In defense of MAGA voters

The neighbors' place.

The people I mostly interact with are adamantly anti-Trump.  Well, so am I. After Joe Biden's disastrous debate performance, I started saying I'd vote for a ham sandwich before I'd vote for Trump in November.  Thankfully the Democrats came up with a better option than ham for the next president. 

How, my friends, family and colleagues at work, often wonder, could ANYONE vote for someone so horrible?  How can they believe his lies? How can they excuse his glaring character flaws? How can they think he cares about their interests?

We don't find an explanation in the media we consume.  Sometimes I find myself scrolling liberal YouTube or other social media, watching clips from various man-on-the-street interviews of the Trump voter done by slick late-night comedians, or random You Tubers with a camera and a microphone.  They give preposterous answers to questions about current events, public policy or history. They spout absurdly implausible conspiracy theories.  They offer elaborate, logic-defying explanations for Trump's lies, exaggerations and foibles. It's quite satisfying. It makes me feel so smart.

Those of us marinating in these presentations without any alternative sources of information about these fellow citizens of ours, conclude that MAGA world is made up of the least intelligent, least educated, least rational, most racist, sexist, xenophobic, gullible people among us. Those who have tried to enlighten them out of their MAGA delusions generally conclude that they are impervious to facts and reason. 

I recall a moment of shock and humility among the the people around me after Trump's victory in 2016, and some folks were saying that it was time to start listening to some of the voters outside of our own blue bubble and understand the source of their discontent.  

I was in a book group at the time and suggested that we read Arlie Hochschild's book, Strangers in their Own Land, a five-year study of conservative working class Louisianans who were reliable voters for a Republican Party that opposed environmental regulations that curbed oil company practices that were causing catastrophic destruction of their homes and communities, creating among other things, a "cancer ally" and home-swallowing sink holes. 

I think Hochschild's aim was to create empathy and understanding of these voters in the hopes of opening up dialogues and eroding the alienation and polarization that has made it increasingly difficult for people with opposing views to hash out compromises—or to even see the opposition as legitimate.  The book didn't seem to have that effect on most of my fellow book-readers, but to confirm their negative assumptions and bafflement. 

The book had a different effect on me, I guess because I'd spend the summer of 2016, after the Brexit vote, and Trump's primary victory, trying to understand what was going on with those voters as I was preparing to teach my fall course on American Politics and Public Policy. I also happened to be writing a meditation on the subject to be delivered at the start of the term.

Since then I've kept seeking out explanations for the Trump voters and I think there's more than the what we see on late night comedy. Here's a list: 

1. Support for Trump is based in both rational and irrational thinking, solid facts and delusions.  That's true of a lots of thinking here in Blue America, too.  I include a segment in my politics class about the cognitive distortions that cloud everyone's thinking, especially when it comes to politics.

2. Trump voters are a varied bunch, like Blue voters, they don't all agree with each other. They range from rabidly angry anti-democratic hooligans who see Trump as divinely inspired, to average middle class voters who only reluctantly pull the MAGA lever, more out of opposition to the Democratic policies than love of Trump. Similarly, Democratic voters include some people with views and action I'd rather not have to align myself with.

3. Trump emerged from a rising populist sentiment in the 2010s that was justifiably revolting against  what Thomas Frank calls "elite failure"—de-industrialization, hollowing out of the middle class, forever wars, the opioid epidemic, the Great Recession, uncontrolled immigration, the catastrophic decline of private-sector unions, corporate money in politics. But after Trump captured the Republican Party, the Democratic establishment put its finger on the nomination scale to make sure the left populist lost to Clinton, who had become a symbol of elite rule.  Pre-convention polls suggested Sanders would have done better than Clinton in the general election. So we got right- instead of left-wing populism. 

Whatever. The point of this, is to share a few things I've read recently in the off-chance who might want to have a more nuanced understanding of the Trump voter.  

• NYT columnist Ross Douthat is not a Trump supporter, but he is a conservative who has no trouble coming up with justifiable reasons to vote for Trump again, for example in a Sept. 14, 2024 piece, "What Undecided Voters Might Be Thinking."
• This podcast, Batya Ungar-Sargon, a 2016 Sanders supporter explaining why Harris's debate performance might not have won working class Trump voters. 
• Thomas Frank does a good job of explaning the populist revolt against the Democratic Party in his books Listen Liberal and The People, No.  
• The writings of John Judis and Ruy Tuxiera blame the Democratic Party for losing voters more than the blame the irrationality of Trump voters.  For example, their last collaboration, Where Have all the Democrats Gone, Tuxiera's Substack blog, "Liberal Patriot," and Judis's primers on populism and nationalism combined along with a book on socialism in "The Politics of our Time."
• Kaitlyn Flannigan's Atlantic article, "How Late Night Comedy Feuled the Rise of Trump," argues that our gleeful riducule of Trump voters probably cements their support of him.

Last but best, the organization Braver Angels has had great success in bringing voters from the opposing sides together to at least listen to each other and sometimes even find common ground. I witnessed this in person at their annual convention in Kenosha Wisconsin this past June.