How to Trust a Trump Voter
Jan-Werner Müller
Just like after the US presidential election in 2016, we are hearing endless exhortations from pundits (and some Democratic politicians) to make an effort to understand Trump supporters, to earn their respect, to be curious about them, not to be condescending etc. There are two obvious problems with this kind of rhetoric: first, nobody asked Trump voters after 2020 to show empathy with, let’s say, African American women and try to comprehend why they had strongly supported Biden. As so often, the lazy talk of ‘polarisation’ obscures a profoundly asymmetrical situation.
Second, the ‘arrogance’ of liberal elites is largely an invention of right-wing media. Long before Trump, talk radio and cable TV hosts practised the art of creating political community through a sense of shared victimhood – Trump only brought it to a head when he explicitly told his supporters at rallies that ‘we’re all victims.’ The point is not that the supposedly resentful ‘deplorables’ never have reason to complain about injustice; rather, it’s that ‘elite condescension’ is less an actual experience than a political meme that always fits.
But there’s something else. If it makes any sense at all to issue imperatives about which citizens should engage with which other citizens on which terms – and one may well ask whether it does – then, politically and morally, things are exactly the opposite of the way the standard commentary would have it: there is no particular political or moral burden on Harris voters, but there is on those who pulled the lever for Trump. It has to do with a form of trust that is indispensable in halfway functioning democracies.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, rising distrust is not automatically a threat to democracy; everything depends on who is trusted and why. As the social scientist Pippa Norris has pointed out, people aren’t necessarily less trusting in general; but it can hardly be a good thing if they have plenty of what she calls ‘credulous trust’ in internet quacks. By the same token, liberals – who today so often default into defending ‘the institutions’ and traditional ‘norms’ – used to be the party of distrusting any concentration of power; thinkers such as Bentham were primarily theorists of political distrust for good reasons.
Still, democracies do depend on a minimal level of a specifically political and horizontal form of trust. Political trust not in the sense that we trust others to vote for our interests, or support our ideas, or affirm our identities: obviously, plenty of people don’t; there are endless conflicts and disagreements in any democracy (contrary to the kitschy American rhetoric of ‘we should overcome our divisions and all come together’). By definition, every vote produces losers, and a lot of people are always going to be disappointed by election outcomes.
However, as philosophers of trust have pointed out, someone who turns out not to be trustworthy does not make others feel merely disappointed. The distinctive moral reaction is a sense of betrayal; this also makes trust different from mere reliance or confidence: I am disappointed if my new car breaks down; but only a friend can make me feel betrayed.
How does that matter in politics? One has every right to feel betrayed by one’s fellow citizens if one has reason to believe that they brought someone to power who might fatally damage democracy. As the commentariat has been stressing, a lot of people cast a ballot because of economic frustrations and ‘post-pandemic pain’: they suffered from inflation and trusted – credulously, it has to be said – that Trump was somehow going to ‘fix it’ (never mind that inflation had already been coming down substantially in recent months).
Let’s assume then that millions of US citizens voted for Trump not because they wanted autocratic kleptocracy (of which Trumpworld already shows many signs). But if so, the burden is on them to say and show this (the liberal resistance, if any, will come out and make noise anyway). It’s for Trump voters to restore the trust that people, for all their conflicts over interests and ideas, have to have in one another in a democracy: we all have to be able to trust that others are competent and willing to go on with democracy as a common concern among free and equal citizens.
An idealistic proposal that only a theorist of democracy would come up with? Maybe. But it’s much less peculiar than the notion that losers in an election owe the winning side some special duty of empathy. Liberals often took on that duty in the past because, in a perverse way, it suggested that everything was still up to them; they were the ones with agency. The performance of liberal contrition (‘we arrogant elites neglected the left-behind!’) and the reaching for ready-made answers – Hillbilly Elegy, with its mixture of resentment and sentimentalism, flying off the shelves – were as patronising as they were reassuring: it’s all still up to us; if liberal elites can act (or at least talk) differently, the political outcomes will be different.
A willingness to confront fellow citizens with the question ‘Did you really want this? If not, will you speak up and act up?’ is a lot less comfortable. But it does presume that others can think and act, and that they might see the point of restoring political trust among all citizens. Posing the question – and making the argument – is at least worth a try.
