Since the years of the George W. Bush administration, pundits have been poring over electoral maps, and drawing inferences – alternately illuminating, plausible, and at the very least interesting (though quite often false) – from the information conveyed in those representations. By this point, enough pieces focused on the fundamental cultural and political divisions between rural America and urban America have been published that one could probably assemble an edited volume on the topic.
The latest of these, Red State Blue City, by David Graham, has just come out in the Atlantic. It raises much of the same issues as the previous decade and a half of similar pieces. If instead of focusing on the state-by-state electoral map, and you focus on the counties, it is clear that, with a few exceptions that seem to be based on racial demographics, there’s a significant and well-established split at the county level. Rural counties go hard red, the majority of their voters supporting Republicans. Urban counties show the opposite trend, deep blue, supporting the Democrats. The urban counties, of course, wield a lot more votes since they are densely populated, but there are far more rural counties, at least in most states.
The suburbs, the border zones, or areas not only of sprawl, but transition, often get ignored in these sorts of analyses, but really would bear much more scrutiny (perhaps a good topic for a later post and discussion). The main point that many of these county-wide electoral analyses do come to some consensus upon is that when it comes to the deepening cultural divisions within our country, reflected along political voting lines, one of the most significant differences is the urban-rural geographical divide.
There definitely is something there – all you have to do is pore over the state electoral maps – and this also seems to be a self-perpetuating division as well. If you grow up, live in, or move to an area where you’re surrounded by people who – very broadly speaking – embody and espouse the agenda and mindset of the Reds or the Blues, presumably over time that environment exerts its effects upon one, and after some time, you start thinking and seeing the world in a similar way.
And, when you look across the divide to “those other people” – perhaps making a daytrip to see how the proverbial other half lives, or going by the now infinitely available images on social media or programs – you can observe an entirely different mindset at work, pushing values, making claims, and setting out arguments opposed to your own. This is, granted, a gross oversimplification of the complex factionalization that has been occurring within our country for decades, but you get the point.
What this particular Atlantic article stresses is that we ought now to expect to see a lot of political clashes – outside of election season – between city and countryside (with the suburbs perhaps poised between them). I tend to agree, for example, on the bedeviled issue of sanctuary cities that is already coming to a head in the new administration (there’s a lot more to be said about that issue as well, both in general, and in the times of the new Trump administration particularly) – that is going to involve serious conflict nationwide, and may take years to come to some resolution.
There is one aspect of this overarching narrative of fundamental blue urban vs. red rural cultural and political schism that I find difficult to buy into, and my misgivings about it stem from observing two things here in Wisconsin, one of the key “battleground” states that delivered Trump his electoral victory over Clinton. I live and work in downtown Milwaukee – a very blue area, so blue that for a number of local offices, there was only one candidate on the ballot, a Democrat – and I also know quite a few people who intended to vote, and then did vote for Trump (I wasn’t one of them). What was interesting was that, for the most part, they kept that fact to themselves, both in face-to-face conversations and in social media, mainly to avoid conflicts, arguments, harassment, and the like.
The flip side of this was that, until the actual election results, most of the the Clinton supporters I know were in full triumphal mode here, confident of their impending victory. Even after the election, there were many people who openly supported Clinton who made the rather implausible complaint – “I don’t know anyone who voted for Trump” – when quite likely, they knew quite a few who did.
Now, that is admittedly anecdotal information I’m providing here about these two aspects of blue urban electoral politics – first that many people in a blue area did vote along red lines, and second that they largely kept that voting intention and preference to themselves, revealing it only to fellow Trump supporters, and to those others (like me) who they trusted not to adopt hostile, dismissive, or inquisitorial attitudes towards them. So, let’s get away from personal experiences and stories, and look at sheer numbers. What do they reveal to us?
Clinton solidly won Milwaukee county, as expected. She took 66.4% of the vote, 288,986 votes – going by Politico’s data. That sounds quite good, and if you look at the map, that sets Milwaukee county as a solidly blue island in a sea of surrounding red – the suburb counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Racine. That picture is a bit misleading, though. Trump got 61.6% of the vote in solidly Republican Waukesha county, 57.1% in Ozaukee, but only 49.8 in Racine (where Clinton took 45.4).
Clinton did even better, understandably enough, in the City of Milwaukee itself, winning 76.5% and 188,657 actual votes. But notice something. Trump got 18.4% of the votes in the city itself, and 29.0% of the votes in Milwaukee county. That’s significant, in a state where the contest is close. He got 45,411 votes in the city of Milwaukee, and 126,091 in Milwaukee county. That is just 19,428 fewer votes in Milwaukee county (where Trump lost) than in Waukesha county (which he won by a significantly smaller percentage margin than Clinton won Milwaukee).
Where else did Clinton win in Wisconsin? She won Dane county – where Madison, the state capital, major university town, and a deep blue liberal enclave, sits. And she got a higher percentage there than in Milwaukee. Trump still got 23.4%, or 71,270 votes. Looking south and west where four other counties went blue, it was a lot closer in all of those. Interestingly, three of those blue wins are clearly rural counties, and Rock county probably could be considered to be so as well. You might argue that they present that anomaly by being dragged into the electoral wake of Dane county, for one reason or another.
Where else? Those thinly populated blue counties at the top of the map, where Clinton got in the low 50s, and Trump in the low-middle 40s. Menomonee county went resoundingly blue, 78.4%, but gave Clinton just over 1000 votes. La Crosse and Eu Claire – both counties with university towns – also went blue, as did Portage, which has UW-Steven’s Point. With each of those, again, low 50s for Clinton (except Portage, where she got 48.6% to Trump’s 45.4%).
