Driving Toward Light
Next time can be better
Since January 20th I’ve lived under a pall: a cloud of sadness, anxiety, and anger.
I’m weighed down by the relentless destruction being waged, its cruelty and waste. The shadow is familiar. It’s what I felt during the years a friend drank himself to death.
The situations are different, of course. For one thing, his descent was slow and gradual; it didn’t directly affect me. My worry was constant but distant. Trump’s carnage, in contrast, makes the headlines daily, and is hurting people I know.
Nevertheless, my feelings now are painfully similar to what I felt then: grief, helplessness, and inexorability. Most of all the aching knowledge that things didn’t have to be this way. In my friend’s case, I don’t know what went wrong; I do know that addicts sometimes recover, but he didn’t. In Trump’s case, we all know some of what created the perfect storm. Analysts will continue to find more.
For this blog, what interests me are the factors I can address; that, in a sense, I can do something about. I can make some points for some readers, who may talk to others, who next time – some other election, years away – will vote differently. This is a teacher’s hope, I suppose. I’ve always been a teacher.
What led to Trump’s election?
Democrats’ missteps. The party’s mistakes are being dissected, and I’m glad. Public health failures during Covid, though, need still more attention, and I hope in time to address them. For now, let me recommend Within Reason, a professional’s searching criticism of his own field.
Mistaken conventional wisdom. In recent posts I debunked some common assumptions. “Shock therapy,” for instance, is rarely therapeutic. Nor is success in business relevant to success in governance. The corollary, that business does everything better than government, is also false. I hope to write about that, too.
News: Fake, misleading, and siloed. Walter Cronkite is long gone. We now read and listen to wildly divergent voices. That could be good – a variety of perspectives can be enlightening. In fact, however, fractured news sources alienate us from one another. I will suggest some remedies.
Polarization News stories are not the only reason for our silos. Most of us shrink from anything even slightly tainted by “the other side.” I want to lessen that.
Shared fallibility
I wish no one had voted for Trump. But many did, and so I’m glad I know a few. Knowing them keeps me from the oversimplification, even demonizing, that is so tempting.
First, a reminder about how human minds work. They are not computers. The frames through which we see the world shape how we understand it: We ignore some information, and what we take in, we try to fit into the beliefs we already have. We’re hard-wired to make various cognitive errors: to be attracted to black-and-white stories, to weight the immediate over the distant. Beyond that, emotions grey out some information.Further, there’s group think. The people we live with inevitably shape our beliefs.
All of these natural errors probably have survival value. They’re imperfections, but useful ones.
Recognizing their existence matters. It can keep us more patient with one another, and more critical of ourselves. It can help us maintain respectf across differences, and more open to new perspectives. These are moral exhortations, I know, but I make them on practical grounds. Polarization is part of what gave us Donald Trump. Not all his voters liked him: Some were instead viscerally repelled by us.
Respecting Trump voters
The Trumpsters I know – friends, neighbors, family -- are decent, often much more than decent, people. Their reasons for choosing him fall into three roughen and overlapping groups. For some Trump voters, it was a deep antipathy to “liberalism.” For others, it was an almost utopian commitment to a radically different government, either a “unitary executive”president or Christian nationalism or both. Some in each of these camps disliked, even despised, Donald Trump the man, but saw him as necessary. For a third group, Trump was something like a savior, bringing truth and righteousness to the country.
Hostility to all things “liberal,” pursuit of utopias, veneration for the man himself: Trump’s voters varied.
Those commitments, like our own commitments, are matters of faith — sometimes in a religious sense, but mostly in a broader sense. Faith is a commitment that shapes one’s actions, beliefs, and emotions; a commitment held despite unconvinced others, and often understanding that evidence is not objectively conclusive. Think, for instance, of parents’ faith in their children, or scientists’ in their research.
And think of revolutionaries’ trust in their leaders and their ideals. Many Trump supporters have begun suffering from his policies. Nevertheless they accept the hardships, for the sake of a greater good, as revolutionaries have always done.
Faith changes slowly. Decisions to end a marriage, to abandon a career, to discard a creed, happen slowly. For that reason, there’s rarely much point in throwing facts at the people we disagree with. Instead we need to erode the walls that separate us. Here’s the lecture I give myself: When painful topics come up, listen. Instead of arguing, find out what you can learn – at least, how the world looks to them, but possibly more. Listen for something you can agree with. The point of the conversation should be not to change their minds, but to connect with them as citizens.
Political rhetoric often does the opposite. It encourages mutual contempt. The stronger that contempt, the stronger the walls that separate us. And the thicker those walls, the more trouble the country is in. Let’s be patient with one another.
Caveats: First, these suggestions are about ordinary personal interactions. Efforts to persuade lawmakers can be, often must be, confrontational. Secondly, whenever I point out that faults occur in both or all sides — and I do that all the time — I am never implying that the faults are equal. Nor that either justifies the other. Those are different questions.
I look forward to reading your future posts. You might be interested in an epiosde from the CBC Radio program _Ideas_, orignally broadcast on April 4, 2022 and replayed on June 16, 2025. It revisits _The Authoritarian Personality_ and considers its application to recent events, including the anti-vaccine trucker convoy that occupied part of downtown Ottawa, Canada, from late January until February 3, 2022. One of the important findings of the contemporary researchers is that, contrary to what many might assume, authoritarians are not all on the "right" and autonomous personalities are not all on the "left".
Have you read Strangers in Their Own Land? One of the interesting things about the book is that she gave it to the folks she was writing about to read. She wanted to see if they agreed with what she wrote, and they agreed she represented their positions fairly. https://www.litcharts.com/lit/strangers-in-their-own-land/summary