What's Tony Thinking

Who Would Vote for Donald Trump?

You may be done with election post-mortems, but one came to my attention recently that I want to share and to comment on.

It was written by a progressive Christian minister, Phillip Gulley, who says he “has been asked the question ‘Who Would Vote for Donald Trump?’ literally hundreds of times” and so offered his take at his Substack site .

He lists six categories of people who would vote for Donald Trump. He elaborates on each category in an extended paragraph, which I’ve not included here for reasons of length. With a couple of exceptions, I cite only the lead sentence of each paragraph. Those are as follows:

“Racists voted for Donald Trump. 

“Misogynists voted for Donald Trump. 

“The uber-wealthy without a social conscience voted for Donald Trump. 

“The Republican party stalwarts voted for Trump. These are the people who vote Republican no matter what. 

“Xenophobes voted for Donald Trump. They fear anyone and anything that doesn’t meet their definition of a true American. 

“The last category of people to vote for Donald Trump were those who would deny women bodily autonomy . . . they are the American Taliban, not resting until every woman of child-bearing age is pregnant, bare-foot, and defeated.”

He concludes,

“Our task in the next four years is to oppose these people and their plots at every turn. Our high calling is to shine the bright light of compassion, progress, and reason into the darkened corners they inhabit . . .”

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not feeling the “compassion,” “progress” and “reason” here. And yet Gulley’s thoughts are not that different from a number of other pieces that have shown up in various media, some as estimable as the New York Times. They purport to explain this election with broad brush indictments of fellow citizens as racists, misogynists, etc. Does that fit some Trump supporters? Sure. Does it really explain where we find ourselves or help move us forward? Seems unlikely.

Instead, each Trump voter has been boxed, labeled and I would say demonized. It may have provided some catharsis for the author, and perhaps to his congregation — unless of course you happen to be a closet Trump voter in their midst, though that seems unlikely. Churches too have become silos of the like-minded, a highly unfortunate development in my view. Moreover, I’m old enough to remember when that wasn’t the case.

Often the complaint of progressives and liberals about Trump and MAGA is that they demonize people or that they “other” people, rendering them targets of prejudice and suspicion. Add to that labeling people with demeaning and nasty names. But I’m not seeing how Gulley’s commentary, or others like it, is a whole lot different.

In the wake of the election, I’ve been trying to focus less on Trump himself (delegating that, so to speak, to a legion of others), and more on those who voted for him, many of them new in his camp as of this election. I’m trying to understand where they’re coming from, what moved them in his direction. I’ve also tried to look at some of the deeper social forces in play.

In that “deeper social forces” connection, I recommend David Brooks’s recent cover article in the Atlantic titled, “How The Ivy League Broke America.” It is an indictment of our nation’s elites. Brooks writes, “The meritocracy as currently constituted seems to want you to be self-centered and manipulative.” A meritocracy without morality.

He goes on to say that, “The meritocracy has created an American caste system. After decades of cognitive segregation, a chasm divides the well educated from the less well educated.” He also observes that “success in school” (where IQ and other intelligence tests are privileged) “is not the same as success in life.” And that the system has overvalued intelligence while undervaluing qualities like curiosity, energy, social intelligence and agility. Really smart, while a value, does not necessarily equate to really a good human.

In my own most recent attempt along those lines, I channelled music critic Ted Gioia, who was himself channelling Ortega Y Gasset and his classic book, Revolt of the Masses. If you missed it, you can link here to that blog, “Look Out Above,”

After I posted that blog, one of you sent me a brilliant 2014 essay by Nick Hanhauer, from Politico. I recommend it as well. Hanhauer calls attention to the threat to democracy posed by extreme and concentrated wealth, even as he is a beneficiary of that arrangement.

I doubt the minister I have quoted above intends to be unfair or mean-spirited. He probably intends to be bold and fearless. But he does, for me, illustrate the condescension and lack of critical self-reflection that characterize too many progressives and Democrats. I confess to my own similar failures in the past.

If we’re going to get through this, we are all going to have to do better.