There were a few red counties where Trump just barely eked out a victory – Door County is a prime example, 49.3% Trump to 46.1% Clinton – but if you look at many of them, there are double-digit gaps between Trump’s and Clinton’s percentage of the vote. And, when you add up all those small contributions, they are significant. But, consider this – the two most important counties that Trump lost, Milwaukee and Dane, gave him 126,091 and 71,270 votes. Nearly 200,000 votes from those blue, urban, liberal counties.
Clinton lost Wisconsin by a bit over 27,000 votes. She won those two urban counties put together by over 309,000 votes (those two counties alone account for 36.6% of her total votes in the state), but she lost almost 200,000 votes in those counties as well to her main opponent. That is a lot of people in what was supposed to be the strongholds of Democrat territory, in a state where the vote clearly mattered, who did vote for Trump over Clinton.
When you look at other state maps, particularly those where the state counts were close, you see similar patterns. Trump and the Republican party sweep most of the rural counties, with a few exceptions (for example, those in the south with large African-American populations) – and those votes do matter, but aren’t enough to give him a win. He also does well in some of the suburb counties, depending on how they lean. He loses the major urban counties, and even some of the university town counties, but for Clinton’s purposes – at least in quite a few states – he doesn’t lose them by enough. He garners significant support in those urban counties where presumably Trump supporters are few and far between, and in several states, this tips him over the edge, and gives the Republicans an electoral victory in the 2016 Presidential Election.
This is a win for Trump and for the Republicans that came as an upset for anyone who was relying upon the polling prior to the election. Nate Silver’s up-to-then solidly predictive models, for one example, had given Trump a 28.6% chance of winning the electoral college (and specifically a 16.5% chance of winning Wisconsin) on November 8 – and that was bullish compared to many of the his predictions of the last few weeks. What happened?
I suspect – though this would be quite difficult to find data to support – that quite frankly many of the polls were off because people who intended to support Trump told pollsters that they weren’t doing so – that they were voting Clinton, a third party, or were undecided. I don’t think this was the case with the level of support for Clinton in the polls. Why would people do that? This is where we get back into these red vs. blue generalizations, analyses, and inferences about political and cultural divides. It seems quite clear – in our blue urban counties, there is a sizable minority of people who do support Trump, who do identify much more with the Republican agenda and coalition, but who don’t make those allegiances public.
Why is that the case? Does it make sense for them to adopt that stance? And what are the implications for our fractured and factionalized liberal democratic society? Those are issues that still remain to be explored, but clearly addressing them is going to require coming to terms with it actually being the case, enough so to exert significant effects upon presidential elections.
Policy of Truth 
Thanks for some interesting reflections, Greg. I, like many people, have spent a lot of time off-and-on since the election pondering what happened and what it means. I don’t have any startling revelations, but I thought I’d point to a couple of items I found helpful.
First is She’s With Him, a project by Jayne Riew, an art photographer, who found 7 women who voted for Trump but who don’t fit the “rural, uneducated” stereotype—and who were willing to let themselves be photographed for the project. Many nonstereotypical, Trump-voting women that Riew found were not willing to participate, apparently because they did not want to be “outed.” Riew herself voted for Clinton. She is also Jonathan Haidt’s wife. Since there are only seven persons interviewed, obviously their testimony doesn’t prove anything about the attitudes that drove educated Trump voters in general. Still, what they say is interesting, and certain themes occur repeatedly.
Second is this article from Politico by Michael Kruse, which describes the people in rural Pepin County, Wisconsin. Pepin County traditionally goes blue, but went Trump in the last election. It is in western Wisconsin on the border with Minnesota. Besides the local people who grew up there, the county has seen a large influx of relatively well-to-do, urban liberals from nearby Minneapolis–St. Paul—artists, retirees, a gay couple who run a hipster pie shop (where the “expat” urban liberals tend to congregate)—you get the picture. The article focuses in part on the dismay—shell shock, really—of these urban liberals who thought they’d moved to a John Mellencamp vision of blue small town America only to find it turn red on them. More importantly, the article also examines the attitudes and motives of the Trump voters in Pepin County, asking how a county that went for the Democratic nominee in every presidential election since 1972 could have gone Trump this time. (Hint: economic hardship apparently had little to do with it.) The piece is long but provides a great deal of insight into what is going on. Incidentally, some elite urban liberals in my own family bought land in western Wisconsin and retired there a few years ago, where they run their place as a small “farm” in just exactly the manner of some of Kruse’s déraciné urban liberal interviewees. I wish I had read this article when I saw them at Christmas; I’d like to have asked them about their feelings about their new community in light of the election. I’m sure they are just as Kruse describes.
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David, thanks for those linked pieces! I’d say the second is one of what we might call “making sense of the rural voters for Trump” genre. Those are quite interesting – I saw similar tensions when I lived in the Hudson Valley (until we moved back to Wisconsin), where it was the relatively wealthy NYC people (and mostly baby-boomers) who had been buying up land and changing the culture, in some places pretty much taking over. I’m more interested here in what is going on precisely in the much more populous urban areas themselves. I suspect there’s a dynamic that is similar in that it involves that “we’re not as dumb or backward as you city liberals make us out to be”, but it also involves the keeping one’s views to oneself.
The womens’ explanations and experiences set out in the first piece/site are much closer to this batch of issues about the recent election and urban (and perhaps suburb) voters. What this means is that, in addition to what we might call red “oases” in predominantly blue areas (for example, particular municipalities within a county), we have a lot of “red-voters” more or less on their own, living, working, playing, etc. in deeply blue urban environments, keeping their views and voting preferences to themselves.
