Meaning

A lot, I think, of what we understand to be racism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry are really just garden-variety cruelty, given outlet against easily-identifiable Acceptable Targets. When I was a child, I thought that I was surrounded by racists, and to a degree, I was - children began to shun me because I was visibly Different from them. But most of the mean words and the nasty actions they would perpetrate as we grew up together weren't them acting out over the end of Jim Crow, or the recent triumph of the Civil Rights movement. They were due to cruelty being a form of social currency, both at school and ad home. Cruelty and meanness were markers of power, and being able to inflict oneself on those one found a reason to dislike was considered a virtue.

When I look at the world of today, and see the things that have gone on since the election, I am reminded of these things because our generation are the parents of most of today's young people. And we couldn't see our way clear to completely unlearning the mean-spiritedness of our own parents, aunts and uncles. So why should they? The same people who spouted racial epithets as easily as breathing while claiming racism was a thing of the past are now leaders in our society. Why should we think that they grew out of the need to denigrate others to advance themselves?

The ability to take deliberate pleasure in the suffering of another may not be a uniquely human trait, but it is a common human trait. And there is no easier target than one whose vulnerabilities you know well.

Working

Q and A

Q: How could so many people have voted for Donald Trump to become President?
A: Because they honestly believe that a Trump Administration will enact policies that will do the most to make life better for everyone in the country, as viewed through the lens of their own experience.

In the end, it's really that simple. While there seems to be difficulty on the Left in understanding this, it's really based on a simple enough concept. Most people tend to view the national interest through the lens of their own experiences, and view that as objective, and to a certain degree self-evident, truth. And to the degree that people have non-overlapping experiences of the world, they begin to have incompatible, if not mutually exclusive, ideas on how best to move forward.

Contrary to what people like to believe (especially when their side looses an election), voters are not generally selfish people. They don't go around deliberately voting to advance their own interests by throwing other people under the bus. The Standing Rock Sioux are not opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline because they've decided that their interests are best served by pipeline workers being unemployed. Likewise, the people of Ferndale, Washington, weren't hoping for a coal export terminal because they were looking to foul the air or cheat the Lummi out of their fishery. While in both cases, the people involved are actively looking out for their local interests, they believe that they're doing what's best for a wide swath of people other than themselves. Sure, it creates problems for some. If the Standing Rock Sioux have their way, someone who desperately wants a job building or working on the Dakota Access Pipeline is going to be out of luck. But those would-be workers are not the targets of the protests. It's the pipeline company and Federal Government who the protestors understand to be the villains; people who are already well-off, who have it in for them.

And it's that idea, the failure to assume good intent that one finds in the need to assign blame, that becomes entangled in electoral politics. Whether or not people took Donald Trump's idea to build a massive (and like quixotic) wall along the border between Mexico and the United States literally or seriously, people on both sides of the issue were quick to discard the assumption of good intent and see in the opposition the villainy of people who were already doing well enough that they didn't need to do injury to others. For low-wage (and/or unemployed) workers eyeing what they see as potentially family-wage jobs being given to migrant workers willing to work for poverty wages, the "liberal" viewpoint that immigration laws could be ignored at will was at best ignorant of their needs. At worst, it was part of a hateful plot against them; a plan to destroy their communities and erode their electoral influence in a bid to impose policies that they couldn't convince people to willingly support. Likewise, for those whose understanding of illegal migration is that it's simply part of the quest for a better life, the the "conservative" viewpoint that immigration laws should be strictly enforced, regardless of the human cost was at best self-serving. At worst, it was part of a hateful plot to return the United States to a past where "White Supremacy" was the order of the day, and everyone else was second-class, at best, scrounging for the scraps that fell from the table of a WASP society built on a racial, ethnic and religious caste system.

And in each case, the everyday people who supported the scheme may not have been villains themselves, but manipulated by a self-interested and deceitful "élite" who were deploying them as cats' paws and smokescreens, putting an "everyman" face on initiatives designed solely to benefit an already well-off (and usually undeserving) few. This is a pattern that we see repeated over and over, especially when causes provoke a counter-cause of some sort - as in the conflict between the contrasting ideals of "Black Lives Matter" and the "Law and order" constituency. Each often sees the rank-and-file of the other side are pawns of a scheme - one that either ends in bloodshed in the name of racial hierarchy or the weakening of law enforcement for illegal profits.

When people ask why others have cast "badwrong" votes, what they are often looking for is an affirmation: that despite an apparent plurality of disagreement (the usual actual plurality is non-participation), that they are still intelligent, thoughtful and ethical. And while there is nothing wrong with this, the opposite idea, that the opposition is some combination of (willfully) foolish, credulous and/or immoral, creates problems, because those are labels that we often use to place people outside the bounds of our compassion. It allows us to define them as comfortable enough to be worthy of affliction, and to see our efforts against them as a heroic stand for truth and decency, born of our own intellect and sensitivity; we are clear-eyed enough to see what's right and courageous enough to fight for it.

Q: How could so many people have voted for Donald Trump to become President?
A: Because they feel, due to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or the direct actions of others, afflicted. Not for themselves, but for the nation as a whole. And they voted for the best promise of comfort that they could find.

The Whatever Vote

The "surprise" election of Donald Trump to the presidency has a number of people asking how such a thing could have happened. In listening to the coverage, I've started to piece it together. There are four elements to it, in broad strokes.

