I am certain that in the coming days, I will be talking with a lot of academics, progressives, liberals, and Democrats who are not only grieving because of the United States election results but are baffled by Donald Trump’s reelection. I am sure I will hear a lot of “How can so many people support a fascist who boasted of sexually assaulting women?”
I am not baffled, and I’m writing this post to help you understand what happened and how.
If you would prefer to watch a movie and get your explanation that way, then watch the movie Brexit starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
I was at a conference in Italy attended by a lot of UK academics when the result of the Brexit vote was announced. They were baffled in the same way my colleagues and friends are now.
Here is the simple explanation: the Donald Trump that so many voted for, and the Kamala Harris that so many voted against, are not the same Donald Trump and Kamala Harris that you voted against and for respectively.
To be clear, I don’t mean that they are not in actual reality the same individuals. Unlike Donald Trump and his supporters, I don’t believe in “alternative facts.”
What I mean is that if those who voted for Donald Trump were listening to such completely different messaging they genuinely believe right now that by voting for him they have saved the United States. While those who listened to most sources of information know that the reason Donald Trump faced so many criminal charges, unlike any other president before, is because Donald Trump is unlike any other president before, what right-wing sources have been telling them is that this is an unprecedented attack on a president by malevolent Communist forces trying to eliminate him.
Obviously, the only way for that scenario to be true is for there to be a massive conspiracy in which politicians, district attorneys, judges, and various others collaborate against Trump, and that is precisely what the sources that more than half of the country tune in to have been telling them is the case.
Living in Indiana, all I need to do is watch TV or flip through radio stations to hear some of this. When I have warned about information bubbles it has been with this in mind.
So what happens now? One thing that is very important is that those who are terrified by the outcome of the election do not respond in ways that confirm the messaging their political opponents have been hearing all along. There has been exaggerated rhetoric on both sides of the aisle, even if not to the same extent. Again, if you listened to right-wing commentators, you’d hear them characterize Kamala Harris’ words about Trump being a “threat to democracy” as itself the threat to democracy. One legal commentator on the radio who supports Trump asked how a candidate in a democratic election can be a threat to democracy by running for office.
The answer is what I’m addressing in this post. If your path to office depends on deceiving people then the democratic process is subverted.
There is a sense that this would be true even if Donald Trump had not been running nor anyone like him. The candidate one votes for is always an image, a focus of messaging that is selective. All of our knowledge and perception is selective and partial. That is unavoidable. There is no way humans can see, hear, or know everything.
But of late we have had something different. The issue is not limited perception but false and distorted information.
As I said before, no one forced the majority of people of Indiana and many other states to choose to tune in to pundits and commentators who would tell not merely offer them biased perspectives but lies. That is why I’ve characterized the situation as “worse than Orwellian.”
Churches played an enormous role in bringing this situation about. In conservative churches, one has been hearing for decades that mainstream science is in a conspiracy to hide the truth about creation, and that the powers of darkness are at work in this secular world. Conservative Christians have been invited to imagine themselves as the heroes in a Frank Peretti novel, doing battle with forces of evil by protesting outside Taylor Swift concerts (yes, they did that here in Indianapolis just recently) and voting for a candidate their pastor encouraged them to.
I’m not going to offer any kind of simplistic “here’s a solution” type of conclusion, but I do have a clear idea of what I think needs to happen if we are to move in a positive direction.
You are going to need to talk to Trump supporters. I don’t mean argue or hit them over the head with information that they have been primed to distrust, coming as it does from the “Mainstream Media” that they consider part of this great conspiracy. I mean you’re going to need to talk to them, understand how they view the world, and figure out a way to get information into their orbit that might make a difference.
You’re also going to need to tune in to enough of the sources they listen to, watch, and read to understand what they are hearing. You won’t be able to combat it without understanding it.
Educators at universities get accused of liberal indoctrination. That’s obviously implausible. We cannot even get students to read the syllabus or the assigned texts most of the time. The reason why so many who get an education shift in a liberal direction is the fact that the very experience of going to university puts them in contact with real human beings who are different from their families and communities, and those foreigners and liberals and gays and lesbians and Muslims and Jews and whatever else turn out not to be the monsters that their families and preachers warned them they are.
Knowing people who are different from you is transformative. Being attacked with messaging is not, at least not most of the time, and at the very least not in the same way. If you just shout at them “you have been lied to” they will simply respond by saying “no, you have been lied to.”
To reach those who aren’t students at university or moving to new places outside their bubbles, you and I need to be those different people and to shatter stereotypes. One day at a time. One conversation at a time.
It will be hard work. It is the only way forward that has any real hope of making a difference.
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