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Thanks for those references, David. I can’t say I found a single one of those Trump supporters sympathetic, or even entirely intelligible. One can see why they’re angry; with a little imagination, one can see why they’re angry at the Democrats. But nothing in any of those pieces really explains why any of them voted for Trump, something that requires a further explanation that few of them manage to give.
Except, I suppose, for this guy:
Well, that’s certainly explanatory enough. The explanatory variables are: bigotry, nihilism, irresponsibility, and a colossal sense of entitlement. I can see the connection between those things and a vote for Trump (since Trump perfectly expresses every one of them), but there’s nothing to sympathize with there–i.e., no reason to think, “Having listened patiently to what Trump supporters had to say, I now see the plausibility in their claims, and can see why someone would vote for Donald Trump.” I’m not sure that sympathy was the point of the articles, but if it was, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not forthcoming.
Sympathy aside, I’d like to think that the articles had an explanatory point, and apart from Scott Sievwright, I don’t see that, either. My hunch is that the same lack of candor that confounded the pre-election polls confounds any attempt to understand what is really going through the minds of Trump supporters. Few of them are going to admit, candidly, to the bigotry (etc.) that motivates them if and when it does:
In lieu of saying something like that, they come up with these quirky-sounding pseudo-explanations that give off a “sophisticated” aura (i.e.: prove that Trump supporters are often hip, urban, and well-educated) but don’t really explain anything.
My own candid reaction to them: having spent two (or two+) summers teaching in Palestine, I’ve had to deal with (teach, spend time with) people who had grievances of a sort that these Trump supporters could not begin to imagine, and that frankly, make their grievances look like a bad joke.* Some of my Palestinian friends/comrades/students insisted on a positive, non-violent approach to the occupation (taking magnanimity to somewhat absurd extremes), but some supported Hamas. It’s remarkable that support for Hamas is widely thought to be beyond the pale in the United States, and yet support for Trump is now something we’re obliged sympathetically to (try to) understand and (eventually) take in stride.
There’s a sickening double standard at work here, and it’s most acute in the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiments of the Trump supporters themselves: the policies they so fervently support abroad have made other parts of the world a living hell. Example 1: The Syrian refugee crisis is in large measure an unintended consequence of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and in particular of the Republican desire to rebuild Iraq in order to keep Israel safe on its northern and eastern flanks. But their candidate wants to exclude Syrian refugees from the country, even if he has to violate the Constitution do it. Example 2: the now fifty-year-long Israeli occupation of Palestine is motivated the same way, and most fervently supported by the same cohort. But their candidate has no fundamental objection to the occupation. As far as he’s concerned, another fifty years of it would be just fine.
That’s what Trump’s supporters voted for and can be held responsible for. But for some reason, their nihilistic displays of rage are something we’re supposed to take seriously, and consider in a spirit of brow-furrowed sympathy. Meanwhile, the equal and opposite displays of rage coming from the Muslim world are to be anathematized and vilified (as indeed are Muslims themselves, whether they’re expressing that rage or not: they just have to be “associated” with it). The truth is that the Hamas supporters I met in Palestine had more dignity (and made more sense) than any one of the people interviewed in the articles you’ve posted. They had suffered more as well, in tangible, articulable ways. If Scott Sievwright were a farmer or shepherd in Beit Umar, he might understand. But understanding would take moral imagination of a kind he and so many people like him conspicuously lack.
I’m sure there’s more to be said on behalf of Trump’s supporters than is said in these articles, but apart from the glimpses they offer into the variety or forms of incoherence and psychopathology, I don’t see what else we get from the articles themselves. Obviously, this is neither a criticism of your having put the articles up, nor of the articles themselves. It’s a commentary on the people in them, and of the cottage industry that consists in making excuses for their conduct.
*Ironically, the exception to that rule may well be the people around Cliven Bundy (involved in the seizure/occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge and similar activities), a parallel that my leftist friends have rejected with a kind of reflexive revulsion, but makes sense to me. I don’t think we’d have a violent militia movement in the United States if the federal government owned less of the West, and was less reluctant to dictate resource-use at gunpoint to the “indigenous inhabitants,” exactly the mechanism of control in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
State control/management of natural resources is the common denominator that gives violence in the American West an affinity to violence in the West Bank (and gives the militia movement an affinity with Hamas). That’s a grievance–or those are grievances–I can sympathize with, even if I think the Bundys’ or Hamas’s methods for responding to them are pointless and unjustified. But the Hamas/Bundy comparison is one that no one on either side of the partisan divide wants to talk about or hear–and is not something that comes up in any serious way in the interviews in these articles.
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So this comment, unlike my last one, is on Greg’s original post and the Atlantic article mentioned in it. I basically agree with Greg’s analysis as well as David Graham’s in the Atlantic article. I would just add a few observations and friendly amendments based on my experiences in New Jersey, and my having pored over the county-by-county electoral map here.
For one thing, I would very much second Greg’s point that the suburban border zones get ignored and need better discussion. The standard discussions revolve around the supposed split between cities and rural areas, but the suburbs are transitional between the two, but belong to neither category. The red state/blue city analysis tells us little about what is going on there.
Second, a quick comment on this:
There’s a profound truth in that, but in a small state like New Jersey, it’s worth distinguishing workplaces from living spaces. (Here’s a relevant post from November, with an electoral map of New Jersey.) If you live in a blue enclave, as I do, you may not encounter many red voters where you live–full stop. But if jobs cluster in locations of high population density, many red voters will be commuting to jobs in bluish enclaves. It matters very much whether these red voters are candid or covert about their political views, or alternatively, whether open political discussions take place or don’t take place at one’s workplace. I happen to live in a blue enclave, but I also happen to live maybe 20-30 minutes’ drive from solid red counties. Since I happen to work at a university, it is unlikely that my co-workers are pro-Trump, but that won’t be true of people who work “normal” jobs. So the idea of being “surrounded by” like-minded people seems to me to apply more to where one lives than where one works.
