During the 2024 presidential campaign and beyond, a recurring theme of commentary was that liberal Americans are not, well, mean for Donald Trump supporters. This admonition applied to words as well as to sticks and stones; there were just certain things liberals shouldn’t say to or about Trump’s acquaintances. Chief among these was any indication that the proposal to elect a man with 34 felony convictions who had attempted a coup might indicate a shortage of smart people, at least when it comes to politics. Apparently this wouldn’t be much fun to do.
“[T]The liberal impulse has been to demonize anyone who even remotely sympathizes with Donald Trump,” Nicholas Kristof said in The New York Times, imploring liberals not to turn away voters eager to send a sociopathic ignoramus back to the White House to “belittle”. He quoted Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel and then lamented that “contempt for people with less education [is] ‘the last acceptable prejudice’ in America.” In other words: Hey, you smart liberals – you’re the real fanatics here! Take that!
Well, I try to – really, really, be nice to everyone. And I would never say that all Trump voters are stupid. On the contrary; in many cases I have no trouble understanding why people would vote for this viper. If you’re an oligarch who wants to make the federal government your servant (like Elon Musk, for example), then it makes perfect sense that you support Trump, an oligarch wannabe who will help you loot the treasury as long as you line his pockets and crawls over him. On the other hand, if you’re an oligarch who just wants the government to cut your taxes and let you poison the planet (like, say, the Koch Brothers), then a vote for Trump is perfectly rational. It’s also possible that you’re not an oligarch at all, just an average guy who loves Trump because he hates the same people you do. In none of these cases would I say people are behaving stupidly. Despicable? Certainly. But stupid? No.
But then we have voters like those in this Times piece from early December. Asked for one word to describe Trump, their choices included “common sense,” “compassion” and “patriotism.” Keep in mind that they are talking about a man who suggested that ingesting bleach could help cure COVID, put migrant children in cages, and tried to steal an election. Later, a truck driver says Trump “believes in Christ,” while a lacrosse coach tells us he “runs this country like a business,” though he admits it’s “hard for some people to see that.” Yes, I must admit that I get bogged down in small details, like the $8 trillion Trump added to the national debt. As for Trump, the apostle of Christ, this brings to mind the words of the Duke of Wellington: “If you can believe that, you can believe anything.”
And this, in summary, is the problem. We’re not talking about the idea that Mitt Romney’s views on marginal tax rates were incrementally better than Barack Obama’s, or that Ronald Reagan’s vigilance toward the Soviet Union was a better choice than the softer approach of Walter Mondale. These positions moved, more or less convincingly, within the space of rational discourse; observant, well-informed people could profitably debate it. But seeing Trump as a compassionate Christian, or as a brilliant businessman and avatar of common sense, signals an epistemic collapse so deep that it removes opinion from the realm of rationality and into that of pure, unfiltered credulity. There is simply no way for someone whose cognitive faculties are working efficiently to hold these beliefs.
This is a strong statement and I don’t want to be misunderstood. Being crazy when it comes to politics means not being crazy in any global sense. I’m sure that most of the people in the Times piece are perfectly competent in other areas of life: they have jobs, raise children, socialize with friends, etc. I’m also sure that they that too. nice people. But when it comes to politics, they are knowingly ignorant. There – I said it. I have searched in vain for another way to describe people who are able to stare at the human wreckage of Donald Trump and conclude that he is fit for any office without bars. It’s not a close call – it’s the only call.
Trying to avoid this fact does not make it any less difficult to understand what is happening in our politics. What we are dealing with is nothing less than a crisis of political rationality – including the suddenly very pressing possibility that rationality may no longer be a concept of any relevance in politics. It is an explosion of irrationalism not seen in the West since the 1930s. Do you remember how that ended?
And it comes in many guises. A more subtle variant is to attribute the choices of working-class Trump voters solely to economic motives. Stranded in the ruined industrial moors whose defunct smokestacks once sustained entire communities, they feel neglected, bitter and vengeful – and Trump is their retribution. An excellent recent example of this approach is Jonathan Weisman’s “How Democrats Lost the Working Class,” which also appeared in the Times. His argument, put simply, is that Democrats in the late 1980s and early 1990s succumbed to the market triumphalism that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union, abandoning their advocacy for economic justice in favor of a business-friendly regime of globalization, low taxes and deregulation. Now, a generation later, the results are visible: closed factories, withered towns and cities, and a working class so steeped in despair that suicide is preferable to life.
Weisman’s article has been deeply reported and researched. (Like Kristoff, he’s an excellent reporter.) But it’s missing some important context. Economics does not just come to us; like everything else, it is embedded in a story, within a story. And a key part of the story here, which Weisman only nodded to, is how the Democratic retreat from economic justice was largely driven by their sense of what voters themselves wanted. It was a response to Reagan’s electoral dominance and George HW Bush’s demolition of Michael Dukakis in 1988. The lesson we learned was that “the era of big government is over,” or at least it should be say if you want to win. elections. Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council did not emerge from a vacuum; they were creatures of an economic discourse adopted by Republicans and overwhelmingly supported by American voters. In large part, it was the white working class – the “Reagan Democrats” – who ratified the first wave of neoliberalism that their children and grandchildren now criticize.
This fact explains an important mystery about our politics. About two-thirds of non-white, non-college voters supported Trump in 2024. About two-thirds of non-white, non-college voters supported Harris. If we assume that both groups experience roughly the same amount of economic hardship, we have to answer an obvious question: Why did they respond to it so differently at the voting booth? The answer, I would say, is that they accept radically different explanations for that suffering. Nonwhites tend to see themselves as oppressed by corporate power and racial bigotry, and they see government as the only institution of sufficient size to resist these forces. Whites tend to see themselves as oppressed by corporate power and elite ridicule. and they see the government as complicit in both. Their only hope for dignity lies, they think, in an outsider, a strong man (and yes, it has to be a man), a firecracker who will destroy a rotten system and revive the industrial glory of their fathers and grandfathers. The chimneys will light again, the Other will be tamed, and life, and America, will be great again.
The widespread acceptance of this narrative among the white working class is a lack of understanding – of rational criticism as applied to economics and politics. Pretending that it isn’t a failure – that we don’t need more facts, more intelligence and more insight from voters – is not tolerance or compassion. It’s an insidious form of condescension in its own way. And it is disastrous for our hopes for decent and viable politics.