Comments
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4 December 2024
at
4:27pm
smisra@smcvt.edu
says:
The political outcomes will not be different if liberal elites show contrition, no. They will be different if they furthered an agenda of economic equality with the same zeal with which they talk about race and gender, if they did not prevent the poor of all races from letting the poor find housing in their tightly-zoned, single-houses-only residential districts while welcoming middle-class Blacks and Whites, if the Ivy Leagues had really enhanced diversity by letting POOR Blacks and Hispanics and not just wealthy ones in through their admissions policies that never made room for class-based preferential admissions in ADDITION to race-based ones. It is not one or the other: it SHOULD be both race and gender AND class. Why has it not been, and what about horizontal trust among the poor for their elite fellow citizens?
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4 December 2024
at
9:32pm
Richard Kmecza
says:
@
smisra@smcvt.edu
You are right, of course.
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4 December 2024
at
11:40pm
smisra@smcvt.edu
says:
@
Richard Kmecza
I couldn't agree more with what you say. Elites get by, no matter who is in power: It is precisely those who put their faith in the wrong place and other vulnerable innocents who will pay for their deadly mistake.
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5 December 2024
at
4:14pm
Rory Allen
says:
@
smisra@smcvt.edu
I would like to know who these 'liberal elites' are? And what is more important in identifying the species: liberalism or being elite? Presumably elites that are not liberal are exempt from your criticism, but I'd like to know more about why you think this. For example, Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, so presumably he qualifies as 'elite'. Donald Trump is also wealthy, and a member of the elite. So being elitist is not a bad thing in itself, it's being liberal that is the real crime here. In that case, why not just refer to 'liberals' rather than the 'liberal elite'?
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6 December 2024
at
1:07am
smisra@smcvt.edu
says:
@
Rory Allen
Yes, I see what you are saying. I mean college-educated people, who are preponderantly liberal and whose elite credentials are derived from their educational rather than their economic status. It has become a truism that the biggest divide in the United States is that between the highly-educated and those without college degrees. The college-educated liberal elite's minority identity politics ignores economic inequality and poverty both among racial and gender minorities, upon whom they focus and who are disproportionately poor, and White working class voters, upon whom they do not.
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4 December 2024
at
9:22pm
Joshua Nachowitz
says:
It is ironic the Prof. Werner-Muller posits that "...the ‘arrogance’ of liberal elites is largely an invention of right-wing media" in an essay that practically drips with liberal elite arrogance.
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4 December 2024
at
9:29pm
Ronald Jones
says:
The only vote you are entitled to is your own. If you want some elses vote you must persuade them. You certainly are under no obligation to sympathize, empathize or understand anothers position, but failure to understand them is likely to result in your not persuading them. If you are looking to win elections the burden is on you to understand the voter. Trump understands what the voters want, he won the election. And he will be in power, a certain segment of our political class would rather be right than in power.
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4 December 2024
at
9:40pm
James Voorhees
says:
So the burden is on Trumpists to explain themselves? How arrogant is that? One does not have to be contrite to engage with those who voted for Trump; one can still be alarmed at what the man's second coming might bring. Indeed, if one wants to gain allies and votes against the MAGA minions, one has a duty to engage, discover why the interlocutor went for Trump, and do what one can to welcome that person to the liberal side.
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4 December 2024
at
9:50pm
Robert Jack
says:
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6 December 2024
at
11:43am
hry
says:
@
Robert Jack
Well said. Far more cogent and well-reasoned than whatever the Princeton professor is trying to say above the line.
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4 December 2024
at
9:58pm
Fritz Holznagel
says:
Thank you for stating plainly that the 'arrogance of liberal elites' is mostly an invention of right-wing media. The minions of the right have been working for 50+ years to plant and nurture that seed, and it has not only sprouted but grown into a mighty (if phony) oak.
