How to Trust a Trump Voter

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 selves – 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.