During the 2024 presidential campaign and after, a recurrent theme among the commentariat was that liberal Americans shouldn’t be, well, mean to Donald Trump supporters. This admonition applied to words as well as sticks and stones; there were just certain things liberals shouldn’t say to, or about, Trump’s familiars. Foremost among these was any hint that proposing to elect a man with 34 felony convictions who had attempted a coup might signal a shortage of smarts, at least when it comes to politics. This, apparently, would be a very not-nice thing to do.
“[T]he liberal impulse has been to demonize anyone at all sympathetic to Donald Trump,” Nicholas Kristof intoned in The New York Times, imploring liberals not to “belittle” voters eager to send a sociopathic ignoramus back to the White House. Quoting the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, he then sighed that “scorn for people with less education [is] ‘the last acceptable prejudice’ in America.” In other words: Hey, all you smarty-pants liberals — you’re the real bigots here! Take that!
Well, I try — really, really try — to be nice to everybody. And I would never say that all Trump voters are stupid. Quite the contrary, actually; in many cases, I have no difficulty understanding why people would vote for this viper. If you are an oligarch who wants to turn the federal government into your valet (like, say, Elon Musk), then it makes perfect sense for you to support Trump, an oligarch wanna-be who will help you loot the treasury as long as you line his pockets and fawn over him. If, on the other hand, you are an oligarch who just wants the government to cut your taxes and let you poison the planet (like, say, the Koch Brothers), then, again, a vote for Trump is completely rational. Alternatively, you may not be an oligarch at all, just an average joe who loves Trump because he hates the same people you hate. In none of these cases would I say people are behaving stupidly. Despicably? Sure. But stupidly? Nah.
But then we have voters like the ones in this Times piece from early December. Asked for one word to describe Trump, their choices include “common sense,” “compassion,” and “patriotism.” Keep in mind that they are talking about a man who suggested ingesting bleach could help cure COVID, put migrant children in cages, and tried to steal an election. Later, a truck driver says that Trump “believes in Christ,” while a lacrosse coach tells us that he “runs this country like a business,” though he does allow that it’s “tough for some people to see that.” Yeah, I confess to getting hung up on small details like the eight trillion dollars Trump added to the national debt. As for Trump the apostle of Christ, well, this brings to mind the words of the Duke of Wellington: “If you can believe that, you can believe anything.”
And this, in sum, is the problem. We’re not talking here about thinking that Mitt Romney’s views on marginal tax rates were incrementally better than Barack Obama’s, or, alternatively, that Ronald Reagan’s vigilance toward the Soviet Union was a better bet than Walter Mondale’s more dovish approach. These positions moved, more or less persuasively, within the space of rational discourse; perceptive, well-informed people could profitably debate them. But seeing Trump as a compassionate Christian, or as a brilliant businessman and avatar of common sense, signals an epistemic collapse so profound that it removes the opinion from the sphere of rationality and into that of pure, unfiltered credulity. There is simply no way for a person whose cognitive faculties are operating efficiently to hold these views.
This is a strong statement, and I don’t want to be misunderstood. To be crazy when it comes to politics is not to be crazy in any global way. Most of the people in the Times piece are, I’m sure, perfectly competent in other areas of life—- they hold down jobs, raise kids, socialize with friends, etc.. I’m sure, also, that they are perfectly nice people. But when it comes to politics they are willfully ignorant. There — I said it. I have searched unsuccessfully for any other way to describe people able to gaze upon the human wreckage that is Donald Trump and conclude that he is fit for any office that doesn’t have bars. It’s not a close call — it’s the only call.
Trying to evade this fact makes it more, not less, difficult to understand what is happening in our politics. What we’re dealing with is nothing short of a crisis of political rationality—- including the possibility, suddenly very urgent, 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. Remember how that ended?
And it comes in many guises. A more subtle variant is to attribute the choices of working-class Trump voters to economic motives alone. Stranded in the blasted industrial heaths whose defunct smokestacks once sustained whole 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 ’80s and early ’90s succumbed to the market triumphalism that attended the fall of the Soviet Union, dropping their advocacy of economic justice in favor of a corporate-friendly regime of globalization, low taxes, and deregulation. Now, a generation later, the results are in—- shuttered factories, withered towns and cities, and a working-class so steeped in despair that suicide seems preferable to living.
Weisman’s article is deeply reported and researched. (Like Kristoff, he is a superb reporter.) But it lacks important context. Economics does not come to us unmediated; like everything else, it is embedded in narrative, in story. And a vital part of the story here, only nodded at by Weisman, 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 to George H.W. Bush’s demolition of Michael Dukakis in 1988. The lesson learned was that “the era of big government is over,” or at least you’d better say it is 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 that had been captured by Republicans and overwhelmingly endorsed by American voters. In large part, it was the white working-class—- “Reagan Democrats”—- who ratified the first wave of the neoliberalism that their children and grandchildren now decry.
This fact explains an important mystery about our politics. About two-thirds of noncollege white voters supported Trump in 2024. About two-thirds of nonwhite noncollege voters supported Harris. If we assume that both groups experience roughly equal levels of economic distress, then we have an obvious question to answer: Why did they respond to it so differently in the voting booth? The answer, I’d say, is that they accept radically different explanations of that distress. Nonwhites mostly see themselves as oppressed by corporate power and racial bigotry, and they see the government as the only institution of sufficient scale to stand against these forces. Whites mostly see themselves as oppressed by corporate power and elite derision, and they see the government as complicit in both. Their only hope for dignity, they think, lies in an outsider, a strong man (and yes, it has to be a man), a smasher who will destroy a rotten system and resurrect the industrial glory of their fathers and grandfathers. The smokestacks will reignite, 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 failure of understanding — of rational criticism as applied to economics and politics. Pretending it isn’t a failure — that we don’t need more facts, more intelligence, more insight from voters — isn’t tolerance or compassion. It is, in its own way, an insidious form of condescension. And it is disastrous for any hopes we might have for a decent and livable politics.