period of several days with a middle-aged couple. The boys found the couple affable, humorous, and apparently amused by (or at least tolerant of) their blatant hippie proclivities (and frequently stoned affect). They also enjoyed exchanging jokes with them, many of them ethnic jokes, especially those once ubiquitous “Pollack” jokes, almost all of which elicited hearty laughter. However, when the guys told a joke that poked fun of Italians, the couple cooled considerably. “We like them,” one of the pair explained. And yes, they also made it clear that they laughed at the Polish jokes, and the Black jokes and the Puerto Rican jokes, because they didn’t particularly care for those groups. This blew the two boys away. They had never even considered that people who liked such jokes did so because they carried ill will toward the people who were the butts of them – in fact, the father of one of the boys was born in Poland, and he was probably the smartest man in all of New England. To the naïve suburban teens, Polish jokes were simply the joke genre du jour. If it had been five years earlier, they probably would have been telling elephant jokes; if it had been five years later, it most likely would have been light-bulb jokes. Nevertheless, it really did leave an impression on them, that a pleasant and friendly adult couple could be so unapologeticallly forthcoming about their prejudices. For years, as the circumstances presented themselves, one of the teens would randomly say to the other, “remember the 'nice' bigots?” But, teenagers that they were, they simply left it as an unresolvable incongruity. It never occurred to them to conclude that the couple’s bigotry was in fact an indication that maybe they weren’t so “nice” after all. Or to conclude that they would simply agree to disagree with them on their opinions of Poles, Blacks, and Puerto Ricans.
Sweet racists and nice bigots. Hmm.
Judgment in America
The Toteboard is a tremendous advocate of civil discourse, and it frequently laments how civility has broken down in so much contemporary discourse. But surely, there is a point at which a person of good conscience must condemn, rather than engage. We don’t “agree to disagree” with Nazis. We don’t “agree to disagree” with advocates of human trafficking. We don’t “agree to disagree” with perpetrators of violence against women, a point that Nicholas Kristoff made just the other day in a Times op-ed.
But that’s the easy part. What about the people who are less overtly involved in those types of criminality? What about those who do not join in abuse directly, but are still somehow a part of it, or even benefit from it? We're talking here about those who passively enable or authorize the misdeeds of the powers-that-be, those who sit idly by while others suffer persecution, and those who briefly get “caught up in the moment” of a violent mob. Where do we draw the line? And what does it actually mean if we judge someone as falling on the “wrong” side of that line?
Of course, that line is at times a fine one. At what point do we condemn any one of the millions who took part in Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Is it when he or she quietly opined that Mao’s initiatives were good for the country? Is it when he or she enthusiastically attended rallies in support of Mao? Is it when he or she expressed support of the goal of purging capitalist and feudal elements from Chinese culture? Is it when he or she joined the Red Guards? Is it when he or she stood by during the public humiliation of a former educator? Is it when he or she joined in the ransacking of a temple or museum? Is it when he or she joined in the overt violence against perceived “bourgeois elements?”
Toward the conclusion of the classic film Judgment at Nuremberg, Burt Lancaster’s character Ernst Janning, one of the defendants in the so-called Judges’ Trial, finally explained how once distinguished jurists could participate in Nazi miscarriages of justice:
What about those of us who knew better, we who knew the words were lies and worse than lies? Why did we sit silent? Why did we take part? Because we loved our country. What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights? What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights? It is only a passing phase. It is only a stage we are going through. It will be discarded sooner or later. Hitler himself will be discarded -- sooner or later. The country is in danger. We will march out of the shadows! We will go forward!
And certainly, some critical mass of Trump voters must have"known better." They weren't all just ignorant, deluded lemmings who had their brains dry-cleaned by Fox News and phony baloney social media. They know who the man is, what he has done, and what he is capable of doing.
Just as Janning acknowledged a willful blindness to the regime’s criminality, these Trump voters, well-intentioned or otherwise, betrayed a willingness to justify his racism and xenophobia, to overlook his felony convictions, to shrug off his attempts to overturn a presidential election, to ignore his abuses of power and people. Yes, these Trump voters may, as the Toteboard reader suggested, “care about the future of the country,” but they must also be engaged in extraordinary acts of rationalization and self-deception. One can even imagine no small number of them sounding appallingly like Janning: “What difference does it make if a few trannies lose their rights? What difference does it make if a few wetbacks get sent back to where they came from? What difference does it make if a few democrats and disloyal republicans get harassed by the government? What difference does it make if a few journalists get sued for printing the truth? What difference does it make if a few people deemed sufficiently un-American get the shit kicked out of them at Trump rallies? What difference does it make if a few loose women have to go into back alleys to secure abortions?” Any person who voted for Trump knew that these were all live possibilities, and signed off on him anyway.
And so, yes, the Toteboard will stop short of condemning all Trump voters as fascists, or evil, or irrational, it will stop short of issuing a blanket “fuck you” in the direction of anyone who checked that box. But Trump is already signaling just how out of control he plans to be for the next four years. So if and when he weaponizes the federal government against American citizens, if and when he fucks with the environment, plays chicken with the economy, decimates the judiciary, cozies up to fascists, and tramples human rights, if and when he declares martial law and sends the country into chaos, well, those seventy-seven million Trump voters will have been complicit in these consequences and will all bear partial responsibility for them. Does this mean that they carry an indelible stain on their moral character, one that will ultimately result in karmic retribution? Who knows. But what is clear is that the Toteboard doesn’t want a whole hell of a lot to do with them.