Tag Archives: hillary clinton

The Stubborn 40%: or, What the Fuck is Wrong With the People Who Still Support Donald Trump

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This is probably the first presidential election in living memory – and certainly the first election within my lifetime – where there is a clear, unambiguously wrong answer on the ballot. There is enough flexibility in the principles of representative governance and liberal democracy – enough space for interpretation in the values spelled out in the Declaration of Independence and codified in the U.S. Constitution – that both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were defensible choices for president. The same is true of Obama and McCain, Kerry and Bush, Bush and Gore, and so on, going back decades. For years, thoughtful voters have consistently been able to punch the ticket for either major party candidate, anchored by a believable defense that their decision was consistent with both a sensible reading of traditional American ideals and a rational interest in peace and international stability.

Not true, in 2016. This year, the American electorate has been presented with the starkest choice imaginable, a decision cast into sharp relief by the fact that one candidate is professionally, temperamentally and intellectually unqualified for the office under contest. Donald Trump represents a threat, not only to the American Experiment, but to the economic and political stability of the entire world. An egomaniacal gasbag and lecherous charlatan, dispositionally insensitive to constructive criticism and new information, Trump has sown distrust in the legitimacy of the very system meant to ensure a peaceful transfer of power, corroding faith in the central mechanism of democratic governance. To boot, he has fueled his campaign on racism, tribalism, xenophobia, and virulent nationalism, all while promising to blatantly disregard the Bill of Rights and the governmental strictures outlined in the larger body of the U.S. Constitution. He has boasted about sexual assault and pedophilia, openly toyed with the idea of using the power of the presidency to persecute his political opponents, and – in a blazing display of contempt for long-standing international relationships, peace, and human life – advocated nuclear proliferation and preemptive nuclear strikes. His ignorance about science, economics, the structure of the U.S. government, the function of executive branch, and international affairs is staggering, dwarfed only by his need to satisfy his own ego at virtually any cost.

There is no case to be made that the values outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the preamble of the U.S. Constitution are laudable aims and useful guideposts for measuring the efficacy and legitimacy of Federal authority and that Donald Trump should be president. The two claims stand in mutual contradiction. Either Constitutional order is desirable or Donald Trump should be president. Either international peace and stability are worthwhile or  Donald Trump should be president. Either all human lives are inherently valuable or Donald Trump should be president. Either active racism, sexism, and xenophobia should be stripped from humanity’s collective consciousness or Donald Trump should be president. There are simply no reasonable arguments behind the proposition that the office of president comes with a mandate to help ensure peace, prosperity, equality, and liberty and that Donald Trump is even a good (never mind the best) choice for said office.

Thanks to Donald Trump, our decision about who to vote for runs far deeper than the issues that normally divide the electorate. It’s not about whether or not climate change is real and caused by human activity. It’s not about whether it makes sense to impose a fundamentalist interpretation of one religious tradition’s definition of marriage on an entire country. It’s not about whether the federal government has grown too large, or what kind of tax system works best. Nor does it have much to do with immigration, deficits, terrorism, or privatization. Sure, all of those issues matter, and all of them will be influenced in some way or another by the outcome of the election. But on a more fundamental level, this election is about who we are as a nation. It’s about whether we’re a country of principled, thoughtful voters, willing to make tough choices to uphold cherished values, or a country of degenerate ideologues, racists, and dupes willing to follow an authoritarian huckster to the edge of chaos – and over. This is the election that will validate or discount the Founding Fathers’ concerns that mob rule could pave the way for despotism.

Yet none of this seems sufficient to convince some 40% of the electorate not to let their blind partisan loyalties and ideological intransigence ride our country off a cliff. Very likely, Donald Trump will lose the election. But the fact that he will lose by anything less than a crushing electoral landslide is deeply troubling. Though Hillary Clinton is an inarguably flawed, deeply problematic candidate, there is no justifiable sense in which her presidency poses a threat to the perpetuation of democratic order. Not so with Trump, whose strongest affinity to world leaders rests among petty, megalomaniacal African despots.

