The problem isn't to reach convinced Trump voters, it's to peel off enough undecideds and Repubs who genuinely dislike Trump. Some subset of the arguments you mention at the outset seem like the best approach, though not a guaranteed path to victory.
The Trump-lovers aren't the only unreachable group unfortunately. There's also a big group (Susa Collins is the archetype) for whom being a Republican is such a central part of their identity that they can't shift. Even among those who have rejected Trump, only a minority have been willing ot advocate a vote for Harris.
I like this only in the sense that you aren't wrong, even though I wish you were. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that we are dealing with a vast number of people who really do want to burn their playhouse down just because they can.
Your post made me think of Francois Furet's comment that the French Revolution was as much about settling scores as anything else. That said, I thought the demographic was unknowable (or so you say more recently) but here you seem to know them very well. But do they all want to burn the house down? What about single issue voters, such as the pro-life bloc or people only interested in inflation? Pro-life voters will always vote for the Republican candidate, even Susan Collins, or inflation-minded voters for the candidate from the party out of power. There are other groups, such as life-long Republican zombie voters. We all have the aunt and uncle who voted for Trump in 2016 because of Clinton's cookie baking comment from two decades earlier.
All this said your comments almost make me despair. I fear this mindset depresses voter turnout.
I was just at the Whitney Biennial and saw the work of native artist Demian DinéYazhi who reminds us that we must stop predicting futures rooted in the Western obsession with apocalypse and destruction. That's where I will be regardless of what happens in 2 weeks.
One thing that is important to hold on to is that uncertainty is as prone to create good (or just different) outcomes as bad ones, and that moments where regimes attempt to 'break the wheel' and institute a radically new political order not only find that there is resilience in the old order that they can't easily unravel but that the attempt itself gives rise to radical uncertainty--and thus to unpredictable outcomes that are often perversely opposite to what the new power wanted to accomplish.
There are definitely multitudes within the GOP's base--and multitudinous motivations that come forward depending on who is asking or what the circumstances around an expressive need might be. But I think there is a persistent indifference among many core voters to the maintenance of status quo systems of administration and to the idea that competence is a crucial attribute in selecting candidates.
On what are you basing this sweeping analysis? Have you spoken with a lot of Trump supporters? My sense is that you're right about a small majority and mostly wrong about many, many others. I know some, and the fiscal conservatives think that he'll be better for the economy and not nearly as bad re: political and constitutionally as you and I fear. I know some evangelicals who have finally come to think that he's not a very good person but they hate Harris and Democrats and think that their best chance to get some of what they want lies with Trump and other MAGA folks. I know some Delco people who really think that he's part of a movement to return us to the Reagan years, or what they remember of it, complete with American pride and a popular culture that looks like what they remember it looking like.
This stuff about Trump voters all or mostly wanting him to blow up everything so that they can fight for the scraps of a ruined modernity? It sounds like an amalgamation of theorists like Pat Deneen mixed with some of the (I think few) actual millenarians and survivalists. I truly don't know where you're getting it from.
What I agree about is that Trump voters aren't convinced by any of the things that you mentioned centrists using as ammo against him. When I have tried I've tended to get back whatabout-isms, whatabout Kamala or Biden doing or not doing X, Y, or Z, and more or less indifference to everything else. And yes, for sure I've seen and heard some people glorying in his criminality because they want to stick a thumb in the eye of elite-dominated politics and law and culture, but that's not the same thing as wanting to blow up everything.
I'll get to the people you think are the majority later in this series; they're the people the NYT has been trying to represent as normal Trumpians, e.g., the audience in Detroit. I think they're involved in some complicated self-deceptions. I also don't think they're the majority of his devoted base, and I'd ask you why you think they are--polls or otherwise.
The stick-a-thumb-in-the-eye IS wanting to blow up everything. We're not talking chortling over what Rush Limbaugh said here, we're talking electing an executive in an era where the Supreme Court has more or less endorsed unlimited exercise of executive power. Trump *says* he's not going to just stick a thumb in the eye, but plunge a sword through the heart of the status quo. Why don't you believe him? Or if you do, why do you think some people who are devoted to him don't hear that message for what it plainly is?
