To statements like “Surely the voters didn’t vote for this?” I’ve lately been arguing “specifically, no; generally, yes.”
It’s extraordinarily difficult to ignore or get around the type of person Trump is. (Well, difficult for some of us. If you click that hyperlink, be sure to read the addendum.) For those of us unwilling to kid ourselves about who he is and what his reelection means, it’s hard to call any of the things he’s been doing surprising, even though no one actually knew what would happen. And that holds in a more nefarious sense for the ones who seem all too happy to kid themselves about Trump. They may not have known exactly what he was going to do, but neither have they seemed the least bit surprised or troubled.
USAID is a perfect example. I don’t know one Trump supporter who had USAID on the brain last year. Now, having learned what the acronym stands for all of two weeks ago, they lecture me about it, celebrating the chaos unleashed on it, without any regard for the truth let alone for sympathy, and happily anticipate its undoing.
Did they knowingly vote for this? Technically, no. Were they hoping for something like this? Possibly, even likely. Either way, are they happy about what they’re seeing and hearing? Yeah, I think they are. It makes sense to say they voted for it.
Same goes for the rest of the nominees and all the other chaos they bring. Each and every one of them has been scratching the itchy ears of a long-standing, deeply rooted element of the American character. (Lots of people, some more honest about it than others, despise the notion of sending even a single tax-dollar overseas as long as there is one leaky pipe somewhere in our own country. When people say chant “America first!” not only should you believe them, you should also hear what they’re really saying: “America — period!”)
To avoid any appearance of mind reading, we can say it differently and see the same thing: Specifically, I didn’t vote against this because I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen. But generally speaking, yes, I voted against precisely this.
Or again: specifically, no; generally, yes. But I seem a minority opinion here.
I quoted Francis Fukuyama the other day — “The United States under Donald Trump is not retreating into isolationism. It is actively joining the authoritarian camp.” (I sent the piece along to a few longtime “conservative” folks, adding “Charles Krauthammer is turning in his grave.” As I’ve said before, a reference to Krauthammer’s grave seems to pull more weight than a reference to the other one.)
Fukuyama closed that piece with this:
Don’t tell me that the American people voted for such a world or such a country last November. They weren’t paying attention, and should be prepared to see their own country and world transformed beyond recognition.
… Well, shit.
Far be it from me to even think of entering the ring with Fukuyama. I agree with his piece entirely, and I think our situation is exactly as he describes it in that post.
Hoooweverrr…
If he means by that last statement that they literally weren’t paying attention, well then I don’t know what he’s talking about. But if he means “they’re getting it all wrong” or “they’re missing what’s really going on” or “their sources of information are shitty sources of information designed to mislead them and distract them” — then sure, I’m with him. But why not just say that? Why must everyone use the same useless “they didn’t vote for this” language, a phrase which, by my reading, seems capable only of disillusioning and deluding the people who use it? I want that phrase killed with fire. And as far as I can tell, there’s no reason Fukuyama needed to end his post with it.
I previously added the disclaimer that I don’t think any of my argument undoes Jonah Goldberg’s caution about assuming Trump supporters share my view of Trump and voted for him anyway; they definitely don’t. But while we may be looking at the same events, there are, as they see it, different facts attached to these events, as well as different preceding histories and different emphases within those histories — and this on top of what are genuine lies and falsehoods, however genuinely they are thought to be true.
So they’re paying attention, alright. But they’re very often paying attention to figureheads who, as Hannah Arendt would put it, “deal in intangibles whose concrete reality is at a minimum.” (How many people does that not describe?)
The journalist Philip Gibbs once wrote about a system that stoked fear and created enemies out of “human beings who prayed to the same God, loved the same joys of life, and had no hatred of one another except as it had been lighted and inflamed by their governors, their philosophers, and their newspapers.” From to Rush Limbaugh to Tucker Carlson, from Pat Robertson to John MacArthur, from John Mearsheimer to Victor Davis Hanson, that’s an inflamed process that preceded last year’s election by decades, and one that didn’t stop the day after the election. (And this is only to speak of the Right; the Left has it’s own brand of the same.)
It’s also worth remembering – or being informed of – the fact that these are usually normal, good-natured people who genuinely believe that the election of 2020 was in fact stolen from Donald Trump. And it doesn’t just include the small-town, blue-collar workers I usually have in mind. I know nurses and doctors, CRNAs and anesthesiologists, members of the “educated elite,” who certainly believe it as well. Even in recent months, I have been told by a surgeon, and I quote, “If you don’t believe that the 2020 election was stolen, you’re an idiot.” (Even as recent as last week, I heard a neurosurgeon say he was impressed by Trumps “maturity” in handling the Epstein files that were set to be released that day.)
As Fred Clark aptly noted in 2018, sometimes the weird fringe is the biggest part. He closed that essay with the observation that Mark Noll’s 1994 The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, “one of the most perceptive descriptions of white evangelicalism ever produced,” was a book that “everybody” read. It sold 35,000 copies. Clark contrasts this with “the world’s worst books,” the Left Behind series, which sold over 65 million copies. “I’m not suggesting that selling only 35,000 copies means it wasn’t really read by ‘everybody’ in mainstream evangelicalism,” Clark adds. “I’m suggesting that means it was. That’s the problem.”
Maybe when Fukuyama says “they weren’t paying attention” what he means to say is that they weren’t paying attention to him. That would track. I like Fukuyama when he comes across my radar, and I regard him highly — very highly. And there are lots of people who I read who read Francis Fukuyama. But nobody I know reads him. Let me repeat that: Not one single person I know reads Francis Fukuyama. It would be difficult, in fact, for me to find someone in any of my circles who would even recognize his name.
So the real question is, Who is it who is not paying attention?