The fact of the matter is, anyone who finds the prospect of a Clinton presidency thoroughly unpalatable need not vote for Hillary Clinton. They can sate their political conscience by voting for Gary Johnson, Evan McMullin or Jill Stein. Barring that, they can display their stalwart defiance against the prevailing political order by writing in a name, voting for a fictional character or their imaginary friend. The existence of third party candidates is hardly a secret, yet a distressingly large swath of the electorate is still considering a vote for the most poisonous candidate since Barry Goldwater. Informed citizens making thoughtful choices are the lifeblood of representative governance. If those criteria obtained in this election season, the Trump campaign would look up to Jill Stein’s polling numbers with envy. Clearly, there’s a cog somewhere in the machine.

The explanation for this is, I think, twofold. First – and most simply – there is the raw fact that some of Trump’s base really do fit into that basket of deplorables. They are racist, sexist, xenophobic nationalists with a paltry understanding of the way the world actually works – if we dare be so permissive as to grant that it even exists. Their feelings of disillusionment, disconnection, and disenfranchisement come from a very real and understandable place: the fact that there is no place for them in the society more intelligent and ethical people are trying to build. Their primitive worldview belongs in the dustbin of history and the rest of us should be doing our best to place it there.

Second, and perhaps more distressingly, there is the wider problem of increasing partisan acrimony and ideological insularity. People on both the left and the right are both unwilling to seriously entertain opposing views and frighteningly eager to disparage contrasting perspectives. This is a problem that exists on both ends of the political spectrum, but in the candidacy of Donald Trump we have what amounts to a natural experiment definitively proving that it has driven the political right completely – and, perhaps, irreparably – off the rails. The conservative media echo chamber has done such a good job of vilifying the political left and spreading a baseless, parasitic white-Christian victimhood narrative that some Americans are willing to fall in step behind an obvious political disaster in order to best their political and ideological opponents. We’ll only know if this is true of the political left when the Democrats nominate someone like Flavor Flav or Kim Kardashian to run against someone like Bobby Jindal or Mike Huckabee – that is, someone abjectly unqualified against someone deeply problematic.

This means that after a few million American heroes do the mature, responsible business of electing Hillary Clinton in order to defeat Donald Trump, there will still be plenty of work to be done. In 1972 George McGovern’s presidential ambitions were obliterated, losing the election with only 37.5% of the popular vote and 17 electoral college votes. McGovern was a reasonable candidate running against an incumbent Richard Nixon (who would be impeached and ultimately resign just two years later). Jimmy Carter lost his second term to Ronald Reagan, winning only six states, despite being a perfectly ethical, intelligent, sane human being. Donald Trump – a puerile, impulsive, pathological liar and conspiracy theorist with virtually no foresight and a repeatedly self-expressed disregard for the rule of law – stands to win something like 40% of the popular vote and at least 35% of the electoral college. This fact alone stands in glaring testament to the fact that our political system is in need of serious repairs.

There’s nothing to be done about the plebeian rabble who actually think Trump makes sense. Anyone who listens to what Trump has to say and actively cheers his candidacy is, for all intents and purposes, a lost cause. Our only hope is that their children and grandchildren turn out slightly less ignorant and intolerant than they are, allowing the slow march of progress to move another few inches forward.

Going forward, there needs to be an urgent program of national soul-searching, the focus of which must be on discovering and eradicating vectors of tribalism and ideological intransigence. We need to find out how we got to a place where people who aren’t racists, xenophobes, or struggling to find their way in a complex world with the cognitive faculties of a sea cucumber are willing to vote for a signally unqualified maniac in order to prevent a flawed – but capable – candidate from winning. They’re willing to trade a potentially bad president for what could very well be our last president. And that, no doubt, is a disturbing symptom of some kind of national lunacy. We’ve had bad presidents before. Hopefully it’ll be a long while before we have our last one.

At root, some of this flows directly from a fallacy at the core of democracy’s central contention: that people can rationally discern what is best for them and will reliably act accordingly. A large and growing body of psychological, anthropological, economic, and political evidence demonstrates that this is simply not the case. Even hyper-intelligent people with rigorous, specialized training in things like game theory and formal logic can be pulled off course by emotional impulses and ideological biases. For a recent field case, look no further than the remarkable success of Trump. It’s tempting to think of his base as entirely comprised of gibbering idiots, but that’s really not the case. A large proportion of the pro-Trump electorate is dangerously ignorant, but there are also very intelligent people seriously considering him as a viable option. The best explanation for this otherwise perplexing phenomenon boils down to deep psychological biases that lend themselves to reactionism and groupishness.

