[This is a significant re-write of an essay I originally posted on Sept. 9, 2020.]

Many of us are in terror that even if Trump loses the election, he and his cronies (maybe with support from his armed followers) will find ways to reject the loss and keep him in power (maybe with the Supreme Court again choosing the president…).

This essay is not about those in direct or indirect power and their personal interests in extending the outrages of this administration, but about that large number of “ordinary” Trumpian supporters, many of whom are drawn to acting out prejudices and long-held resentments against anyone they perceive (sometimes legitimately) as demeaning them or having an unfair advantage over them—the people Hillary Clinton so unadvisedly called “deplorables.”

On social media, we often offer retorts to lies and misunderstandings, but I doubt we convince anyone but ourselves (indeed, I doubt anyone but our choir reads them). More troubling is the way we use our “superior” knowledge and analytic abilities to lord it over ignorance we perceive behind, say, resistance to what “science” puts forward. We pontificate about their shortcomings, happily promoting stereotypes of bumpkins, ignorant nitwits, uncultured louts, beer-guzzling slobs, gun nuts, and the like, who in our minds collectively form an undifferentiated and single community of…deplorables. Our intellectual chauvinism is in its own way no less obnoxious than so many of the never-ending vituperative and stereotyping attacks made by those we view as our enemies.

No one likes to feel lorded over. Think about your own experiences with feeling ridiculed, not just by peers when you were a child but especially by teachers or other “authorities” who have made you feel humiliated when you made a mistake or spoke without due respect for traditional cultural attitudes or just disagreed with the authority. Such teachers were modeling how to look down on people as a behavioral norm. (If you somehow escaped such treatment—perhaps because you were among the chosen whom your educator cultivated—how did you feel when you watched classmates being put down? How should you have felt?)

When we make social media posts that ridicule our “enemies,” what do we expect? That they’ll humbly acknowledge the error of their ways and thank us for correcting them? Or bother to read us? If they happen to encounter what we say, they will instead, of course, picture yet another snotty egghead or (unfairly) well-off know-it-all. When they alternatively hear people whom they experience as speaking to their deepest needs, both good and bad, why should they care about whether the foundation of those statements is “true”? [1] Indeed, how often do we ourselves shunt aside troubling information about someone whom we admire or some idea central to how we think about life?

Other than non-trivial differences like financial and class status of many of them and us, their daily lives and ours (when we’re not intellectualizing) are pretty similar: they have romances, raise families, seek entertainment, eat out, celebrate holidays, treasure pets, respond to peer pressure, promote and cling (often stubbornly) to beliefs that give meaning to their lives, expatiate on compelling issues, and so on. During the pandemic, they are flummoxed about what to believe, how to adapt, whether to accept imposed or recommended limitations like keeping kids at home or wearing facemasks. They proudly and publicly turn to ingrained precepts about, say, individual freedom, without regard to consequences for themselves or others.

They are not alone in the human history of finding ways to reject uncomfortable truths and looking for scapegoats for their troubles. And indeed, intellectual history is rife with well-educated folk who insist on “truths,” including scientific dogma, that turn out to be totally wrong.

Where we have been conditioned to use critical thinking as the key to evaluate what is or isn’t “true,”[2] they (not unlike Trump himself) seem to focus on visceral intuitions (“feeling,” so to speak, trumps “reason”—a guideline we’ve all been taught is appropriate in certain contexts), with minimal interest in whether a proffered “fact” is accurate. In opposition to our hoity-toity, educated superiority, they readily grasp onto outlandish (to us), conspiratorial interpretations of why their lives are under assault (the latest example—for me— is QAnon).[3] They feel marginalized about their concerns and powerless to make their lives better—or maybe more accurately, meaningful and just. Many of “them” seem to need scapegoats based on differences in skin color, worship, class, privilege. Why should they give credence to anything, including media reports, anyone in such suspect categories puts forth?[4]

At one level, we and they share mistrust of governments and business. When “they” interpret political and economic issues more or less as we do, we applaud and embrace them as the salt of the earth. But when they fall into line behind Trumps and QAnon barkers, we ridicule them as unacceptable aliens (we might even secretly like to put them behind barbed wire), a conditioned reflex not uncommon when people fear their “normal” lives are about to be stripped from them.

None of this, of course, helps us know how we might change the minds of such people. But all of it has to do with what kind of human beings we are.

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[1] I’ll forego here a discussion of what are “truth” and objectivity.

[2] This is not to say we’re always good at critical thinking. How many of us ourselves can be taken in by reports that we’d like to believe are true?)

[3] How different is such “logic” from metaphysical beliefs?

[4] An interesting scholarly article that reinforces my intuitions (and therefore must be accurate) is https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-density-divide-urbanization-polarization-and-populist-backlash/ (summary) or https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Wilkinson-Density-Divide-Final.pdf (full article). The essay focuses on the history of population movements to cities and a consequent increase in divisive social attitudes.