Trump Essentials (2): Long Cons

Don't Be The Person Who Says, "I Didn't Know"

It’s hard to know quite how to think about a genre of mainstream political opinion and journalistic commentary that offers a pre-emptive benediction to a class of people who are quite decent folks who are peculiarly attached to the idea of voting for Trump.

Much of this feeling is about social class. “But people like me, they’re voting for Trump!”

And yet, some of it is also about a desire to operate across class boundaries, in the venerable “but I talk to my taxi driver” genre pioneered so ably by Robert Kaplan and Thomas Friedman. “In my role as a buyer of services, I talk to a guy and the guy tells me what he thinks and what he thinks is that people like me stink. Not me, of course, because I’m paying him and I talk to him, but all those other guys.”

Less cynically, it’s about maintaining those bridges outside your immediate worlds—and they do matter and are useful both narrowly as a precondition of knowledge production. All knowledge producers need to keep a line open to the people that they depend upon. Journalists need to honor sources, scholars need to honor the vested worldviews of the people they study and talk with.

Some of this is the art of being human. Keeping a line open to old friends, to distant family members, to childhood acquaintances, to that guy you play a sport with, to the odd friendship you’ve made out of nowhere in particular.

My own social networks have contracted considerably as I’ve aged, and especially so since 2020. I interact with fewer people generally, and keep to myself more. And like many anti-Trump people, since 2015, I’ve frequently broken ties with people at the distant edges of my social network who are strongly Trump-favoring. Moreover, not because of Trump as such, I’ve also retreated from my long-standing attempts to engage conservative thought online. I still read conservative thinkers, often with considerable interest and appreciation, and often with the feeling that much as many evangelicals Christians do not seem to know the New Testament very well, neither do many avowed conservatives seem very interested in the body of thought that was assembled into a conservative canon from the 1960s into the early 2000s. But at some point in the latter years of Easily Distracted, I became increasingly conscious that most of the bridges I’d tried to build were actually Skinner boxes designed by others to move Overton windows to the right, that those dialogues were being weaponized, and that there was almost nobody on the other side yearning to understand and connect.

I can still ping at the edges of my networks, however, and see where conservatives in the academy and proximate to it have worked themselves towards Trump, and where their professional and corporate counterparts are doing so. There are certainly compelling cases in those same fringes of intellectuals, professionals, executives, tradespeople, bureaucrats, soldiers, and so on who still identify as conservatives but who have also strongly and loudly disavowed Trump. I bless them, I thank them, and I hope they’re going to be one of the constituencies that pulls us back from the brink.

But what about the people who in some sense ought to know better who are still professing a dedication to Trump? If you read this newsletter, you know I am systematically dubious about looking to misinformation as a generalized explanation for why people might make bad political choices (or act in other ways). I believe that people generally have real reasons for what they’re doing, and that people should be held responsible for what they do. Circumstances matter, constraints can be real, and agency is often constrained. But saying that people are misinformed is a secular version of “the devil made them do it”.

It is also the kind of thing that people say when they’re living in the aftermath of their own misjudgments and are called in some way or another to an accounting by the next regime, by their victims, by a restored order. “I was misinformed”.

I know that many of the possible Trump voters who ought to know better stubbornly dig in when they’re told that they ought to know better. . They have so many ways to refuse to hear: “you’re just protecting yourself! you’re the one who has a problem with information and evidence! you just don’t want to believe that my ideas for the future are better! you hate me and my people and my religion and you always have!”

And most of all, most of all: ”come on, grow up, Trump isn’t going to do any of that stuff, he’s just trying to rile you up”.

“Come on, Hitler isn’t going to do any of that, not really” is what old-line German conservatives told themselves in voting for the National Socialists. It is what every modern social constituency that claims to not want authoritarianism or fascism says before supporting or voting for an authoritarian or fascist. “They’re not really going to do all that, it’s just for show. It’s just about projecting strength. It’s just a response to how bad things are.” It is what whites in South Africa sometimes said to themselves in the 1970s: it’s not so bad in the townships. It’s all ok.

This is often accompanied by, “The institutions will keep some of that from happening. The laws will keep that from happening. The general population won’t put up with it if they go that far. You’re just exaggerating.”

These are such transparently false assumptions, disproven again and again by history, that they pose the kind of interpretative problem I raised in yesterday’s newsletter. In our current moment, men who worked with Trump in high positions of authority are telling the American public that he will govern as a fascist would, and this time, without anybody who might try to check those tendencies. The Trumpist future is all in plain sight. Nothing is hidden, nothing is ambiguous, nothing is deniable.

So what do we make of people who should know better who nevertheless deny it? Only two things are possible.

The first is that along with, “I was misinformed”, they will someday join the long parade of those who stood with authoritarians during their tyranny, who enabled their rise: “I didn’t know that all of that would happen.” “I was fooled.”

