A couple of weeks ago, in the immediate aftermath of the United States election, I remarked that despite losing by a margin of only about one per cent, the Democrats “on that basis … are now being urged to overturn their whole approach to politics.” Since then there has been a further avalanche of commentary to the effect that Democrats and the media need to reach out to Trump voters, understand their concerns and meet them half way, or perhaps further.
Of course all voters should be listened to, and any party wanting to win a majority should be sensitive to the concerns of those who are not currently supporting it. But much of this advice is simplistic and it is often given in bad faith. Rather than explaining why, I can just refer you to this piece at Literary Hub by the wonderful Rebecca Solnit.
What’s particularly interesting about this is that it was written four years ago, after the Democrats won the election, demonstrating that the same advice is being given, win or lose. Solnit recently reposted it on her Facebook page,* pointing out that “parts of [it] seem[] timely again.” It also echoes some points that I’ve been making for a while, albeit much more eloquently. Extracts below, but it’s worth reading the whole thing.
These pieces treated [Trump voters] as both an exotic species and people it was our job to understand, understand being that word that means both to comprehend and to grant some sort of indulgence to. …
The implication is the usual one: we—urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. … When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. …
There’s also often a devil’s bargain buried in all this, that you flatter and, yeah, respect these white people who think this country is theirs by throwing other people under the bus—by disrespecting immigrants and queer people and feminists and their rights and views. And you reinforce that constituency’s sense that they matter more than other people when you pander like this …
Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
… If half of us believe the earth is flat, we do not make peace by settling on it being halfway between round and flat. Those of us who know it’s round will not recruit them through compromise. We all know that you do better bringing people out of delusion by being kind and inviting than by mocking them, but that’s inviting them to come over, which is not the same thing as heading in their direction.
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* Thanks to Bill King for drawing it to my attention.
The World is Not Enough 
The problrem is, which that writer fails to acknolwedge, is that if you don’t listen to people, they turn to people who *will*.
It doesn’t help that the university educated – a bigger minority in Australia since Whitlam and Hawke’s reforms, but still a minority — and even more so in the States – insists that they are “ordinary people, too” and that the “one percent” is the only elite.
The intellectual elite is still an elite and it does not matter what your class background is — if you went to uni and have a white-collar job and live in an affulent area, you are part of an elite.
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Bravo!
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