My repeated question to you, before I respond, is: on what are you basing your assessment? If you're basing it on the publications and podcasts you consume, and not on talking with a reasonably wide range of Trump voters, then I think that's a significant problem. The NYT has that problem as well. Please don't for a moment think that I'm saying this to brag about how many people I talk with, and that I'm somehow better or smarter because of it. I hate that kind of virtue-signaling. I do, however, happen to have pretty regular contact with a bunch of Trump voters and have had some quite extended conversations (in person and via text) about him. They've sometimes been me exhorting people to pay attention to the kinds of things that you mention. They've sometimes just been me listening to people without trying to change their minds. And I've heard pretty much none of the "burn-it-all-down" thing that you sketch in your initial post. For the most part, the people with whom I've talked extensively just don't believe me that he means or will do the things that alarm both of us. They'll talk to me instead about the corruption of Obama, Clinton, Biden, Harris-- how the first two have earned huge amounts for speeches and books (which is true), and how Biden's son has done this and that-- and when I've pointed out the vastly more serious financial corruption of Trump and his family, I've just gotten no response or else something to the effect that the Trump voters aren't that bothered by it.
I think it's very difficult, and probably impossible, to assess the motivations and thought processes of Trump (and other MAGA) voters without hearing at least some of it from the people themselves. We sit in our offices and make logical inferences from what we have read and heard about (and from) Trump and what we know about his poll standings, and we assume all kinds of things about what this must mean re: his supporters' minds and intentions. Sometimes that might be a valid way of doing analysis, but IMO not in the Trump years.
The argument here you are offering *is* based on "I talk to them and you don't", so I really don't think you are standing somewhere else--you're reading the vibes by the people you're proximate to, and I'm reading the vibes by the people I'm least proximate to, which is the people who go to his rallies and are his most performatively and visibly devoted base. Unless you and I really have a much different sociality than I've thought, the Trump people you're speaking to are pretty close to the Trump people I used to speak to and don't any longer: people who are in my extended social networks. Beyond that, I would guess that experientially you and I have the same trading cards, which is whatever anecdotal encounters we've had beyond our immediate social worlds. And beyond that still is the wide world of social media, the public sphere and so on.
When I get around to my subsequent entry on the people you've got most in mind, I intend to make a basic point that you are questioning already, which is "we have to hear from the people themselves". I never disagree with that as s starting place--in fact, I think historians and ethnographers take it more seriously than other social scientists--but at the same time the idea that what people themselves say *about* themselves stands as an accurate representation of their motives, thinking and causalities is something that all social sciences doubt in their own fashion. How we doubt it and what we do to explore our doubts varies methodologically and epistemologically, but the only time a social scientist stands pat on "what people say is the sum total of what they really think and the sum explanation of what they really do" is the moment when a social scientist has a prior reason to want to affirm what is said as the last word.
I'm saying something with 3 parts: (1) yes, there are methodological and epistemological problems with generalizing, from a great social distance, about the Trump vibe/ influence; (2) yes, I interact with more Trump supporters than you seem to be saying that you do, some of which comes from community engagement work in Delco rather than just my Facebook circle, and that does inform my sense of Trump's appeal but it does not make me smarter or more acute-- it just makes me humbler about generalizing than I think you're being.
Lots of intellectuals have done Monday morning quarterbacking (or Monday morning psychoanalysis) of mass phenomena throughout history, and some have made very persuasive cases in retrospect-- you know that I'm a big Arendt fan, and she had fascinating takes on German and other European society over more than a century-- but we remember and continue to read the ones who happened to get it right (or whose analyses continue to seem more plausible when we read them) and don't know about the many who were preposterously wrong. And at any rate, Arendt was largely writing about elites and she had met a lot of those people.
I truth, Tim, I think a lot of my critique could have been circumvented had you just claimed to be describing "some portion of" Trump supporters rather than "many." Some unknown portion. I don't think it's anywhere near a majority or a plurality. When you (rightly, IMO) criticize "newspapers and conventional political commentators and scholarly analysts" for misunderstanding a social and political phenomenon, and then make the kinds of generalizations that newspapers and conventional political commentators and scholarly analysts generally do (based on your sense of how myriad others are motivated), it seems to me that your second move runs afoul of your first.