That said, now that Trump is president, in my experience, pro-Trump voters have become more open about sharing their views. I now regularly see pro-Trump paraphernalia (bumper stickers, etc.) displayed in supposedly blue enclaves. The message seems to be: “we’re here–get used to it.” (On a recent visit to the doctor’s office, my physician told me that he’d voted for Trump, and then explained why–the reasons having to do with the regulatory burdens of the ACA.) So one needn’t make “a daytrip to see how the proverbial other half lives.” In some cases, you can just make a trip to the cafeteria on your work site.
This is, I guess, another way of agreeing with what Greg says a bit further down:
Right–they just didn’t know them under that description. But they may well know them now, regardless of where they live.
It seems to me that this point is the most crucial one:
There are two ways of interpreting this reticence. One is to view it as a form of justified prudence: who wants to be harassed by rabid, unthinking liberals simply for holding views at variance from the complacent liberal consensus? Another is to view as a form of moral and intellectual cowardice: hide your political views from scrutiny because they can’t survive scrutiny; then cry “harassment” when people take you to task for holding them. (Then attack “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” on campus because political correctness is a contemptible thing.) I’m curious what people think about these two interpretations.
In either case, I think the irony is that reticence is a consequence of a set of left-liberal dogma about “privacy.” According to these dogmas, the “right to privacy” entails a right to conceal what one really thinks about “private” matters; and no one has a “right” to inquire into anyone’s “private beliefs,” so that the attempt to query anyone’s “private beliefs” is a breach of etiquette or civility. Here is Thomas Nagel’s version of the doctrine, from his famous 1998 paper “Concealment and Exposure,” intended (ironically and ludicrously enough) as a defense of the Clintons:
In many ways, it seems to me that the Trump phenomenon–reticence about and concealment of one’s “private beliefs” about public matters–is an unintended consequence of the sort of view that Nagel had defended. Trump’s supporters exploited the conception of “privacy” that liberals had long defended, and in doing so, blindsided the liberals themselves. In other words, the Trump phenomenon is yet another come-uppance for a complacent liberalism that hadn’t reckoned on competition of the kind it’s now had to face. Better late than never, I guess.
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Inspired by Greg’s post, I revisited the electoral map with a view to getting a better handle on the details about how people voted where I live. I said in the preceding comment that I live in a blue enclave, which is technically true, but turns out to be a little misleading. The results are very mixed, and depend a lot on how one describes “where one lives.”
By one description, I live in New Jersey, which went to Hillary Clinton, by a ratio of 55:41. By another, I live in Essex County, which also went to Clinton, by a ratio of 77:21. By yet another description, I live in Bloomfield Township, which went to Clinton, 68:28. I spend a fair bit of my leisure time in the neighboring town, Montclair, which went to Clinton 84:11. My hometown, West Orange, went to Clinton 73:23. I lived a decade in Princeton, which went to Clinton 80:15. I work at a university with two campuses, one in Lodi and one in Rutherford. Lodi went to Clinton 61:37. Rutherford went to Clinton 54:42. All of that suggests that I live and work in blue enclaves (or in a single blue enclave).
Oddly, though, I drive through the towns of Nutley and Wallington every day on my way to work, and spend a fair bit of time in both towns. Nutley, adjacent to Bloomfield, went to Trump 49:46. And Wallington, adjacent to Lodi, went to Trump 56:41.
Those results suggest that the idea of a “blue enclave” is misleading, at least in places like New Jersey, where municipalities proliferate like weeds, and each municipality has a discernibly different character, guaranteed by its system of planning and zoning, its master plan, and its local governance structure. Contrary to what I said in the preceding comment, though I live in a blue enclave, the nearest red area is not a 20-30 minute drive, but a 5 minute drive from where I live–the next suburb over, not some distant rural area. I don’t know whether the degree of municipal subdivision involved here is unique to New Jersey or generalizes beyond it; in any case, it’s described in detail in Alan J. Karcher’s New Jersey’s Multiple Municipal Madness.
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I couldn’t have invented a better articulation of the view I was discussing in my February 11 comment above than this column by Nicholas Kristof in today’s New York Times, “Fight Trump, Not His Voters“*:
One obvious absurdity here is the idea that you can fight Trump without fighting the people who put him in office, and are supporting him while he’s there. But that absurdity is the whole point of the column.
Then there’s the explanatory gap between “people out there are having a hard time” to “you can’t really blame someone having a hard time for voting for Trump, despite Trump’s being a lying, bigoted, dangerous, incompetent demagogue.” Really? You can’t blame people having a hard time for doing something wrong?
First of all, to make a good old fashioned Republican point: not everyone who’s having a hard time deserves sympathy; some people bring hard times on themselves. But even if you put that point aside, there is no obvious explanatory connection between “relief of hard times” and “Trump administration.”
Further, it’s not as though the voters Kristof is discussing faced some clear-cut two-way choice between Trump and Ebenezer Scrooge. They had to narrow both the Democratic and Republican fields before they ever got to Clinton vs. Trump (rather late in the game), and then vote for Trump over Clinton, construing a vote for Trump as a vote for “struggling good folks.” There’s more than one step there to the finish line, and more than one set of options along the way. So it’s a puzzle why they “didn’t know where to turn” but Trump.