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4 December 2024
at
10:17pm
Robert Wood
says:
We (the Democrats, the liberals) are supposed to be the party of making the system work for more people, not the party of blowing up or repudiating the system. Lately we've characterized anyone who hasn't internalized our fashionable dogmas (the internal discourses we've mistaken for reality) as 'deplorable'. You know something is wrong when Ivy League universities are somehow more "progressive" than land-grant universities. Enough. Property rights, markets, the police, etc. exist for very good reasons. But they also create massive inequalities and other "negative externalities" that need constant addressing. And we commit to addressing these inequalities while also protecting the rights that allow us to live relatively free lives. So-called progressives have forgotten how we earned these rights. They also love to heap laws upon laws with no thought of how any of it fits together into a workable legal order. Very typical elite behavior, by the way. Similarly, the Right, despite all its rhetoric, could care less about these rights or the system that enforces them. They like the easy logic of the law of the stronger. Which is why, no matter how many stupid things we say, or how many pop stars we trot out to show how cool we are, I will continue to vote Democrat as long as we try to sustain a realistically good system. But, when we lose to such a clown as Trump, we should ABSOLUTELY ask why we have alienated people who would otherwise have cast their vote for us in a heartbeat.
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5 December 2024
at
3:58am
Doc TH
says:
Perhaps unsurprising, coming from a Princeton Professor. It is difficult to understand the belief that the "‘arrogance’ of liberal elites is largely an invention" when examples abound - e.g., the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and M.I.T. refusing to say before a Congressional Committee that calls for Jewish genocide were unacceptable on their campuses. Does the professor recall Obama's comment that small town Pennsylvania residents are bitter and they "cling to their guns and religion"? Arrogance or not?
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5 December 2024
at
6:20am
Graucho
says:
After the 2016 election I could see where they were coming from and their rational. After that stunt he pulled on Jan 6th 2021 I find anyone who voted for him this time around beneath contempt.
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5 December 2024
at
7:04am
Mick Mooney
says:
Dems were simply like the right wing cohort in Labour at the time of Corbyn. They'd rather lose an election than change their neolibtard economic disposition or foreign policies. Neolibtards, ferociously messaging the universal subject brandishing neolib economic policies and R2P, act as if R2P applies to their own domestic electorates, ignoring their own dire economic policies, and now are left to opine their messaging didn't get across a la Blair in his dying days. See the ineffable self-heroising self-pitying Harris. Instead of actually thinking, or listening, they demand another "message" back from their deplorable opponents. Finally they're 'giving a voice' to the deplorables, but with a pithy demand, and only after the election??
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5 December 2024
at
7:23am
Mick Mooney
says:
The Good Samaritan who walks on by, humming the tune too, worrying to himself about racism. That's them Dems.
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5 December 2024
at
4:15pm
Kenneth Wilsher
says:
So Trump won because the deplorables were too thick to appreciate the subtle arguments of the Democrats!
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7 December 2024
at
11:16am
whatnot
says:
@
Kenneth Wilsher
1 - 'millions'? it's like a 1760s free-for-all all over again.
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5 December 2024
at
4:18pm
Rory Allen
says:
All that matters, surely, is whether the Trump administration can deliver on its promises. All this talk about how people have referred to Trump supporters, and vice versa, is all secondary, though I have noticed it is the kind of thing that the commentariat loves to chew over (while ignoring more urgent threats: Russia and climate change come to mind).
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6 December 2024
at
8:42am
Brian reffin Smith
says:
All such discussions leave me with both cynical laughter and despair. No matter what excesses are to come, a significant proportion of US citizens will still support what they, quite knowingly, voted for. Whilst grinning and knowing that much of it is lies. Were many of those who voted for brexit to be swayed by anything nice liberals could say, do or write about ? No, they voted against immigrants, having been told by the mainly right wing UK press for months before that to remain in the EU would mean millions more AND THEY WERE DELIGHTED TO BE THUS LIED TO. You should be “reaching out” (ugh) to Fox, to Rupert Murdoch and the slavering fans of revenge, punishment, hate and apocalyptic resentment. Good luck with that. Just remember: it will not get better. X will not become kinder. Torture will not get less. Democracy is receding in the world. The nasties and enough of their supporters, who know exactly whom to lock up, are winning. Understanding is indeed overrated. It's far too late for that.