To return for a minute to Arendt: what you're writing reminds me of her writings on "the masses" versus "the mob." I absolutely love those writings. On the other hand, she was also generalizing vastly and sometimes inaccurately. And as far as the US goes, I think there are a lot of nuanced groupings other than mass and mob (with the latter perhaps designating some of the most unhinged and violent Trump supporters).
Today's entry is a reply to a lot of your points here. The major point yet to come is that I agree with you that there are other Trump constituencies to address, which is what I'll write about next. If here I am thinking like Arendt about a mob, I will next be thinking about the kinds of German conservatives who thought that Hitler and the National Socialists wouldn't be able or inclined to do anything of the things they threatened to do, and figured that mainstream German conservatism would simply have a more powerful hand to pursue its conventional goals. Those conservatives as well know were wrong; the calculation they made has been foolishly repeated many times since 1932, usually with the same results.
Thanks Tim, I look forward to reading it. Our last conversation led me to revisit Arendt and I'm going to teach the 3rd volume of Origins of Totalitarianism next semester, plus some other relevant texts. And to be clear, I don't disagree that we're in dark times. Our diagnoses/ worries may dovetail even if we disagreed on the weight of certain components.
Sorry, I wrote that my argument had 3 parts and then I only named 2. I meant to divide part 2 into two separate parts. I have very little history commenting on blogs and am not used to not being able edit my ramblings.
BTW, does that mean that *I* understand Trump voters' motivations? No. I don't. I find it completely baffling that so many intelligent and capable/competent people can seem impervious to what I'm fairly sure are facts and the disastrous consequences that have ensued, historically, in a number of situations where people ignored such facts and red flags. But just because I find it hard to comprehend, I don't then attribute to a majority or even a plurality of Trump voters the nihilism or quasi-millenarianism that you do. Not without hard evidence, at least.
I think the idea that they *want* something concrete other than vibes is inconsistent with how they behave.
I think Trump and Trumpism are intensely and overwhelmingly a vibe and not a set of policy principles or priorities. Some of these are simple group membership-- self-identified Republicans' perception of the economy flipped on a dime in January of 2021, from thinking that the economy was terrific to thinking that it was terrible. There was an inverse but far weaker effect among self-identified Democrats. Some of these are just old-fashioned racism and sexism-- there's no explanation for "Kamala is dumb" that doesn't rest on a very healthy dose of that.
Which is why the rationalizations never work with these voters-- their preference for Trump doesn't follow from their policy preferences; their professed preferences follow from their support for Trump. And that applies equally to those that Ben describes who "think he'll be better for the economy" or will "return us to the Reagan years." When polls describe wild gyrations in how people feel about the economy that are roundly rejected by the data, I think it's safe to say that "the economy" is a euphemism that doesn't actually mean anything related to how much the country produces and how easy it is to get a job or a raise.
Vengeance, a spoiler mentality, etc. I think all fit comfortably within the bracket of "vibes". I'd go further and say that Italian fascism in the 20th C. was less programmatic than National Socialism--and could very well be described as a vibe-based political project first and foremost. Vibes and culture war are well-aligned overall--a struggle over sentiments, feelings, the zeitgeist--and what has and can arise out of that are often terrifying concrete projects that more or less meet the approval of the folks who were seeking vibes, that derive from some of the foundational ideas behind the vibes. This might even be a fair distinction between MAGA-core vibes and liberal-left sensibilities: the latter want to know about the concrete projects and plans that will derive from a cultural-sentimental candidacy; the former do not because they're sure (without fully articulating it) what is and is not consistent with their foundational vision of the world.
I would agree; culture war is probably a subset of "vibes". To a very substantial degree, policy preferences flow from which side of culture war someone is on. It I think explains why Trump being very clearly in favor of abortion (at least for him) doesn't hurt him with his base at all. If abortion is framed as women having reproductive freedom and the choice to make sexual decisions, a big chunk of the population hates it. If it's framed as being a way for Donald Trump to be able to chase away unwanted children, the same chunk of the population is all in favor.