In any case, aren’t undocumented aliens also “struggling good folks”? Apparently, Kristof’s “struggling good folks” had to go out of their way to ignore or downgrade the struggles of undocumented aliens, and in many cases, participate avidly in the protracted hate-fest against them. Surely some of these Trump supporters are guilty of something. And surely many of them are hateful bigots, despite whatever undeserved suffering has come their way.
For decades, Republicans and conservatives have derided the idea that suffering is an excuse for political malfeasance. Urban blacks are having a hard time? Well, that doesn’t mean they should be taking Jesse Jackson or the Rainbow Coalition seriously. Arabs and Muslims feel oppressed? Well, that’s no excuse for Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood. Native Americans are having a tough time out on the res? Well maybe–but only a fool would have sympathy for the American Indian Movement. Latinos feel dispossessed? Well that’s too bad, but the fact remains that La Raza is a racist organization. No excuses! No whining! Suck it up! Toughen up! Reasonable people keep a stiff upper lip and express their politics accordingly.
After forty or fifty years of derision for radical left-wing politics, and as many years of suggesting that the oppression suffered by minorities is really not that big a deal (or is their fault), these same people see an uptick in the white mortality rate and conclude that the time has come to embrace their own form of identity politics–the identity politics of the white middle-aged American working class. Instead of applying the same Dickensian strictures to this group as they’ve applied to every other, they’ve demanded an outpouring of sympathy and excuse-making for reactionary politics in their name. Then they’re sorely puzzled that the sympathy isn’t universally forthcoming.
Is it really implausible to conclude that the “principle” involved here is a matter of racial solidarity? As long as the people suffering were non-white, their suffering was a matter of obloquy. Now that the people in question are white, it’s all different. It’s Excuse Time.
The preceding dynamic may not explain the motivations behind every vote for Trump, but it surely explains something significant. Assuming it does, how does it differ from the sympathy for the Nazis expressed by white middle aged German workers under the Weimar Republic–who were frustrated enough to take a gamble on the high pitched Austrian who spoke to their fears? If it’s bad that union jobs have dried up in Oregon, how much worse would it have been if they’d dried up under Weimar-style hyperinflation? In that case, would Kristof have told us that we should fight Hitler but not the Nazis?
No, we can’t make the blanket judgment that all Trump supporters are bigots, but at some point, they’re going to have stop hiding behind the misfortunes they’re suffering and take responsibility for putting him in office.
*That’s the title in the print edition.
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Finally got around to reading this. Thanks Greg (and David) for the helpful references. I’ll be reading some of those (especially the Atlantic piece) in due time. I have an interest in explaining why people are voting as they are right now in this country, especially with respect to preferring Trump over Clinton.
Regarding the patterns of reasoning that explain people voting for Trump, I want to suggest an alternative to the following pattern (that Irfan seems to find or infers to be lurking around quite a bit):
BIGOTED
(i) I’m mad about various stuff
(ii) I’ll scapegoat some different-cultured or darker-skinned folks
(iii) Trump is with me in not being sensitive the the various difference-celebrating shibboleths of the left (and that half the right accepts as well)
(iv) This is reason enough for me to vote for Trump (any bigotry on his part is a feature, not a bug).
Here is the alternative:
RESPECT
(i) I’m pissed because the dominant liberal culture disrespects and seeks to stamp out my parochial ways (which may be not so good in various ways) – and they wrong in doing this to me (and people like me)
(ii) Trump’s main message is that he is here to defend me (and my peeps) on this.
(iii) This is a good-enough moral reason for me to vote for Trump (despite any bigotry he encourages or exhibits).
I’ll add that I think that, depending on the specifics, the first premise of RESPECT is true (because liberal/progressive culture does not recognize or respect private/public boundaries, seeking the shame/change stamp out what it often-accurately takes to be bad in the various parochial ways – but not just insofar as this impacts a reasonably-defined public sphere). Especially in light of this, many arguments on this pattern are pretty good ones. Even though they are consistent with – and perhaps in many forms even conduce to – bigotry (and perhaps a version of BIGOTRY). The point, though, is that while BIGOTED is both vicious and irrational, RESPECT is not.
I suspect there is quite a bit of RESPECT out there among Trump voters. I suspect that Irfan takes BIGOTED to be more prevalent. Maybe he even thinks that RESPECT is not as good a pattern of argument as I think it is.
In any case, I don’t have enough empirical evidence to make much of an argument for the prevalence of RESPECT over BIGOTED among Trump voters. And not much interested in a war of intuitions and anecdotes (I suspect that both of us are rather unreliable on this count). But I think that distinguishing these two broad patterns of argument (or something like them – I’m just spitting this out a bit slap-dash) is helpful.
And I think it is important to see and respect RESPECT.
(By the way, I’m all for Borg-like eventual cultural hegemony of some version of secular, cosmopolitan values and culture. I just think it is wrong to get there by telling Mr. F-150 how wrong he is, trying to change him, etc. Just model it and let the Borg-like elements of the dominant secular, cosmopolitan culture do their work. And be smart enough not to overreach or forget all of the ways in which Jonathan Haidt (and other evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists) are right. This is pretty much working. Just consider the social and cultural progress of the last 30 years or so in this country.
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[I’ve edited this comment after posting for clarity.]
I’m not persuaded by that.
I guess the first and simplest point I’d make is to reiterate the point I’ve been making: BIGOTED exists and has an alarming degree of currency. Casual, anecdotal evidence is sufficient to make that point. I make (and made) no precise claim about the relative frequency within the pro-Trump population of BIGOTED to something more benign. I’ve met pro-Trump people who don’t easily fit BIGOTED. But you don’t need to make precise quantitative claims to say that BIGOTED is a real problem, and then to put the burden of proof on pro-Trump people to explain why it is that they voted for Trump. I so far have not heard a good explanation.
