Trump Supporters Among Us
More than 74,000,000 people voted to re-elect Trump. With so many people involved it is certain that some are immoral, stupid, or insane. Given what happened on Jan 6th it is certain that some of them have no respect for the process of democracy. But those who would paint the average Trump supporter with such brushes must have an unusually poor opinion of their fellow human beings.
One of the references listed below quotes women who cannot understand why their partners are Trump supporters. One woman put it rather succinctly: "I couldn’t believe then that someone with such a kind, loving heart would support him [Trump]." The short answer would be that her husband is focusing on different aspects of the Trump administration that she is.
In an amazingly simple minded view of human relationships, there are even therapists who are telling their clients to break up with partners simply because they support Trump. In this short essay I hope to convince you that is bad advice. Don't ghost your partners or friends because they are Trump supporters.
Apparently it is those of us who cannot stomach Trump who are more likely to have a major difficulty reaching across the divide Trump has built. Most often I hear the difficulty expressed this way: "you cannot reason with them". I wonder how many people have actually tried reasoning with them. Instead I am thinking they stopped listening and started arguing at the first absurdity. That is not the way to reason with people. If you want to reach out you take the time to listen until you can find a point of agreement. That's the place where you start talking.
None of us is capable of rational thought when really scared. There is a physiological basis for this. It simply cannot be done. Instead like an expert chess player who can zero in on the essence of a chess problem without thinking about it, we can train ourselves to go through the motions of reason when frightened.
People on both sides of Trump's divide are scared of losing our democracy. My side sees democracy as a process that must be followed or we will no longer be able to settle all our differences peacefully. The other side, as best I can tell, sees democracy as a way of life that they are comfortable with and that must be defended with violence from time to time.
With this much fear in the air our political forum is not poised for rational discussion.
Yet without rational discussion we will not heal this land of ours. Ghosting friends on the other side of the Trump divide will not do it. Shutting down social media or otherwise suppressing the other side will not do it.
This morning I listened to Trump's Jan 6th speech. I was surprised to find that he is a good orator. All I had seen of him before was the debates with Hillary and those left me with a very different impression. In those debates I saw him as defensive and covering up his defensiveness with belligerence. Perhaps he knew he was out classed. More probably he was as always just really uncomfortable whenever faced with people who don't admire him.
Trump's spin on why the election is being stolen is simple and rather convincing. The reasoning goes like this. He got over 11,000,000 more votes this time around than was enough to win the presidency last time. This November he was clearly winning when most people went to bed. During the night something nefarious happened and an unbelievable number of votes for his opponents suddenly appeared. He has found plenty of evidence for fraud which he will bore his audience with later in the speech.
Of course he never did bore his audience later in the speech but he did provide more details of various kinds. Normally with a pack of lies, the more details that are inserted the more contradictions will appear. But there is a way around that problem and Trump utilized it. Speaking of how happy the Democrats were with their fraud, he continued "the only unhappy person is Hillary Clinton because she said 'why didn't you do this for me four years ago?'" Then he blathered on about that subject for a while.
Bear with me a minute. Assume the fraud story is true and that Hillary was unhappy that there was no fraud for her. How would Trump know exactly what she had to say? He wouldn't and his audience knew that. But they enjoyed the story. While they were enjoying it, the underlying fraud story was becoming more entrenched in their minds.
When I started listening to Trump's speech I had in mind to point out the places where he was making use of known cognitive biases to bamboozle people. But the effect of that kind of writing would only be to make us feel superior. Our thinking would be: "See, I knew they were gullible". After all we are not so gullible. We know this because we know ourselves.
Or we think we do.
Yet all we can actually know are our conscious thoughts. Between those thoughts and the real world is a large part of our brain we have no conscious access to. That part of the brain works pretty much the same in all human beings. Among other things it creates expectations from experience. You, I, and all Trump's supporters have the same wiring. It filters everything we perceive but we have no awareness of it.
The brain's unconscious wiring is the basis for the cognitive biases identified by psychologists. Advertisers and politicians learn to manipulate us through these biases but the only time we notice these manipulations is when we see other people affected by them.
So we can see how Trump's supporters are being manipulated but not how we ourselves are. We all have this difficulty. We see other people being manipulated by watching their behavior. We don't see ourselves being manipulated because we search our consciousness for signs of it and that is not where the manipulation happens. I have as much difficult with this as anybody. But I can tell you about one example from decades ago.
I was driving through Omaha I when I saw a man sweeping off a sidewalk. I had an instantaneous, unthinking reaction: "why is a white man doing that?" The reaction is embarrassing because I was raised to think skin color is no more significant than hair color. Consciously I'm not racist. Unconsciously my brain had learned that manual laborers are black. The pattern had been established while I teaching in South Carolina. That day in Omaha was my first day back in my home state.
Because we all have the same brain structure and hence the same cognitive biases, because we cannot directly perceive our own cognitive biases, it is a mistake to assume Trump supporters are more gullible than we are.
Even so, perhaps we can assume Trump's supporters are less moral?
I have no difficulty painting Trump himself that way. As an example let's consider the most egregious example of his immorality. In my opinion that is his decision to separate children from their parents at the border.
In a Machiavellian way the policy made sense. There are far more Latinos wanting to immigrate to the US than any administration could tolerate. Trump wasn't the first to make Mexico take them. He inherited that from Obama and it was not a long term solution. In theory a wall was a better idea. It would have been a huge symbol that discouraged people from making the dangerous trip across Mexico. But the wall idea was monumentally impractical. So instead Trump started mistreating all immigrants who made it onto our soil.
Trump's policy at the Mexican border was implemented in an immoral way but it worked. The flow of immigrants was greatly reduced. As for the kids who lost their parents, they were collateral damage.
According to the Wikipedia, the oldest known use of the term “collateral damage” was in 1961. I think the phrase arose because of our contradictory attitude about killing civilians in World War II. German bombing of British cities was a crime. Allied bombing of German and Japanese cities was not. We needed a term for our own killing of civilians, one that emphasized that we didn’t really want to do that. By the time we were gearing up to fight in Vietnam, “collateral damage” was that term. It meant the unintentional killing of civilians during a military operation. Today it means unintentional damage.
Are those who support Trump’s border policy in spite of its collateral damage worse human beings than those who support our use of drones to take out terrorist enemies in spite of the inevitable collateral damage? Or those who still support the napalming of civilians in Vietnam in spite of the fact that the reason for that policy has been proven false. (Recall that the reason given to us was that if we do not draw a military line in Vietnam all of Indochina would fall under horrendous communist rule.) How about those who know our prison system is cruel and unjust but support it anyway because they see a problem they are not willing to solve any other way?
Perhaps these are differences of opinion that we can live with in a democratic society? We certainly have been doing so.
Don't ghost Trump supporters. Engage. And do it by listening first. Don't be afraid you might be influenced by listening. Not every single one of their ideas is bad.
This is important. There is another Trump out there. One who is more competent. We need to heal this nation before that person gets into a position to act.
References
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/annotated-trump-speech-jan-6-capitol/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/opinion/sunday/is-donald-trump-a-threat-to-democracy.html
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/533650-poll-majority-say-trump-should-resign
https://www.scarymommy.com/trump-supporters-wives-voting-biden/
https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/emotional-health/5-things-you-never-knew-about-fear
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_damage
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