The last sentence I think is entirely correct, and not just in this context; while it's a difference between MAGA-core and liberal-left sensibilities, I think when it comes to the far left, there's more in common with MAGA than not. It makes me think of the small but quite vocal online constituency that's holding up Yahya Sinwar as a heroic martyr and Hamas as a brave "resistance" operation. These people's sensibility is that the US and certainly Israel and kinda sorta sometimes Western Europe are bad and the root of all bad things and try to frame a clearly incoherent "policy" paradigm into their preferences. You saw it in the Cold War, where American's struggle with racism during its civil rights movement was supposed to distinguish from supposed Soviet egalitarianism. Or those declaring that support for Hamas is a part of a project for LGBTQ rights. You can usually boil down the vibe to a pretty simple axiom, and the policy declarations will either follow from there, or will rest upon a complete funhouse caricature of reality.
What is the far left that you're waving off here? Maybe Swarthmore gives you an amplified sense of how many they are, and how much vibing they're doing. Social media does that too, a bit. But outside of some rarified domains, they're not important. Where they are important it's because more than a "far" sentiment shares their vibes in a less dogmatic way: that the US maybe shouldn't be licensing vengeance bombing (whether for itself or a proxy), that maybe single-payer health care isn't some utopian fantasy that no country on earth has achieved, that maybe gun control is some bizarre impossibility, etc. None of which requires you to be an enrolled member of the Socialist Workers Party. The vibe you're putting into equivalence here is a small vibe; MAGA is a sizeable vibe whether or not it wins its way to power.
They're probably not very numerous. Certainly a couple orders of magnitude less numerous than the MAGA folks. But they aren't nonexistent. And while social media amplifies them, traditional media does as well. Take the professor from Cornell (I think?) who called October 7 "exhilarating" or the protestors hanging paraglider photos on their social media or the internet activist who posted herself voting in Yahya Sinwar for president. They're also fairly prominent in the pro-Russia neo-isolationist space, and at least part of what amplifies them may be Russian disinformation. But they also aren't purely hypothetical-- my former councilperson on the Seattle city council has gone that route. Jill Stein is pretty much that. My law school classmate who was the editor in chief of the law review (and is now a professor) is toeing that line. So they aren't entirely made up.
In some cases their presence is probably purposely amplified by bad actors to avoid having serious conversations-- there's nothing that drives the narrative away from Israel's conduct of the Gaza War or its treatment of West Bank Palestinians, for instance, like activists celebrating October 7 or agitating to dismantle Israel. There are important and serious conversations to be had about the proper projection of American power, but those get derailed when the avatars for that position are loudly and openly pro-Putin. I think that's also somewhat distinct from people with unserious policy ideas-- "Medicare for All or bust" types probably aren't Russian stooges, but they are quite unserious. Healthcare is an important issue, so dressing it up as "Americans should get all possible health care that they want, for free at the point of service, and we should pay for it by taxing billionaires" really isn't even a thoughtful starting point for tackling it.
I think if you're looking for the democracy where there isn't someone doing something that everybody else thinks is foolish, you're looking for something that not only won't exist but maybe shouldn't. A democracy ought to include whimsy and edge forms of reason. It is one of my frustrations in fact with the usual viewpoint-diversity, heterodoxy people is the utter hubris and gall of their self-anointment as the guardians of such when they tend to occupy such utterly conventionalized spaces of opinion. A real devotee of heterodoxy delights in "The Rent Is Too High Party" and "The Raving Monster Loony Party" and so on, in part because they are proof of the heterodox possibilities of political representation. The question is not "are there such people out there" but "do they constitute an electorally meaningful group" and if so, "well, now what?" if what they want is more or less to overturn the present order in blood and fire. At a minimum, if one is somewhat fond of the present order, the question becomes "And so why is it that we have come to this?" If the answer is "there is nothing to be done about it, they are of another order of thinking entirely", well, that's why some liberal-left thinkers are playing around in the House of Strauss lately.
The problem isn't to reach convinced Trump voters, it's to peel off enough undecideds and Repubs who genuinely dislike Trump. Some subset of the arguments you mention at the outset seem like the best approach, though not a guaranteed path to victory.