The issue is not simply why Trump was preferred to Clinton, but why Trump was preferred to the whole of the Republican ticket and to every other non-Clinton choice. Take a conservative Republican who voted for Trump in the primaries and ask: Why was Trump preferable to Kasich? Surely one competing hypothesis would have to be, “Kasich may have been conservative enough, but he wasn’t bigoted enough.” Anyone interested in the election results has to grant the possibility that that hypothesis explains the whole of what happened at the Republican convention.
Second, though I’m willing to grant more benign motivations for voting Trump than BIGOTED, I don’t think RESPECT involves a sufficiently clear contrast to BIGOTED to make for a real distinction between them. As stated, RESPECT is too vague and indeterminate. Some unclarities: In what ways are the speaker’s “parochial ways” not good? How is the speaker characterizing “people like me”? What counts as liberal culture’s “disrespecting and seek[ing] to stamp out” the speaker’s ways? Fill in those blanks in certain ways, and RESPECT becomes BIGOTED or something close enough. But once RESPECT becomes BIGOTED or approximates it, it forfeits its claim to respect. As stated, it’s not clear where BIGOTED comes down on sexism or gender/orientation-based bigotries. And as stated, RESPECT is perfectly compatible with white nationalism.
Third, even on a relatively benign interpretation RESPECT seems to me seriously over-wrought and confused. We’re trying to avoid heavy reliance on anecdotes here, but what exactly is “dominant liberal culture”? Liberals sometimes say and do stupid, offensive things. But how do we get from, say, Samuel L. Jackson on Ben Carson (whom I’ve just attacked) to “dominant liberal culture”? I question the legitimacy of the quoted idea: it seems like a way of turning merely anecdotal evidence about liberals into something more substantive. Yes, liberals have common beliefs, and sometimes agree on their dumbest beliefs, but “dominant liberal culture” is doing far too much unexplicated work here. And even if we grant its legitimacy, it really seems to me a stretch to say that liberals are, on the whole, seeking to stamp anything out.
Supposing there are cases where things end up being stamped out by the liberal state, is it really fair to describe what it’s doing in terms of a motivation to stamp those things out, full stop? A minimum wage stamps out some employment, but is it motivated simply by a desire to stamp out low-wage employment? Regulation of Uber stamps out some Uber rides, but is it motivated by the desire to stamp out Uber? The ACA stamped out some people’s insurance coverage, but was it enacted for that reason? Federal consent decrees on municipal police departments sometimes stamp out good police work, but were they intended to?
As you plead for fairness in the interpretation of Trump voters’ motives, you have to apply the same standards of fairness to liberals, but RESPECT doesn’t do that. “I’m pissed because liberal culture seeks to stamp out my ways” is something an adolescent would say in the grips of adolescent narcissism. It states an adolescent’s attitude toward mean, authoritarian parents while insisting that nothing else matters right now but this one acontextual, over-stated grievance. There are some grievances for which that may be an excusable attitude, but not many. In fact, it’s that very attitude that inspired my comparison/contrast of Trump voters and Hamas supporters. What grievances do most of them have that are comparable to the grievances of the average supporter of Hamas in the West Bank or Gaza?
Finally, I don’t think anyone who asserts the parenthetical in RESPECT (iii) about Trump deserves any respect at all. I can muster up some respect for the person who asserts that parenthetical about, say, Reagan or even Nixon. But your comment fails to capture the sheer virulence of the bigotry exhibited by Trump in particular, and by implication what a voter would have to overlook, evade, or excuse in order to vote for Trump.
Consider just five uniquely Trumpian transgressions:
• To the best of my knowledge, no candidate for the American presidency in the last hundred years has ever called for the execution of a criminal suspect, and then refused to repudiate the call after the suspect was found innocent.* But that is essentially what Trump did with respect to the Central Park Five (with a very small and transparently dishonest figleaf to avoid making the point explicit). It’s also what he’s so far done with respect to Bowe Bergdahl.
• No president that I know of has called explicitly for torturing people—not “enhanced interrogation” but just flat out torture–much less torturing them after we went through a regrettable decade or so of torturing them, then came to our senses about it. But Trump has.
• All politicians lie and mislead, but no politician—no public figure—has told lies on the wild, pathological scale that Trump has. According to Politifact, 84% of Trump’s controversial assertions are half-truths or worse, and fully half of them are flat-out false.
• No president has ever referred to the press as “an enemy of the people,” a phrase directly out of the rhetoric of the totalitarian state, and typically intended to mark people out for incarceration or death.
–No president has lyingly defamed thousands of residents of an American city by accusing them of complicity in the mass murder of their fellow citizens. Trump has.
In doing so, he’s encouraged Americans to view Muslim-like people as presumptive terrorists. It’s hard to make such claims and then offer a wholehearted condemnation of acts like this. From a recogizably Trump-inspired perspective, the arsonist’s real mistake in the preceding case was to mix Indians up with Arabs. But if it really were true that the average Arab grocer cheered the mass killing of his neighbors, the arson in this case becomes excusable, if not quite justifiable. A person who cheers at your death is someone who, if given the chance, would kill you. If we are really surrounded by such people, doesn’t it make sense to show them that we won’t be taken easily? If the police won’t profile them (because the liberals have stopped them from doing their jobs), it would appear that the time has come to take matters into our own hands–at least until the police can become more assertive, which will take time.