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6 December 2024
at
2:02pm
Delaide
says:
Policies schmolices. Shouldnt it be a key election criterion that the head of state can at least purport to be a decent human being and is mostly truthful? Trump couldn’t even pretend to have either of these qualities. Good luck America.
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7 December 2024
at
11:37am
Podge
says:
@
Delaide
Please tell me more about the honesty and decency of Genocide Joe.
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6 December 2024
at
9:33pm
whatnot
says:
Nevermind trust, how has 'liberal' come to carry negative connotations in Amreeka? You never hear its antonyms (what are they? 'illiberal'?' 'regressive'? good old 'bigoted'?) claimed proudly, if only to 'trigger' those same 'elites', so what's going on.
Read moreNevertheless, it was still wrong to vote for Trump. He is still the worse choice exactly on the economic/fairness/accessibility issues. Catastrophically worse. Look at his cabinet picks. The outsized power of Musk etc.
Apparently "credulous" Trump voters owe Prof. Werner-Muller and his Princeton colleagues an explanation for why they spent so little time digesting Bureau of Labor Statistics data about trends in core and non-core inflation and so much time worrying about the daily costs of feeding their families.
Presumably the Prof. and his colleagues would also appreciate an explanation from working class Latino who somehow failed to understand that they are "oppressed persons of color" and vote accordingly.
The arrogance’ of the liberal elite may be an invention but by replacing arrogance with ‘studied yet indifferent, dogged support for the political, cultural and economic business-as-usual model’, which seems plausible, ‘trust’ becomes betrayal. It's no good asking voters ‘did you really want this?’ when they, the voters, actually did want what the liberal elites promised for so long but which they, the liberal elites (all elites of course), can never and do not want to actually deliver.
In my lifetime the Democrats have not been perfect, but they have nominated a series of thoughtful, empathetic, brave and public-minded people: starting with old-timers like Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern, and on through people like John Kerry and Kamala Harris. They have been rejected again and again, in favor of people like Nixon and Reagan and George W. Bush and now Trump. The burden is, indeed, on GOP voters to explain why their votes of this year, and the last 50 years, were helpful to the common good of the American people.
The Democrats bear no little responsibility for their election losses, despite the obvious disorganized erratic behavior of Trump. In 2020, Biden promised to be a moderate; he was not. Biden promised to be a "bridge" to new leadership; but he clung to power even in the face of obvious debilitation. The exit from Afghanistan was shambolic, and the method of execution was against the advice of senior military leaders. Student loan forgiveness was widely perceived as a policy wherein those who didn't voluntarily go into debt would be paying for those who did. Illegal immigration dramatically increased absent any federal attempt at control. Biden chose a very weak candidate for VP for purely political reasons who was not anointed as the party's candidate until the end of July.
I consider Trump to be a terrible choice for president. However, I also believe there is overwhelming evidence that the Democratic party paved his way to the White House - twice - and that elite liberal arrogance was an ingredient in that recipe.
T. Holohan M.D.
Yes - we did struggle to see why:
1/ Biden immediately removed Trumps border controls and only brought some back in June 2024 after millions of illegals had entered the US. Harris never criticized this policy!
2/ In a nation where it is widely acknowledged that many voters feel uncomfortable with a woman (the President) being the head of the armed forces, the Democrats could put Admiral Rachel Levine on TV every month. If it was an attempt to re-educate the electorate, it failed!
3/ The Dems went along with the soon to be discredited BLM and Defund the Police movements - even before the election the Democrat Govenor of California had to get the California Highway Patrol the go into Oakland and sort out the mayhem!
4/ The crass politicization of higher education by the 95% Democratic voting academics as shown for example in the Congressional hearings on campus unrest. The President of Yale (on one million dollars a year) being exposed as not really qualified to be President of a local Community College!
2 - why so uncomfortable?
3 - how was BLM 'discredited'?
4 - eh?
And at the moment, we simply do not know how well, or badly, Trump's policies will function in practice. If he succeeds, nobody will care what 'liberal elites' say, or have said. If he fails, the people that voted him in will vote him out. Until then, maybe the wisest thing we can all do is wait and see, rather than compulsively examining our navel fluff one more time.