The Trump-lovers aren't the only unreachable group unfortunately. There's also a big group (Susa Collins is the archetype) for whom being a Republican is such a central part of their identity that they can't shift. Even among those who have rejected Trump, only a minority have been willing ot advocate a vote for Harris.
I like this only in the sense that you aren't wrong, even though I wish you were. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that we are dealing with a vast number of people who really do want to burn their playhouse down just because they can.
Your post made me think of Francois Furet's comment that the French Revolution was as much about settling scores as anything else. That said, I thought the demographic was unknowable (or so you say more recently) but here you seem to know them very well. But do they all want to burn the house down? What about single issue voters, such as the pro-life bloc or people only interested in inflation? Pro-life voters will always vote for the Republican candidate, even Susan Collins, or inflation-minded voters for the candidate from the party out of power. There are other groups, such as life-long Republican zombie voters. We all have the aunt and uncle who voted for Trump in 2016 because of Clinton's cookie baking comment from two decades earlier.
All this said your comments almost make me despair. I fear this mindset depresses voter turnout.
I was just at the Whitney Biennial and saw the work of native artist Demian DinéYazhi who reminds us that we must stop predicting futures rooted in the Western obsession with apocalypse and destruction. That's where I will be regardless of what happens in 2 weeks.
One thing that is important to hold on to is that uncertainty is as prone to create good (or just different) outcomes as bad ones, and that moments where regimes attempt to 'break the wheel' and institute a radically new political order not only find that there is resilience in the old order that they can't easily unravel but that the attempt itself gives rise to radical uncertainty--and thus to unpredictable outcomes that are often perversely opposite to what the new power wanted to accomplish.
There are definitely multitudes within the GOP's base--and multitudinous motivations that come forward depending on who is asking or what the circumstances around an expressive need might be. But I think there is a persistent indifference among many core voters to the maintenance of status quo systems of administration and to the idea that competence is a crucial attribute in selecting candidates.
Yes, it's settling scores!
On what are you basing this sweeping analysis? Have you spoken with a lot of Trump supporters? My sense is that you're right about a small majority and mostly wrong about many, many others. I know some, and the fiscal conservatives think that he'll be better for the economy and not nearly as bad re: political and constitutionally as you and I fear. I know some evangelicals who have finally come to think that he's not a very good person but they hate Harris and Democrats and think that their best chance to get some of what they want lies with Trump and other MAGA folks. I know some Delco people who really think that he's part of a movement to return us to the Reagan years, or what they remember of it, complete with American pride and a popular culture that looks like what they remember it looking like.
This stuff about Trump voters all or mostly wanting him to blow up everything so that they can fight for the scraps of a ruined modernity? It sounds like an amalgamation of theorists like Pat Deneen mixed with some of the (I think few) actual millenarians and survivalists. I truly don't know where you're getting it from.
What I agree about is that Trump voters aren't convinced by any of the things that you mentioned centrists using as ammo against him. When I have tried I've tended to get back whatabout-isms, whatabout Kamala or Biden doing or not doing X, Y, or Z, and more or less indifference to everything else. And yes, for sure I've seen and heard some people glorying in his criminality because they want to stick a thumb in the eye of elite-dominated politics and law and culture, but that's not the same thing as wanting to blow up everything.
I'll get to the people you think are the majority later in this series; they're the people the NYT has been trying to represent as normal Trumpians, e.g., the audience in Detroit. I think they're involved in some complicated self-deceptions. I also don't think they're the majority of his devoted base, and I'd ask you why you think they are--polls or otherwise.
The stick-a-thumb-in-the-eye IS wanting to blow up everything. We're not talking chortling over what Rush Limbaugh said here, we're talking electing an executive in an era where the Supreme Court has more or less endorsed unlimited exercise of executive power. Trump *says* he's not going to just stick a thumb in the eye, but plunge a sword through the heart of the status quo. Why don't you believe him? Or if you do, why do you think some people who are devoted to him don't hear that message for what it plainly is?