Despite his protestations, Trump’s views amount to a kind of sectarian incitement against Muslims. If you lyingly accuse thousands of people of complicity in mass murder, insinuate that the mass media has refused to report accurately on the story, accuse liberals of hamstringing the police, call for capital punishment in cases that haven’t yet been adjudicated, take measures to undo police reforms, advocate torture, and refer casually to your fellow citizens as “enemies,” you are de facto inciting people to vigilante violence. When that violence happens, and you ignore some of it and condemn some of it in a bored, half-hearted way, you don’t really get yourself off the hook. You encourage more.
With all due respect (so to speak), I find it hard to muster up respect for anyone who can ignore all of that. A person willing to overlook that is a person willing to dispense with bedrock moral principles for the sake of short-term gains promised by a pathological liar. That strikes me as a paradigm of the sort of electoral malpractice that Jason Brennan has been attacking for the last couple of years. It takes a lot to get me to make favorable reference to Brennan, but he’s right to say that voters like the preceding are a menace to all of us.
As stated, RESPECT is perfectly compatible with the following thought:
If RESPECT is to deserve respect, it has to be formulated in a way that excludes motivations like the preceding. As stated, it doesn’t. All that differentiates BIGOTED from RESPECT is the explicit reference to skin color in BIGOTED and the race-neutral willingness to regard one’s fellow citizens’ most basic rights as violable at will in RESPECT. BIGOTED scapegoats dark skinned people. RESPECT says: “My political interests override even minimal concern for your rights.”
To get a respect-worthy version of RESPECT off the ground, you have to incorporate some sense of moral limits into it, and some sense of reciprocity. A person who is pissed at his fellow citizens may legitimately treat them as opponents or adversaries, but not as all-out enemies. The problem with Trump and his supporters is that there don’t seem to be any limits on what they’re willing to do, except what they can get away with. As long as Trumpism is entangled in views like that, it’s going to get justifiable disrespect.
*I’ve worded this to exclude Theodore Roosevelt, who’s always struck me as a fascist anyway.
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I just happened to see this interview with Camille Paglia in New York magazine, and it perfectly encapsulates what strikes me as wrong with a certain brand of commentary on Trump’s supporters:
I’m focusing on the claim in the last two sentences–something akin to an ad populum fallacy, now very common. The argument seems to come in two varieties, one “practical” and one “theoretical.”
Practical version:
Theoretical version:
The practical version of the argument seems to demand sacrificium intellectus on socio-political grounds: we have to think the best of our fellow citizens, lest we antagonize them with our untoward thoughts about them. But the hard fact is that the empirical evidence is at least consistent with the hypothesis that bigotry is enormously widespread among Trump supporters. The hypothesis can’t be confidently avowed, but it can’t confidently be disavowed, either. If so, a fortiori it can’t be disavowed on “practical” grounds. If Trump’s supporters take offense at that, that’s their problem. The irony is that the practical version of the argument demands a kind of “safe space” for them the size of the entire country. Meanwhile, the right is up in arms over “safe spaces” on college campuses.
The theoretical version professes to find it inconceivable that large numbers of our population could be bigots. But there is no a priori reason to deny this, any more than there was a priori reason to deny that large fractions of the German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, or Japanese populations ca. 1936 could have been bigots of some sort. The theoretical version seems wedded to an unargued sort of American exceptionalism: “Americans couldn’t possibly be anything like the totalitarians of the early-mid twentieth century.” But Americans have in the past done pretty horrific things. Unless you believe in a Whiggish conception of specifically American progress, there is no reason to deny the possibility of retrogression toward an American form of fascism. Again, the possibility can’t confidently be avowed, but it can’t confidently be disavowed, either. We have to take the possibility seriously.
To take an example from another domain: the preceding arguments strike me as akin to an argument I recently encountered in a book on psychiatry, to the effect that caffeine dependency could not possibly be a serious addiction. Why not? Well, because 60 million people drink coffee every day, and addiction is a serious mental disorder; it simply is not possible that 60 million people in a country of 319 million could have a serious mental disorder. (Cf. drinking and driving.)
Indeed, caffeine dependency can’t be a serious mental disorder even if “caffeine is as addictive as nicotine, can cause intoxication, and can provoke anxiety disorders and cardiac problems.” Justification: “Caffeine dependence is so ubiquitous….it did not seem worthwhile to have sixty million people wake up each day to the awareness that their morning pleasure was a mental disorder” (Allen Frances, Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out of Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life, p. 191). Therefore the authors of DSM-IV omitted caffeine dependency from their list of disorders. It’s not a disorder because calling it one would leave “too many” people with the “wrong” diagnosis.
Note the misinference: to avoid an adverse practical outcome (everybody wakes up with a diagnosis), assume a priori that a certain empirical proposition must be false (caffeine addiction is a serious disorder). Presumably, when you do that, you put your beliefs in “reflective equilibrium,”* and all is right with the world–even if your beliefs aren’t tracking the world. The whole procedure strikes me as delusional.
That’s why I take exception to the advice you (Michael) give about dealing with “Mr. F-150.” Does it really make sense, in the name of liberalism, to discourage people from telling Trump supporters that they’re wrong even when they are? Trump’s supporters take umbrage at the mere suggestion that bigotry played a role in Trump’s rise to the presidency. Are we no longer allowed to follow the evidence where it leads for fear of offending them? Meanwhile, they don’t seem to have any scruples about offending us–even when what they say is brazenly false and intended to deceive.