It is these biases that are inflamed and exaggerated by the conservative media echo chamber. Working on extant emotional preferences, outlets like Fox News and right-wing talk radio take people who might be inclined to vote conservative for a variety of thoughtful, principled reasons and turn them into ideological fanatics, possessed of such an unbridled distrust of the political opposition and passionate partisan loyalty that they would rather vote for one of the worst candidates in history than vote for a troubled candidate or third party alternative. The modern media landscape excels at taking the very likely evolved emotional preferences that limit our rationality in everyday decision-making and exploding them into unbridgeable barriers.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to see what can be done about this. All of the most likely solutions seem to fall somewhere between paternalism and authoritarianism. The only recourse that seems in line with our desired aims – mitigating partisan intransigence and ideological fanaticism – and our guiding principles – freedom of speech and expression, for instance – is discourse and persuasion. Sadly, this seems the method that has proven least effective on the modern political landscape. Whatever progress it yields will be glacial. But personally, I think it’s worth a try.

Which sets an agenda going forward. Those of us who recognize the existential threat Donald Trump poses to our political system and are willing to act accordingly should make efforts to convince redeemable Trump supporters (i.e. those outside of the basket of deplorables) to see the light. That doesn’t mean convincing them to adopt a liberal worldview – I don’t see how that’s possible or even, necessarily, desirable. Rather, it means encouraging them to divorce themselves from the information vectors that are poisoning their thinking – turning off Fox News and conservative talk radio, avoiding sites like Breitbart and the Drudge Report, and leaving books written by right-wing pundits on the shelves. In the spirit of detente, we might propose a trade, turning our attention from blatantly liberal news sources. This is not because they are in anyway equivalent to Sean Hannity or Alex Jones or Rush Limbaugh, but because we can all (regardless of political inclination) afford to spend less time watching or reading material that only serves to confirm or reinforce our existing worldview.

If this is a route to progress, it’ll be both tedious and frustrating. But simply convincing friends and family to avoid sources that seed dangerous and demonstrably false narratives into the national consciousness could go a long way toward moving the United States toward a place where productive discourse and bipartisan compromise are once again feasible. Importantly, it might get us to a place where a candidate like Donald Trump will be drummed out of the primaries well before we get to a place where the fabric of democracy looks precipitously close to unraveling.

…


So who am I voting for? I’ll tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?

And, because it is both funny and considerably more intelligent than anything Trump has actually said, enjoy:

There will be two types of Trump voter In November – ignorant rabble and traitors

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Traitor

There are two types of people who will vote for Donald Trump in November. Roughly speaking, they can be divided into either the deeply stupid or the deeply cynical.

In the former case, a severe deficit in critical thinking and an aversion to verifiable information seems to foster the kind of fear, distrust, and cultural animus upon which Trump has so successfully preyed. This is the plebeian rabble that has supported him from the beginning. Ignorant, hate-filled, and fear-drenched, these are men and women who listen to the oft-inconsistent fusillade of inflammatory rhetoric Trump issues and think he might be onto something. On the other hand, there are the negative partisans and party loyalists, people who find Hillary Clinton so grossly unpalatable — or imbue allegiance to the Republican Party with such exaggerated significance — that they will vote for Donald Trump in spite of his obvious and myriad insufficiencies as a candidate for the U.S. presidency.

The unfortunate reality is that there’s nothing to be done about the rabble. All anyone can do is wait for them to die and hope the next generation is incrementally better. Though in many respects reprehensible, there is also a valid sense in which they are blameless. Their life on the lunatic fringe is a product of bad genes and worse circumstances, trained to value all the wrong things and think all the wrong thoughts by parents, peers, and family members who do likewise — and have done for generations as a matter of reflexive tradition. Intensely tribal and insular, they are products of the endlessly self-perpetuating cycle of stubborn ignorance bred at the poisonous confluence of poverty, tradition, and poorly delivered and/or undervalued education.

It may be a rosy-eyed and naive long-shot to think something can be done about the negative partisans and Republican fanatics. But unlike the moral and intellectual degenerates who are enthusiastically all-in for Trump, there is some hope that these men and women have some reason to which we can offer an appeal. Or, at the very least, a sense of decency and patriotic loyalty that we can wield as a cudgel, beating into them enough shame and personal resentment for ever having considered Trump as a viable option that they will shrink from actually casting a ballot in his name in November.