My repeated question to you, before I respond, is: on what are you basing your assessment? If you're basing it on the publications and podcasts you consume, and not on talking with a reasonably wide range of Trump voters, then I think that's a significant problem. The NYT has that problem as well. Please don't for a moment think that I'm saying this to brag about how many people I talk with, and that I'm somehow better or smarter because of it. I hate that kind of virtue-signaling. I do, however, happen to have pretty regular contact with a bunch of Trump voters and have had some quite extended conversations (in person and via text) about him. They've sometimes been me exhorting people to pay attention to the kinds of things that you mention. They've sometimes just been me listening to people without trying to change their minds. And I've heard pretty much none of the "burn-it-all-down" thing that you sketch in your initial post. For the most part, the people with whom I've talked extensively just don't believe me that he means or will do the things that alarm both of us. They'll talk to me instead about the corruption of Obama, Clinton, Biden, Harris-- how the first two have earned huge amounts for speeches and books (which is true), and how Biden's son has done this and that-- and when I've pointed out the vastly more serious financial corruption of Trump and his family, I've just gotten no response or else something to the effect that the Trump voters aren't that bothered by it.
I think it's very difficult, and probably impossible, to assess the motivations and thought processes of Trump (and other MAGA) voters without hearing at least some of it from the people themselves. We sit in our offices and make logical inferences from what we have read and heard about (and from) Trump and what we know about his poll standings, and we assume all kinds of things about what this must mean re: his supporters' minds and intentions. Sometimes that might be a valid way of doing analysis, but IMO not in the Trump years.
The argument here you are offering *is* based on "I talk to them and you don't", so I really don't think you are standing somewhere else--you're reading the vibes by the people you're proximate to, and I'm reading the vibes by the people I'm least proximate to, which is the people who go to his rallies and are his most performatively and visibly devoted base. Unless you and I really have a much different sociality than I've thought, the Trump people you're speaking to are pretty close to the Trump people I used to speak to and don't any longer: people who are in my extended social networks. Beyond that, I would guess that experientially you and I have the same trading cards, which is whatever anecdotal encounters we've had beyond our immediate social worlds. And beyond that still is the wide world of social media, the public sphere and so on.
When I get around to my subsequent entry on the people you've got most in mind, I intend to make a basic point that you are questioning already, which is "we have to hear from the people themselves". I never disagree with that as s starting place--in fact, I think historians and ethnographers take it more seriously than other social scientists--but at the same time the idea that what people themselves say *about* themselves stands as an accurate representation of their motives, thinking and causalities is something that all social sciences doubt in their own fashion. How we doubt it and what we do to explore our doubts varies methodologically and epistemologically, but the only time a social scientist stands pat on "what people say is the sum total of what they really think and the sum explanation of what they really do" is the moment when a social scientist has a prior reason to want to affirm what is said as the last word.
I'm saying something with 3 parts: (1) yes, there are methodological and epistemological problems with generalizing, from a great social distance, about the Trump vibe/ influence; (2) yes, I interact with more Trump supporters than you seem to be saying that you do, some of which comes from community engagement work in Delco rather than just my Facebook circle, and that does inform my sense of Trump's appeal but it does not make me smarter or more acute-- it just makes me humbler about generalizing than I think you're being.
Lots of intellectuals have done Monday morning quarterbacking (or Monday morning psychoanalysis) of mass phenomena throughout history, and some have made very persuasive cases in retrospect-- you know that I'm a big Arendt fan, and she had fascinating takes on German and other European society over more than a century-- but we remember and continue to read the ones who happened to get it right (or whose analyses continue to seem more plausible when we read them) and don't know about the many who were preposterously wrong. And at any rate, Arendt was largely writing about elites and she had met a lot of those people.
I truth, Tim, I think a lot of my critique could have been circumvented had you just claimed to be describing "some portion of" Trump supporters rather than "many." Some unknown portion. I don't think it's anywhere near a majority or a plurality. When you (rightly, IMO) criticize "newspapers and conventional political commentators and scholarly analysts" for misunderstanding a social and political phenomenon, and then make the kinds of generalizations that newspapers and conventional political commentators and scholarly analysts generally do (based on your sense of how myriad others are motivated), it seems to me that your second move runs afoul of your first.
