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| London Bridge on November 25, 2017 |
How are the targets of Trump’s autocracy campaign supposed to respond? Reactive self-defense won’t work. Another paradigm has to be constructed piece by piece.
This post continues my effort to think through the relation between U.S. politics and knowledge. Politics seems to me to have become a knowledge sink. In the U.S., a good way to win in politics is to glorify the refusal of knowledge. Trump is especially good at glorifying knowledge’s destruction as a triumph of the will.
Democrats tend to hate this, whether they went to college or not. But they haven’t figured out how to expose or weaken it. They are also haunted by one famous reference to the issue.
During her 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton made a snotty remark about half of Trump’s voters that allowed the Republicans to move the clock back to George Wallace time.
Clinton was speaking at a fundraiser on September 9th when this happened:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
She said the other half of Trump’s supporters “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change.”
Republicans turned the deplorables line into a permanent symbol of the reverse bigotry of educated elites. Hillary Clinton became the icon of the professional-managerial elite that looks down on ordinary Americans and feels entitled to force puberty blockers on their children and make them say Latinx.
The twinned idea is that billionaires, private equity kings, and tech lords are not elites but powerful defenders of regular people. They prove this with their hostility to transgender people and civil service employees. The deplorables narrative equates right-wing positions with triumphant wealth and heartland Main Street.
I felt no love for Clinton’s policy positions. However, when you put both halves of her statement together, was Clinton actually wrong about MAGA?
She was saying that MAGA voters were a mix of the desperate who wanted a change candidate and the bigoted who after eight years of a Black First Family wanted a white candidate to ride to the rescue. These days, there’s widespread agreement that Trump voters are a mix of the two positions.
Many have pointed out that Trump voters weren’t getting dogwhistle racism but the explicit kind. This was even more true in 2024. At his big final rally at Madison Square Garden, the comedian Tony Hutchcliffe famously said, “there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson remarked that Kamala Harris is “just so impressive as the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” He was echoing Trump’s own refrain of calling her “slow,” and a “low IQ person.”
As far as I know, the media never found a Trump voter who said, “I just love his tariff policy, but I can’t vote for him now because he keeps calling the Black woman ‘low-IQ.’ It takes a special kind of pocketbook voter to support a racist oligarch for his supposed economic populism. Trump has tens of millions of them. Hillary Clinton was making this same point.
In his 2024 election debrief, Keith Boykin said, “Let’s be real. Trump doesn’t represent policy. He represents cultural resentment against the changing America.” Boykin doesn’t call MAGA voters deplorables, but he’s making this same point.
There’s social psychological research that backs this up. The book Authoritarian Nightmare appeared during Trump’s 2020 campaign. Former Nixon counsel John Dean partnered with social psychologist Bob Altemeyer to tie Trump partisans to high scores on an instrument that generates a Right-Wing Authoritarian (RWA) scale. It has been in use since the 1970s.
Dean and Altemeyer were able to combine this scale with a Monmouth University Polling Institute survey of Trump voters. Their conclusion is memorable.
The verdicts are in. (1) Donald Trump’s supporters are, as a group, highly authoritarian compared to most Americans. (2) They are also highly prejudiced compared to most Americans. (3) You can explain the prejudice in Trump’s supporters almost entirely by their authoritarianism. (4) Authoritarianism is a strongly organized set of attitudes in America that will prove very difficult to reduce and control. . . . The pillars of Trump’s base, white evangelicals and white undereducated males are highly authoritarian and prejudiced. . . . The connections among prejudice, authoritarianism and support for Donald Trump are so strong that no other independent factor can be as important in supporting his re-election. There just is not much left to be explained, which is a highly unusual situation in the social sciences, but that is where the data have taken us. Ask a very complicated question: Who are Trump’s staunch supporters? Get a very simple answer: Prejudiced authoritarians, and a few others.( Dean and Altemeyer 2020, 224–25).
My point is not so much that Hillary was right, or that MAGA voters are deplorable, or that tens of millions of Trump voters willingly jumped into Trump’s basket of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and Islamophobia.
My points are, first, that some large percentage of Trump voters vote on the basis of bias, fake knowledge, destroyed knowledge, persecution mania, or epistemic violence.
Second, authoritarianism validates false knowledge as true knowledge simply because its source is the leader. It prevents learning, both individually and collectively.
And third, most of the media –and the left—treat their positions as authentic working-class consciousness rather than as what they are, bullshit that undermines of the possibility of political knowledge.
I find this free pass massively patronizing of Trump voters. Most are legitimately angry about housing costs, food prices, et al., and are statistically almost as likely as Democrats to think corporate America has too much power. Yet they have perverse, backward ideas about how to fix real problems, nearly all of which will make the problems worse while enabling the persecution of millions of people. And yet most pundits, policy wonks, and Democratic politicians do not hold them to the same standards of political thinking that the rest of us have to live by at work, at home, in public meetings, or on the bus ride every single day.
This inhibition is an artifact of the right’s teplorables Taboo. “If you think my racist or sexist or stupid economic position is wrong, that’s the same as saying I’m a deplorable, which makes you elitist and wrong and out of touch with regular people.” Instead of being mercilessly critiqued--not for who they are but for what they think, Trump voters are often granted carte blanche authenticity and legitimacy. A lot of commentators are scared not to. The deplorable taboo immunizes the Trump voter from criticism and from ordinary self-reflection.
I’m not saying the left should match Trump’s insult politics and call Trumpers too dumb to live, to name the URL of my first blog 20 years ago. These are some of my relatives we’re talking about.
But I am saying we should use the teacher’s approach to the knowledge gulf teachers face every day. Respect for and dialogue with the person, relentless dispute of their bad or lacking information and their bad and destructive ideas. And the building of a public ethos that expects this.
It’s the age-old “love the sinner, hate the sin.” Clinton may have sounded more like “hate the sinner”—and the sinner is often subject to overt coercion. But Democrats have paid enough for the condescension in her remark. The left now has to be fully in the business of contesting terrible Trumper thought.
If we don’t do this full-scale attack on Trumpian epistemology starting with the most popular parts, the left will fail in its renewed post-election efforts to speak directly to the real concerns of the American working class.
I particularly like Hasan Piker’s version, blocked quoted here, and Faiz Shakir’s version. But all this getting real won’t change anything unless we address the underlying knowledge crisis. Their fake knowledge needs to be engaged, attacked, replaced and its foundations exposed.
If we don't do this, we will also fail in the ongoing effort to replace oligarchic governance with complex systems to deal with our polycrises.
Trump revives the Republican's ancient roots as the party of the small businessman who might soon become a platform mogul—Joe the plumber, the mattress store owner who builds a national franchise, Elon Musk. The key feature of this type is direct and absolute rule over their company, then generalized to the entire society. You don’t need Hitler for this kind of authoritarian sovereignty as a way of managing systems. This is standard practice for the American CEO.
Democrats have become the party of the well-educated and also of public spending on knowledge economy infrastructure. The Democrats are wrong about many things—their entire foreign policy needs to be burned to the ground—but they are right about the fact that only complex systems and distributed authority have any chance of dealing with climate change, monopoly, inequality, racism, public health, housing, and the other scourges that are unraveling U.S. society.
To get any of this, a new paradigm for collective action needs to be built, and it’s going to require the replacement of Trumpian (anti) knowledge structures.
Academia will also need to enter the fight. In an upcoming post, I’ll talk about universities, (bad) democratic higher ed policy and MAGA voters.
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