I would insist that a rights-based cosmopolitan culture only comes into existence through contestation of the sort practiced by a Socrates or a Martin Luther King. But King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail“–a staple of grade school and high school civics classes–is precisely a defense of the activity of confronting people, making them uncomfortable, and telling them they’re wrong, to their faces. The view you’re defending literally repudiates all of that–not considered particularly radical until now–so as to accommodate the thin skins of Trump supporters. But at a certain point, we have the right to say that their discomfort is their problem.
*Note the scare quotes, Riesbeck. I’m not attacking coherentism!
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“liberal/progressive culture does not recognize or respect private/public boundaries, seeking the shame/change stamp out what it often-accurately takes to be bad…”
I fail to see how this is true in any sense that is not also true of ‘conservative’ culture. Consider the following four positions, widely held by conservatives:
1. Abortion should be widely prohibited by law.
2. Same-sex marriage and its surrogates (‘civil unions’) should be prohibited by law.
3. Immigration should be heavily restricted, not merely for purposes of security, but to protect the jobs of American citizens.
4. It should be legal for citizens to carry firearms openly.
All four of these positions fail to recognize or respect a private/public boundary. The prohibition on abortion would do this in an obvious way. Opposition to same-sex marriage and civil unions seeks to give specific religious views the force of law and to deny to some citizens the public recognition of their relationship that is granted to others. Restrictions of immigration not justified by considerations of security prohibit private businesses from hiring the people most willing to work for them. Support for open carry laws rejects the distinction between the private right to own firearms and the restriction on carrying those firearms around in public.
I don’t mean to suggest that any of these views are wrong. Though I ultimately reject all of them, each has something to be said in its favor and has intelligent, reasonable advocates. What those intelligent, reasonable advocates freely acknowledge, however, is that they reject the purported relevance of some private/public distinction in these cases. Opponents of abortion quite plausibly maintain that the decision to kill another human being is not and should not be regarded as a mere private choice of no public concern. Opponents of same-sex marriage also plausibly maintain that public recognition of marriage status brings with it public endorsement and acceptance of the relationships so recognized, and so is hardly religiously or morally neutral. Opponents of more open immigration laws plausibly maintain that a company’s hiring practices are not mere private choices without significant public implications. Supporters of open carry plausibly maintain that the right to self-defense that justifies the right to own firearms is not duly respected by prohibitions on when and where they can be carried. In each case, proponents of 1-4 disagree with their opponents about the existence or relevance of a private/public distinction, and clear-headed defenses of these views reject the notion that there is some public/private boundary that their view fails to respect adequately.
Again, my point is not that these conservative views do fail to respect some important private/public boundary. It’s that the proponents of these views do in fact reject the notion that there is some such boundary that they are failing to respect in the right way, and that objections to these views that appeal to nothing more than the notion that they fail to respect some such boundary are question-begging at best. Conservatives and Progressives disagree about what these boundaries are; it is a distortion to suggest that one side recognizes such boundaries and the other doesn’t.
The same goes for the charge that progressives seek to stamp out what they regard as bad through a mixture of law and shame. Conservatives do precisely the same thing in each of the four cases I’ve described and in plenty others. The current conservative panic over transgender people and which bathrooms they use is a perfect example (and not one that is easily assessed in terms of public and private boundaries, I might add). Everyone engaged in political action tries to resist what they regard as bad by some combination of law and sharp negative discourse. This is true even of the most anti-government libertarians: they seek to change laws and they engage in a lot of fierce critical discourse. Perhaps some libertarians have a very short list of the things they think are bad, but with the possible exception of some very apathetic libertarians, even they fight against what they regard as bad. Everyone with extensive political interests does. They just disagree about what is bad, about what the role of laws and government should be, and about where, if anywhere, the relevant public/private boundaries lie.
If the claim is just supposed to be that progressives more often indulge in sheer polemic aimed at shaming their opponents, then I’m not buying that either. I don’t have much patience for the tendentious, sanctimonious ranting all too common among progressives, but I don’t have much patience for the different style of equally tendentious, sanctimonious ranting all too common among conservatives, either. It’s a bipartisan disease. No, strike that; it’s a trans-partisan disease.
I’m beginning to wonder whether you think that progressives are so much worse on these topics than conservatives because you’ve more often found yourself directly or indirectly targeted by progressive verbigeration and are less sympathetic to the views that lie behind it. I confess I used to think that progressives were more given to the disease than conservatives, but I came to realize that that assessment was the product of selection bias: I only ever read or talked to fairly intelligent, educated conservatives interested in making a persuasive case to people who didn’t already share their views, whereas, particularly in academia, I was constantly surrounded by progressives who seem quite sincerely to believe that only stupid or evil people disagree with them. Once I modified my reading and socializing habits a bit, I realized that a vast number of conservatives think and talk exactly the same way. It didn’t help that in the context of academia I am not especially far to the left, so that I found myself indirectly targeted by a lot of the left-wing rage I encountered, whereas the conservatives I was reading and talking to mainly held moderate views that I either agreed with or learned from by disagreement. Again, once I changed my reading and socializing habits a bit, I learned that I was the target of a vast amount of right-wing rage, too, and that I am at least as opposed to much of the ideas that lie behind it as I am to the ideas that lie behind the left-wing rage. I don’t know whether a similar sort of selection bias from your own personal experience is what leads you to think that progressives are somehow especially guilty of the charges you level at them in a way that conservatives aren’t. Maybe not. Perhaps that’s not even what you think and I’m only inferring it because I’ve just happened to notice you singling progressives out more — another kind of selection bias!
In any case, I don’t think the differences between conservatives and progressives are well captured either in terms of a private/public distinction or in terms of different levels of interest in fighting attitudes and practices they don’t like. I might, however, be willing to concede that many Trump voters think that’s true.
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