To return for a minute to Arendt: what you're writing reminds me of her writings on "the masses" versus "the mob." I absolutely love those writings. On the other hand, she was also generalizing vastly and sometimes inaccurately. And as far as the US goes, I think there are a lot of nuanced groupings other than mass and mob (with the latter perhaps designating some of the most unhinged and violent Trump supporters).
Today's entry is a reply to a lot of your points here. The major point yet to come is that I agree with you that there are other Trump constituencies to address, which is what I'll write about next. If here I am thinking like Arendt about a mob, I will next be thinking about the kinds of German conservatives who thought that Hitler and the National Socialists wouldn't be able or inclined to do anything of the things they threatened to do, and figured that mainstream German conservatism would simply have a more powerful hand to pursue its conventional goals. Those conservatives as well know were wrong; the calculation they made has been foolishly repeated many times since 1932, usually with the same results.
Thanks Tim, I look forward to reading it. Our last conversation led me to revisit Arendt and I'm going to teach the 3rd volume of Origins of Totalitarianism next semester, plus some other relevant texts. And to be clear, I don't disagree that we're in dark times. Our diagnoses/ worries may dovetail even if we disagreed on the weight of certain components.
Sorry, I wrote that my argument had 3 parts and then I only named 2. I meant to divide part 2 into two separate parts. I have very little history commenting on blogs and am not used to not being able edit my ramblings.
BTW, does that mean that *I* understand Trump voters' motivations? No. I don't. I find it completely baffling that so many intelligent and capable/competent people can seem impervious to what I'm fairly sure are facts and the disastrous consequences that have ensued, historically, in a number of situations where people ignored such facts and red flags. But just because I find it hard to comprehend, I don't then attribute to a majority or even a plurality of Trump voters the nihilism or quasi-millenarianism that you do. Not without hard evidence, at least.
So what's your alternative interpretation besides "People are people, go figure"?
BTW, for what it's worth, Tom Nichols at the Atlantic published an essay on October 23 that tracks very closely against my analysis here. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/10/trumps-depravity-will-not-cost-him-this-election/680352
I think the idea that they *want* something concrete other than vibes is inconsistent with how they behave.
I think Trump and Trumpism are intensely and overwhelmingly a vibe and not a set of policy principles or priorities. Some of these are simple group membership-- self-identified Republicans' perception of the economy flipped on a dime in January of 2021, from thinking that the economy was terrific to thinking that it was terrible. There was an inverse but far weaker effect among self-identified Democrats. Some of these are just old-fashioned racism and sexism-- there's no explanation for "Kamala is dumb" that doesn't rest on a very healthy dose of that.
Which is why the rationalizations never work with these voters-- their preference for Trump doesn't follow from their policy preferences; their professed preferences follow from their support for Trump. And that applies equally to those that Ben describes who "think he'll be better for the economy" or will "return us to the Reagan years." When polls describe wild gyrations in how people feel about the economy that are roundly rejected by the data, I think it's safe to say that "the economy" is a euphemism that doesn't actually mean anything related to how much the country produces and how easy it is to get a job or a raise.
Vengeance, a spoiler mentality, etc. I think all fit comfortably within the bracket of "vibes". I'd go further and say that Italian fascism in the 20th C. was less programmatic than National Socialism--and could very well be described as a vibe-based political project first and foremost. Vibes and culture war are well-aligned overall--a struggle over sentiments, feelings, the zeitgeist--and what has and can arise out of that are often terrifying concrete projects that more or less meet the approval of the folks who were seeking vibes, that derive from some of the foundational ideas behind the vibes. This might even be a fair distinction between MAGA-core vibes and liberal-left sensibilities: the latter want to know about the concrete projects and plans that will derive from a cultural-sentimental candidacy; the former do not because they're sure (without fully articulating it) what is and is not consistent with their foundational vision of the world.
I would agree; culture war is probably a subset of "vibes". To a very substantial degree, policy preferences flow from which side of culture war someone is on. It I think explains why Trump being very clearly in favor of abortion (at least for him) doesn't hurt him with his base at all. If abortion is framed as women having reproductive freedom and the choice to make sexual decisions, a big chunk of the population hates it. If it's framed as being a way for Donald Trump to be able to chase away unwanted children, the same chunk of the population is all in favor.