It’s not so much that Clinton is a perfect alternative. Far from it. But the revulsion towards Hillary Clinton that would motivate a vote for Trump is the pinnacle of partisan irrationality. It is an impulse born of naked political dogmatism, clearly concocted in the miasma of fact-averse vitriol, paranoia, and victimization that fills the conservative media echo chamber. To vote for Trump simply to spite Clinton is to offer an obsequious votive to the Republican Party, a private organization with a clear mandate to pursue the general interests of the United States as a constitutional republic but no unambiguous evidence of having significantly done so for at least the past thirty years.

The raw reality is that there is no line of reasoning that justifies placing a bloviating, megalomaniacal, chronically deceitful authoritarian into the nation’s highest office over and above an admittedly focus-group manufactured, self-serving political opportunist. The former is an ugly populist, deploying racism, xenophobia, and bloodthirsty chauvinism to great effect among the dregs of the American electorate — completely absent any coherent or realistic policy initiatives. The latter  is a clear perpetuation of the status quo, who nonetheless offers a thoughtful and substantive policy agenda. Clinton is, if nothing else, a career politician. That’s something most of us are tired of, but it’s also something stable and predictable. Though there are many respects in which another Clinton presidency seems substantially less than ideal, the fact nonetheless remains that she is a safe bet. For instance, she has not advocated nuclear proliferation or the murder of noncombatants.

Take another example. Clinton’s record with nonpartisan fact-checking outlet politifact.com reveals a record almost precisely opposite of Trumps: whereas 77% of reviewed statements rate mostly false or worse for Trump, 71% rate half true or better for Clinton. That’s not exactly the record of anyone who could be strictly described as a paragon of honesty, but it is nonetheless exponentially more reassuring than Trump’s. In Trump, we see either a man with a vast disconnect from established and verifiable facts or such monumental disdain for the crowd he’s playing for that he doesn’t feel any need to trouble himself with the truth. To put this in perspective, the previous two Republican nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain, enjoy half true or better ratings of 59% and 57%, respectively. A candidate with Trump’s level of disregard for the truth probably isn’t entirely unprecedented. But one who has made it so far almost certainly is.

The whole affair serves to highlight and underline the by turns pathetic and frightening corner into which rigid identity politics have driven the American electorate. Hillary Clinton is a pro-business foreign policy hawk, a modern incarnation of Reagan-era Republicanism. Her presidency promises to be a continuation of an economic agenda driven by supply-side neoliberalism and a foreign policy built around military interventionism — broadly motivated by the parochial interests of economic elites. In a climate devoid of such harmful extremes of polarization, where rigid political allegiances are blindly dictated by voting records and continuously reinforced by self-selected cocoons of ideological reinforcement on social media, traditional conservatives would look at Hillary Clinton and see a reflection of many of their core principles. The only clear distinctions rest in the array of social wedge issues Republican campaign strategists have so deftly wielded to turn a large segment of the electorate into political marionettes. Conversely, liberals and progressives would look at Clinton and see something altogether distasteful.

Instead, people define themselves by steely political binaries, declaring themselves as either Republican or Democrat and falling into party line without any serious reflection on the underlying issues. In a better world, people would abandon partisan affiliation, repudiate both parties for the self-serving, parasitic monstrosities they are, and renegotiate their votes each election cycle according to a piecemeal engagement with the issues.

That, sadly, seems to be a fantasy world. Instead we have to look forward to an election where a dangerous megalomaniac with a puerile and punitive disposition stands a decent chance of becoming president. A significant segment of the conservative-leaning electorate are already beginning to align themselves with the gibbering imbeciles and racists who willfully support Trump and more are likely to follow. Teasing out their final motivations for doing so is difficult, but most of it seems attributable to the pied piper’s on conservative talk radio and Fox News success in convincing them that Clinton is a vicious dragon-lady, a political succubus greedily clutching at their purportedly god-given Rights. This is a hideously shameful state of affairs. All those votes would come with a complimentary cloud of embarrassment and regret, if only their originators had the presence of mind to set aside past partisan boundaries and carefully assess the incredibly fraught political landscape we all tread.

It’s very hard to overstate the potential threat a Trump presidency poses to the United States. Yes, it’s true that no one knows for certain how things will shake out if he were to win in November. But there has been very little – and by very little, I do mean absolutely no – indication that he will perform admirably. Donald Trump is a con artist, his history as a businessman a litany of failures. In terms of disposition, his greatest affinity with world leaders can be found among despots – he has all the thin-skinned narcissism and retributive instincts of Robert Mugabe or the late Muammar Gaddafi. A simple-minded huckster with no interest outside the nourishment of his own ego, a Trump presidency stands almost no chance of turning out better than a Clinton one.