The con man is a venerable part of American life, and his victims are frequently people who ought to have known better. The devil knows that intelligent people are easier to fool: they have more ways to talk themselves into Hell. Telling people to get out now before it’s too late is often a way to accelerate their descent. Pride pulls them down and shame keeps them from admitting it to exasperated friends and family who tried to intervene. People who finally have to admit they were conned, often because they have no money, because they’ve lost everything, will often admit that somewhere along the way they knew what was happening but they didn’t dare acknowledge it in the moment because the pain was too enormous, because the need to believe that it was all going to end with wealth and success was the only relief from that agony.

The thing is, what the victim wants from a con man is sensible, in its own terms. The victim wants an easier path for the realization of their own dreams and hopes for wealth and success. In political terms, the equivalent is that they want to have people agree with their values without the hard work of persuading them. The political victim doesn’t understand the mysterious reasons why the culture has changed, why their own preferences are no longer widely shared, and they don’t want to. They want to get rich quick, in the political sense. Well, who doesn’t? It would be great to be the dictator whose values are imposed on everybody, as long as it was you in charge.

Except it wouldn’t be, because it doesn’t work out like that. You don’t get the society you personally want when you’re compelling everybody to be this way or that way. You don’t get rich quick. Somebody else gets your money and your house, someone else gets the power, and that somebody laughs all the way to the bank. Or the prisons and the mass graves.

If this is it, I don’t know what to say to those possible Trump voters. The same histories that say that this will all end badly, will all end with unconvincing and unsympathetic pleadings, with “I was fooled” say that telling a victim about the con man usually intensifies his grip on his victims.

What I fear even more is that the people who will someday say, “I didn’t know he would do all that”, who will confess, “I was fooled”, who will ask for forgiveness from the wounded survivors of the possible catastrophe, are not a con man’s victims but his accomplices. That they are not fooled and they do know he will do all that. If so, where they differ from the people who just want the entire status quo blown up, who harbor a millenarian expectation about the new world yet to come, is that they expect the status quo to survive, they expect there to be law and order, they expect everything to be more or less the same or better. For themselves. And they expect that some group of others they have in mind will be put in their place. They expect a full embrace of “the law is for thee, not for me”: a freedom for themselves, a new and violent restriction of others.

They know better than to say it. They don’t want to lose the friends they’d lose if they said it. They don’t want to be shunned or cancelled. They don’t want to seem declasse or boorish. They still want to be in all the conversations, invited to all the dinners, have all the professional courtesies, still observe all the forms and proprieties. They may even fear to admit it to themselves, openly, because they know some of what they want to happen is wrong. But they are not fooled and not conned and not unaware that what Trump and his present associates say they will do is in fact what they will try to do.

If this is indeed the case, then we will struggle in the aftermath to make any distinction between “I knew what I was doing” and “I didn’t know that it was happening”. Because the person who knows what they’re really hoping for is a person who also knows that someday, if they are called to account, they will be able to say, “I was fooled” with apparent sincerity. This too is our history: in the modern world, many times now, we have had to reckon with people who tipped that world into some fresh hell and then scrubbed it all over, took on the mighty work of recasting their own loyalties as tortured ambiguities when the world climbed out of the abyss, essentially daring any critics to prove that they were not just fools.

If that is the case, I know even less what to say. I want to save a conman’s victim from their own folly and even more to save them from doing me harm in the process. But facing someone who I suspect knows exactly what they really want and is tendentiously skilled at deflecting and denying those intentions, I am and always will be at a loss. In this disquiet, I am far from alone: this is the reason that liberal theorists have been looking warily at a profoundly anti-democratic thinker like Carl Schmitt, not so much in admiration but in rueful acknowledgement that he had a point in observing that liberal democracy’s greatest vulnerability is its inability to name its political enemies as enemies, much as Karl Popper famously observed that tolerance cannot afford to be tolerant of intolerance.

I suppose in this sense I am hoping for fools and dreading enemies. I’d much rather neither and say simply that there are people who are just kind of banally wrong, or people who are so single-mindedly focused on a single policy issue that they don’t care about anything else. But we are well past the point where that is a plausible description of someone stubbornly bent on supporting Trump precisely because that requires denying so much of what he has said and done in a way that goes far, far beyond being mistaken in a quotidian way and because Trump’s erratic and narcissistic temperament belies the thought of him delivering in a focused way on a single policy goal in a settled, stable and successful fashion.

Whichever it is, all I really hope is that this is a much smaller group of Trump-favoring people than I fear they might be.

One virtue of a secret ballot is that when you pull the lever, that act is between you, your conscience, and your god. It is a good time to confess silently that you have been fooled and to vote with wisdom. It is a good time to silently set aside enmity and take the first step back to a commonweal. It is a good time to be embarrased into doing the right thing rather than bitterly determined to do the wrong thing. It is a good time to think broadly, beyond your own heart. I don’t care if you ever say any of those things to other people later on. All I ask—all I beg—is that you do the right thing in the privacy of that moment.