The last sentence I think is entirely correct, and not just in this context; while it's a difference between MAGA-core and liberal-left sensibilities, I think when it comes to the far left, there's more in common with MAGA than not. It makes me think of the small but quite vocal online constituency that's holding up Yahya Sinwar as a heroic martyr and Hamas as a brave "resistance" operation. These people's sensibility is that the US and certainly Israel and kinda sorta sometimes Western Europe are bad and the root of all bad things and try to frame a clearly incoherent "policy" paradigm into their preferences. You saw it in the Cold War, where American's struggle with racism during its civil rights movement was supposed to distinguish from supposed Soviet egalitarianism. Or those declaring that support for Hamas is a part of a project for LGBTQ rights. You can usually boil down the vibe to a pretty simple axiom, and the policy declarations will either follow from there, or will rest upon a complete funhouse caricature of reality.
What is the far left that you're waving off here? Maybe Swarthmore gives you an amplified sense of how many they are, and how much vibing they're doing. Social media does that too, a bit. But outside of some rarified domains, they're not important. Where they are important it's because more than a "far" sentiment shares their vibes in a less dogmatic way: that the US maybe shouldn't be licensing vengeance bombing (whether for itself or a proxy), that maybe single-payer health care isn't some utopian fantasy that no country on earth has achieved, that maybe gun control is some bizarre impossibility, etc. None of which requires you to be an enrolled member of the Socialist Workers Party. The vibe you're putting into equivalence here is a small vibe; MAGA is a sizeable vibe whether or not it wins its way to power.
They're probably not very numerous. Certainly a couple orders of magnitude less numerous than the MAGA folks. But they aren't nonexistent. And while social media amplifies them, traditional media does as well. Take the professor from Cornell (I think?) who called October 7 "exhilarating" or the protestors hanging paraglider photos on their social media or the internet activist who posted herself voting in Yahya Sinwar for president. They're also fairly prominent in the pro-Russia neo-isolationist space, and at least part of what amplifies them may be Russian disinformation. But they also aren't purely hypothetical-- my former councilperson on the Seattle city council has gone that route. Jill Stein is pretty much that. My law school classmate who was the editor in chief of the law review (and is now a professor) is toeing that line. So they aren't entirely made up.
In some cases their presence is probably purposely amplified by bad actors to avoid having serious conversations-- there's nothing that drives the narrative away from Israel's conduct of the Gaza War or its treatment of West Bank Palestinians, for instance, like activists celebrating October 7 or agitating to dismantle Israel. There are important and serious conversations to be had about the proper projection of American power, but those get derailed when the avatars for that position are loudly and openly pro-Putin. I think that's also somewhat distinct from people with unserious policy ideas-- "Medicare for All or bust" types probably aren't Russian stooges, but they are quite unserious. Healthcare is an important issue, so dressing it up as "Americans should get all possible health care that they want, for free at the point of service, and we should pay for it by taxing billionaires" really isn't even a thoughtful starting point for tackling it.
I think if you're looking for the democracy where there isn't someone doing something that everybody else thinks is foolish, you're looking for something that not only won't exist but maybe shouldn't. A democracy ought to include whimsy and edge forms of reason. It is one of my frustrations in fact with the usual viewpoint-diversity, heterodoxy people is the utter hubris and gall of their self-anointment as the guardians of such when they tend to occupy such utterly conventionalized spaces of opinion. A real devotee of heterodoxy delights in "The Rent Is Too High Party" and "The Raving Monster Loony Party" and so on, in part because they are proof of the heterodox possibilities of political representation. The question is not "are there such people out there" but "do they constitute an electorally meaningful group" and if so, "well, now what?" if what they want is more or less to overturn the present order in blood and fire. At a minimum, if one is somewhat fond of the present order, the question becomes "And so why is it that we have come to this?" If the answer is "there is nothing to be done about it, they are of another order of thinking entirely", well, that's why some liberal-left thinkers are playing around in the House of Strauss lately.