Now that trillions of dollars have vanished as a consequence of the Trump tariffs, I see that some liberals who are sitting on high perches are talking about how the tide is turning against the president. They tell us that even Donald Trump’s voters are changing their minds.
It’s things like this that worry me. It tells me that liberals still operate according to certain articles of faith that are well beyond their expiration dates. It tells me that liberals grossly underestimate the power of corruption, greed, arrogance and stupidity, and grossly overestimate the inherent goodness of the American people.
For the last 25 years or so, liberals have complained about the fact that people who vote for Republicans always vote against their own economic self-interest. Yet at the same time, liberals believe deep in their bones that once they experience economic hardship, as a consequence of their vote, these same voters will change their minds.
Why would they do that? If they truly understood their own economic self-interest, they wouldn’t have voted against it in the first place. They don’t. Their vote is proof. So the question is: Why should we expect people who don’t understand what’s good for them to change their minds? Why should we expect people who don’t understand what’s good for them to see the value of the Democrats’ economic policies?
The common response is that their suffering will force them. Suffering, however, isn’t the same thing as changing your mind. It isn’t the same thing as accepting responsibility for choices made. It certainly is not the same thing as saying you should have voted for the Democrat.
Yes, they will complain. They will cry! But that’s not turning on Donald Trump. That’s being in the habit of being the center of attention safe in the belief that your suffering is the only suffering that really counts.
Why are they in that habit? That’s easy. It’s because they’re white. No other class of people can reasonably expect such deference. Anyone else is grandstanding or trying to get something they don’t deserve.
It’s cultural assumptions like this that have motivated a majority of white Americans to vote Republican since the late 1970s, even though GOP policies immiserate them. It’s cultural assumptions like this that are a stand-in for a social order in which white interests are the only legitimate interests. Liberals say such voters do not vote in their own interest, but they do. Those interests are just not especially economic.
It should come as no surprise that the liberals I’m talking about are not Black. White liberals are regularly shocked to see Trump voters killing themselves, sometimes literally, in the service of white power. This is so shocking as to be unbelievable, which is probably why so many don’t believe it. Instead, they go off in search of some other explanation for their behavior and, typically, what they conclude is they were duped.
Over the weekend, a highly placed pundit was stunned to see Trump “monetize the presidency” after markets crashed. “How dumb do you have to be to accept this?” he said. “Please don’t come at me with talk of economic or cultural grievances. He’s playing millions for fools.”
How dumb do you have to be? In that question is a degree of disbelief, as if no one can possibly be so dumb as to accept Trump “monetizing the presidency” while making life materially harder for everyone in America. The question I have is this: why is that so hard to believe?
Is it really so much easier to believe that Trump duped these people than it is to say that they wanted to be duped? We can spend all our time talking about “economic and cultural grievances” or we can save time by coming to a moral conclusion: You can’t cheat honest people but given that Trump is president, honest people are in short supply.
White liberals cling to their faith in the American people, because they believe that individuals facing economic hardship will understand their own experience on their own terms. In fact, most people do not do that. They see their experience through the lens of group identity, and if their group tells them they are not experiencing what they are in fact experiencing, individuals in that group probably won’t see it.
This is why white liberals who say things like “Trump can’t spin the economy” worry me so much. They suggest with those words that the work that needs to be done doesn’t really need to be done, because individuals can be trusted to figure out on their own that Trump is to blame for their suffering. If nothing else, the last election should have proven that the opposite is true. He can spin the economy now, just as he spun the economy then, and most of his voters will believe him.
White liberals seem naive about the current character of the American people, because most are living in the past. In the postwar era, there was a consensus about the government, that it should serve everyone, and from that arose all the rights movements. After four decades of rightwing propaganda, that consensus is gone. Yet white liberals still cling to a belief in the inherent goodness of the American people.
European liberals of the early 19th century had grave doubts about democracy. They thought it could turn any vice into a virtue by making it popular enough, and they were right about that. They did not believe individuals would willingly embrace liberal principles like free speech, religious freedom, habeas corpus and so on – individuals had to propagandized and won over – because they, like Black liberals today, had no illusions about corruption, greed, arrogance and stupidity.
I get why white liberals are so focused on the suffering of Trump voters. If they change their minds, there’s hope for the future. But there’s hope even if they don’t (and they won’t), because hope never came from people who succumbed to evil. It comes from people who can face evil squarely in the face and then make choices accordingly.
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The suffering of white Trump voters isn’t going to change a thing