Given all this, it’s quite easy to justify the radical claim made in the title of this piece: that those who vote for Trump for any reason other than their own pitiable idiocy are traitors to the Union. Broadly speaking, we can define the governing principles of the United States as the perpetuation of constitutional order for the purpose of preserving a pluralistic society amenable to the happiness and success of the greatest possible proportion of Her citizenry. There is no valid sense in which Donald Trump is the best choice for fulfilling this mandate. Disturbingly, there are a number of clear indications that a Trump presidency will in fact be directly inimical to these goals. To be fair, there is a narrow sense in which this has been true of the Republican Party since at least 2010, when conservative Supreme Court Justices gave us Citizens United vs. FEC. Since then, Republican congressmen have been intractable opponents to the principles of one-person, one-vote representative democracy, supporting Citizens United and subsequent corrosive decisions while opposing measures to increase the transparency of campaign finance. So for at least the past six years, a vote for a Republican on the national stage has been a vote for plutocracy and against proportionally representative republican governance.

When it comes to the Supreme Court, Trump seems to double-down on these positions, suggesting someone like the judicially reprehensible partisan ideologue Antonin Scalia should fill the vacancy left in the wake of said Justice’s passing. Not only is this in line with the Party establishment’s position on the continued erosion of representative democracy, he has also threatened to actively work to erode the First Amendment, a position perfectly consistent with his frail and punitive character. He has advocated an economic agenda that will directly threaten the stability and prosperity of the United States. He has floated the idea of completely abandoning historically important alliances, moves that would put the United States and the larger world as increased risk of violent, devastating conflict. He has courted and refused to repudiate neo-Nazi and white supremacist supporters. He gives indiscriminate voice to hare-brained conspiracy theories. A vote for Trump is a declaration of allegiance to something other than the welfare of the United States.

None of this is an inflation of available facts, yet already increasing numbers of prominent Republican politicians are lining up to pledge their fealty to interests outside those of the United States and recent polls indicate the Republican electorate is doing likewise. This isn’t just disappointing – it’s disgusting. Certainly they’re not selling military secrets to North Korea or defecting to ISIS, but they are offering succor to a candidate whose values and beliefs are far-too-often thoroughly antithetical to those outlined in the U.S. Constitution.

Boil everything down to its bitter essence and it becomes strikingly clear that everyone who votes for Trump is, in a perverse but unmistakable way, voting against democracy. Through a combination of ignorance and belligerence, they will have made themselves enemies of the core principles of republican governance. Few outside the cloistered ranks of Democratic Party insiders are likely happy about a perpetuation of the status quo. It’s a sad choice, but at least those voters who take it can rest with the reassurance that they are not willfully selling our country out to a stew of party loyalty and partisan resentment.

Ultimately, the poisonous status of a Trump vote is granted not by the fact that he is, by an exceptionally permissive interpretation of American values and constitutional propriety, the worst option in November — or any previous November in living memory. Rather, it comes from the fact that no one’s vote needs to be decided along a strict partisan binary. Anyone who finds Clinton thoroughly unacceptable does not have to register their disdain for her by voting for someone who poses a clear, existential threat to the economic and social welfare of the United States. They can research candidates outside the major parties and register their votes there. Or they can simply write in a name, voicing their protest through a vote for Grover Norquist, their favorite talk radio blowhard, the restless spirits of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek, or the Ghost of Ronald Reagan. They don’t have to vote for ego incarnate — a vulgar demagogue with no respect for civil liberties, no coherent or sensible policy ideas, a faithless political disposition, and pseudo-fascist tendencies. That choice will benefit few outside of Trump’s sycophantic inner-circle and very likely hurt everyone else.

To vote for Trump is to betray the United States of America— to risk the preservation and perpetuation of constitutional and representative governance on the bet that maybe (and maybe really is the best anyone can say) Donald Trump, despite all indications to the contrary, will make a good president. That’s a dangerous and irresponsible bet to make, but it does suggest a third category of Trump supporter: maybe some of them are just people who want to watch the world burn. If that’s your agenda, Trump is probably the safest bet American’s have ever had.