One) Elections aren't about what we think they're about. Our common understanding of elections is that they're a form of referendum on the relative merits of the candidates involved. And while that may be true of many elections, it's not really true of the presidential elections. And this is why Allan Lichtman has been batting close to a thousand with a formula that has nearly nothing to do with the actual candidates who are running - of the 13 factors examined, only three of them relate to the current contenders, and, according to the model, those three factors alone can't determine the outcome.

Taken together, Professor Lichtman's other 10 factors mostly represent a referendum on the term of office that is ending as the election is being held - the represent the likelihood that voters would want to continue the policies of the previous stint of the presidency. And that's something that tends to be independent of the actual candidates in the current election. In fact, Professor Lichtman's Keys to the White House are aimed at party - Will the incumbent party retain the Oval Office, or will it go to the challenging party? Which brings us to...


Two) The role of party. Any number of people, among them David Brooks, had mentioned that part of the reason why Donald Trump had such a large pool of potential voters was the simple fact that he was the Republican nominee. No matter how little one otherwise knew of him, that affiliation was a sort of shorthand. And an effective one. Third-party candidates in presidential races aren't even considered also-rans; instead they're considered hopeless and best and wastes of time (and votes) at worst. Given this, the candidates of the major parties have a huge advantage. If you don't like one party, and you don't want their policies (something that most people understand from partisan shorthand, if {and usually} nothing else) to be enacted, your only viable option is the other major party. A vote for the Libertarian Party or the Socialist Worker's Party isn't considered a serious form of political engagement.

One interesting point that I'd heard made during this election cycle is that many of us have political causality backwards. Most voters (although certainly not all) don't consider their positions on important political issues and then select a party accordingly. Rather they choose a party affiliation, and then adopt the platform positions of their chosen party to one degree or another. And for many people selection of candidates is the same. Once people have chosen a political party, they tend to vote for that party's candidate, and that means...

Three) Love my party, love my candidate. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both had substantial negatives, many of which were considered character flaws of the highest order. Yet each racked up tens of millions of votes. And, I suspect, that the reason for this is simple - once people had made up their minds to vote for a given party, they adopted that party's candidate, and set about to justify that decision to themselves. So the tendency of Republican voters to take Mr. Trump "seriously, but not literally" (a phrasing that seems often applied to the Bible) and to therefore brush aside his more incendiary comments as hyperbolic rhetoric (while contending that Mrs. Clinton's words were sincere insults) was driven by the understanding that they were going to vote for the man, and so they had to tell themselves that he lived up to whatever standard they'd set for political candidates.

Perhaps one of the most important factors is one that very much contradicts the way we think about how people vote...

Four) It's not about who voters support - it's about whose supporters vote. On Wednesday morning, I was listening to a story that noted that Mrs. Clinton had "underperformed" among Black voters. It seemed unlikely that, given Mr. Trumps abysmal polling numbers in the Black community that a lot of them had crossed over (although some may have). Instead, the Black voter participation rate dropped slightly from 2012. It's likely that many of those votes not cast would have gone Democratic. Social media has been at pains to remind me of how poorly Mrs. Clinton had fared when compared to other recent Democratic candidates.

One think that we tend to forget is that a rather large number of people didn't vote in the election. Among all eligible voters, and all registered voters as well, the single most popular choice was not to cast a ballot at all. There is nothing unusual about this. Every election, a sizable minority of voters sit the contest out. But that doesn't mean it's the same sizable minority in each election.

Each party has what we could call a number of "marginally attached" potential voters - people who somewhat identify with the party to some degree, but not enough so to be consistent voters. And it's these people who are what we've always heard referred to as "swing" voters. Other people have noted that the number of genuinely undecided or swing voters is very small - for many people, you know roughly how they're going to vote - if they vote. And that becomes the issue. Getting the marginally attached voters to either turn out or tune out. Get-out-the-vote efforts are aimed at identifying these voters at are on your side and urging them to go to the polls - negative campaigning is aimed at convincing those on the other side not to bother.

In spite of the fact that Donald Trump was the nominee, in key swing states enough of the marginally attached Republican electorate came out to cast a vote for president, while enough of the marginally attached Democrats stayed home that it made the difference. And for the most part, it wasn't about the candidates.

It runs counter to the prevailing understanding of how elections work, and I think that this is why we don't hear more of this theory, outside of the footnotes here and there. It's less dramatic, and frankly, less interesting. Political coverage tends to focus on the "horserace" aspect of elections, and the intersection of Professor Lichtman's model and people's voting habits tends to render the horserace moot. But I think that an understanding of it all is helpful, because it illustrates the underlying thinking that goes into things. And more insight never hurts.

Understanding

The tools of democracy and republic were not intended to be the means by which two mutually antagonistic groups determine which of their mutually exclusive worldviews and understandings of the national interest is to be imposed on the public as a whole. Democracy in America is not broken, any more than a screwdriver is broken because it does not saw things in half. We have insisted on putting our tools to incorrect usage, and then are unwilling to answer for our own intents.

It's interesting.When this thought occurred to me this morning, it seemed true. It seemed to fit in with the way the world actually worked. But the more I thought about it, the more it dawned on me that while it was a convenient narrative that explained what I saw, it didn't do the job of explaining what actually happened. Language is a powerful tool, because it shapes our thoughts (to such a degree that there is a school of thought that says that children don't actually think until they learn to converse inside their own heads). But also because it shapes the way we perceive.

I don't know that the insight that came to me about the nature of elections is wrong. I suspect, to a degree, that it is, because it's too convenient, too pat, too in tune with the perceptions that my language about politics had created. And so I must find a different insight. I don't know yet, but I think I know where to look for it.