We of the left are still tending to delude ourselves in assuming that Trump supporters will come around to our point of view. We couldn’t believe that people would vote for someone as awful as Trump, and we were wrong. Now we assume that people will soon wake up to his awfulness and reject him. But it’s far from that simple. The root of the problem goes far deeper than lack of information or errors in calculating self-interest. Trump emerges from a collapse of trust – and that is not easy to reverse.
I know something about trust. I’ve written a book about it (Trust in a Complex World). And one thing I know is this: if you think trust and harmony will restored by others finally seeing that you are right, you will be sadly disappointed.
We of the Left look and Trump and see someone who constantly violates our deepest values, and assume therefore that anyone who supports him must be evil. Those of us who are comfortable in the current system – well-educated, benefiting from globalization, loving the growing diversity of music and food and culture around us – see him as a destroyer of the good. Those who consider ourselves expert on some part of the system – economics, or international affairs, say – see him taking reckless actions that may blow everything up, and we assume everyone else will eventually see the danger.
But here’s what Trump’s supporters see: they see a world that for decades has undermined their communities, criticized their moral codes, weakened their status; they see a future that will increasingly marginalize their way of life; they see a leadership elite that is utterly alien to their sense of what’s right – a bunch of people on the coasts who love things that they hate and hate things that they love, who do not respect them, who treat them as idiots and boobs. And in Trump they see a guy who promises to break that elite, who delights in mocking them and enraging the pundits and the experts and the educated. Whether or not they agree with specific policies, Trumpists see a validation of their way of life for the first time in generations. And the more we object and protest, the more they feel Trump must be on the right track. For them, the fact that Trump is violating rules left and right is not a failing, it’s a virtue.
So what we have is a vicious circle of mistrust, one of the most dangerous of human phenomena. It has led throughout history to wars and mass destruction. When views get polarized in this way, the worse things get the more dug in the sides become. Opposition fuels a self-fulfilling prophecy. Things can literally never get bad enough that people stop and say, “Oh, we were wrong” – because they can always blame failure on the opposition’s resistance.
We are in danger of that terrible dynamic. We of the Left talk a lot about inclusiveness, but we have done a very poor job of including much of the country. Now we’re finding ourselves forced into the position of claiming that half the citizenry is deluded or evil or stupid. That should make us uncomfortable – indeed, it should be completely unacceptable to us. But we are falling into the old pattern of saying if only those who disagree with us didn’t disagree with us, everything would be all right.
The vicious circle of mistrust won’t fix itself. It won’t end because our opponents see the light. It won’t end because our moral view of the world triumphs. It will not end with the victory of one side. It will end when the vast majority of the country – not 51%, but 75% or more – build together a sense of the future that they can all live with and live in. The only way to stop the spiral towards mutual destruction is to connect, to forge new relations of inclusion and understanding, across the lines. And the place we can start, those of use on the Left, is by understanding better where the Trumpists are coming from, rather hurling insults at them.
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