What's So Hard About Peace, Love, and Understanding?

Liberals should strive to understand Trump supporters. But why aren't they curious about us?

Wishing you a sunny spot and no Trump coup

What I’m Writing

The Guardian: Enough is enough. Republicans’ fealty to Trump imperils America itself

CNN: This is what it’s like to have a president again

CNN: The GOP is pitifully out of step with America on Obamacare

Medium: Celebrate Biden’s victory. Then address why it was so difficult to achieve

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This weekend, the networks finally called the presidential election for Joe Biden, who trounced Donald Trump in the Electoral College and stacked up some five million more votes than the sitting president — a stunning defeat for an incumbent. Nevertheless, the president refuses to concede. And while he and the GOP are undermining American democracy, those of us in Reality-Based America are getting something of a scolding: We shouldn’t be so surprised that Biden didn’t win in a landslide; instead, we should seek to understand Trump supporters.

Does that last directive sound familiar? Because it was also what liberals were told in the aftermath of 2016, when Trump won: We shouldn’t be so surprised Hillary lost; instead, we should seek to understand Trump supporters.

Cue reporters from the nation’s most storied papers driving out to small towns across rural America, charged with interviewing aging white men in Rust Belt diners.

And that’s wonderful, truly — it is good to try to understand people who are different from you. Coverage of America outside of big liberal cities was sorely lacking. And as a general rule, if you find yourself wondering why someone did a thing and the only answer you can come up with is “because they’re bad,” you are probably not looking hard enough, asking the right questions, or fully grasping the situation. Sure, some people are motivated purely and entirely by a desire to do harm. But they are a minority. Usually, it’s more complicated.

But here’s the thing: Who we are curious about, and whose stories we tell, also depends on whose voices we believe are valuable. There is a lot of mythos around Real America on the right and the left. Trump Republicans believe that they stand for a Real American Man who is fed up with PC culture, is rugged and masculine, believes in American greatness, and wants to work in the same factory or coal mine that his father and his father before him did — before trade deals and immigrants and the Chinese came along and took all the jobs, all of which Donald Trump will fix. On the left, the fetishization of the white working class is just as much of a caricature. Many leftists believe that they stand for a Working Man who is fed up with PC culture, is rugged and masculine, believes neoliberal Democratic politicians hung him out to dry, and wants to work in the same factory or coal mine that his father and his father before him did — but unionized and with free healthcare and free college, which is why he would vote for Bernie Sanders. Mainstream Democrats aren’t necessarily any better: The big case for Joe Biden was that he understood the working men of places like Scranton, and would earn their support in a way Hillary Clinton could not (it turns out that was actually kind of true).

Why the emphasis on the white male members of a working class that is in reality disproportionately female and of color? Because for the entire history of the United States, white men have been the heroes, leaders, and narrators. And while soft-handed educated men may rise to power, the man who works with his hands has always captured the American imagination as a platonic masculine ideal, and certainly the manifestation of the Real American.

White men, and particularly working-class white men, again voted overwhelmingly for Trump. So even though their candidate lost this time around, it is in their direction that we are being asked to extend our curiosity and our empathy. Oddly, I have not yet seen a spate of articles by conservative-leaning news outlets about, say, the Black women in suburban Atlanta who organized their communities to come out big for Biden, or all of the Latinas in Texas and Arizona who showed up to vote for Joe, or the overwhelming number of religious “nothings” who supported Democrats. Are we (or Republicans) as curious about those folks as we are about the would-be steel worker in Pennsylvania and the would-be coal miner in Appalachia? If not, why not? Do we think we know their stories? Do we think that because they don’t fit into our mold of who a Real American is — whose vote actually may count more because of where they live — that we understand well enough and there’s no real story to tell there?

Mainstream outlets like the New York Times have done some of this reporting. But what I have not seen is a hunger on the right to understand the left. I have not seen these stories on Fox News. I have not seen commentators admonishing conservatives that, in the wake of a pretty epic loss, they should take some time to really think about whether they understand America outside of their bubble.

And that is what particularly grates: That there are asymmetric expectations and demands when it comes to empathy and understanding, and there’s little recognition of the fact that liberals and conservatives do not live in identically-limiting bubbles. American cities, which tend to be much more liberal than the country’s rural reaches, are many magnitudes more diverse than those rural areas and small towns. In the course of an average (pre-Covid) day in New York City, I would encounter dozens of people who are very unlike me: Who come from different places, who worship differently, who speak different languages, who have a whole host of radically different beliefs about the world. My immediate and close social universe in this city includes women from all reaches of the country, of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, from different class backgrounds. And because of the kind of right-wing affirmative action that well-meaning liberals extend, it’s impossible for me to pick up a mainstream national newspaper and not read conservative columnists, or turn on a mainstream (or even left-leaning) television news channel and not see conservative talking heads on screen. In four years of college and three of law school, all at the supposedly uber-liberal NYU, I had many conservative professors and classmates. Are my friends all progressive? Yes indeed. But that’s not a bubble — that’s choosing to spend my time with people who are my values. By contrast, you can go to any number of small rural places and the diversity — in race, in religion, in political orientation — is significantly narrower. If you only watch Fox News and only read right-wing websites and only attend private religious schools, you can have an entire existence with nary a real liberal in sight — only caricatures of, I don’t know, radical Antifa Black Lives Matter rioters giving away free abortions to your teenage daughters.

That isn’t a rallying cry against understanding. But it is a plea to have that understanding go both ways. Because right now, understanding and empathy are only being demanded from one side, and only being extended in one direction.

xx Jill