A great deal of the opposition to Trump and Trump supporters
is couched in the register of moral outrage. Some of it is ridicule: making fun
of Trump’s appearance and his obliviousness to demonstrable facts, as well as the
ignorance of some of his supporters. We lament the danger he and his supporters
pose to democracy and peace, and the hatefulness of what they say and do about women,
people of color, and the poor. One might almost suppose that the Left these
days is united primarily around hatred for Trump and people who support him, even
though we say that love trumps hate. Trumpists find solidarity in their disgust
for the Left, whom they call “libtards” and “snowflakes”, but it would be nice
if the Left was united by something better than hatred or even moral outrage.
There’s no denying that shared moral outrage feels good; it
is a way of declaring oneself to be on the right (that is, the Left) side of
history and in solidarity with like-minded others. But it only drives the wedge
deeper between us and people who are inclined to support Trumpism, convincing
them that we live in a different moral universe from them, and that our only
political wish is to silence them and render their desires and aspirations null
and void in political decision making that effects their lives. Of course there
are Trump supporters we cannot reach because their real material interests –
their investments and professions – stand to benefit from tax cuts and
increased military spending. But we should not give up on working class Trump
voters, even if they have intolerant views that we find reprehensible. We need
a strategy for eventually bringing everyone who is not a capitalist around to
the understanding that capitalism is the enemy, not other members of the
working class.
Trump supporters are often represented as too lazy and
stupid to think beyond the brainwashing they have received from Fox News and
the social media of the alt-right. The right-wing media have certainly managed
to focus and give content to the discontent that Trumpists feel. But people
believe what they believe in order to make sense of their lives. We need to ask what it is about the
lives of millions that makes right-wing rhetoric make sense to them.
What underlies the hatred of Trumpists for immigrants,
people who cannot support themselves, people of color, and the direction of the
country under mainstream political leadership? Hatred grows out of fear, for
hatred is a way to redeem fear, to make it proactive rather than merely
reactive. It turns flight into fight, and fight feels better than flight. So
what are Trumpists fearful of?
The reality is that they are being systematically fleeced by
neo-liberal capitalism that has made wages stagnant while good jobs that can
give a person a sense of getting ahead and doing something worthwhile are
vanishing over the horizon. Policies affecting their lives are made in big
cities far away by people very different from themselves professionally, economically
and culturally.
Moreover, it appears
to them that the cultural ground they stand on is shifting under foot, shaking
their confidence in their right to be who they are. This bears on the problem
of race. Our recent economic history of massive inequality and social
disruption has left many people in rural and rust belt America without a secure
sense of belonging in the world. If they are white, then, given the history of
institutional racism in this country going
back to slavery, they inevitably get some of their sense of identity
from the mere fact that they are not black, i.e. white. So as the complexion of
the nation changes, many who, often unconsciously, regard themselves as “white”
feel threatened by the increasing numbers of people of color and by what looks
to them like liberal policies of preferring them through policies of
immigration and welfare. We can protest and tell them they ought not to feel
that way, but when we do so, they feel they are being preached at by people who
do not share their lives. In a similar way, people who have grown up with their
sense of self rooted in traditional gender relations can also feel their life-world
coming apart as those relationships are challenged by the increasing visibility
and legitimation of the LGBTQ movement.[1]
It’s important to understand that these perceptions and
fears are in varying degrees unconscious to those who have them, or are
conscious only in partial and distorted ways. People who think (falsely) that people
on welfare are mostly black and Hispanic and lazy do not know that this belief
is a rationalization of their fragile sense of identity that depends on feeling
superior as “white” to people who are not “white”.
Can we on the left let go of the assumption that our truth
and our justice is so obvious that only people who are stupid and
intellectually lazy, or just plain evil, could possibly fail to see it? Not
only does this attitude, by casting ourselves as superior to the stupid and ignorant
masses, poison our message so that only those already on our side will hear us,
but we blind ourselves to the real reasons for Trump’s appeal to a big chunk of
the electorate. I suggest that what we see as their stupidity is not a lack of
native intelligence, but rather the paralysis of their intellects by fear and
anger, leaving them unable to do more than lash out with “alternative facts”
and simple-minded slogans that justify and express their anger.
The philosopher Spinoza wrote, “I have labored carefully not to mock human actions, nor to lament nor to
curse them, but to try to understand them.” When we mock, lament, or
curse someone, we cannot understand him or her. We have reduced the complex person, who is
embedded in a many-sided social situation, to a demonic and isolated
caricature, someone who is either a moron or is evil for no other reason than
the perverse desire to do evil.
Notice, though, that refusing to mock, lament, or curse what
people do does not rule out objecting
to what they do, or criticizing it,
or prohibiting it, or even trying to stop it by force. But all these actions
will be more effective if they are done with an understanding of how the
cultural and political landscape looks and feels to the people whose actions we
are objecting to and trying to prevent.
The fact that Trumpism and alt-right views are deeply rooted
in unconscious fears means that reasoned arguments will have very limited
value, especially on people who have been committed to their views for a long
time and who live in communities of like-minded people. We can hope, though,
that younger members of those communities can be persuaded. But that will
require us to develop and teach a positive and vivid vision of a better world,
one that is powered by the will to cooperate rather than the will to dominate. And
we need to learn to teach these things with an understanding of the people we
are addressing and with as little mocking, lamenting, and cursing as humanly
possible.
Presented on the Old Mole Variety Hour, December 11, 2017
After thought: How realistic is it, psychologically, to separate the moral indignation necessary for political action and commitment from anger, and even rage? Can we motivate people into radical political action without evoking moral outrage? And can that outrage be directed only at the system (racist-patriarchal capitalism) without spilling over into anger at, and hatred of, particular agents of the system (like Trump and his supporters)?
[1] Jonathan Gray, a local
conservative political consultant, told the New York Times (12/11/17), “Washingtonians
still don’t fathom the extreme level of heartland anger against how government
'shoves things down their throats' by interfering with how they raise their
kids, sneering at their faith, denigrating America’s heritage and regulating
them half to death."
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