Changing minds
Katha Pollitt asks some pointed questions about the beliefs of others.
For almost three years now, reporters have been begging tired farmers and miners eating their pancakes at Josie’s Diner in Smallville, Nebraska, to say they’ve seen the light. They never do. White evangelical women sneaking away from the Republican Party make for a good story—but they didn’t stop Ted Cruz from getting 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in Texas.
After Trump took the White House, and even after political scientists and pollsters figured out that many Trump supporters were not out-of-work Rust Belters but just your basic well-off Republicans, there was an orgy of self-criticism among Democrats and progressives. Somehow, those voters were our fault; we had neglected them, disrespected them, not felt their pain.
Democrats and progressives tend to be masochistic that way. Republicans and conservatives don’t, so much (except when it comes to the fetus), because of The Invisible Hand. The Hand does everything for the best, so compassion is not just a waste of energy, it’s also a slope down to socialism and economic armageddon.
Another version of this idea is to call on progressive white women to convert other white women who support Trump. Nobody calls on white men to convert white men, because everyone assumes that’s impossible, but for some reason, white women who hate abortion and taxes and Obamacare, who want to “build the wall” and “lock her up,” are supposed to be pliable—and it’s the duty of liberal white women to expiate their own racism by bringing them around.
Some suggestions about what the some reason might be? Women are all Mommy, supposed to take care of everything. Women are seen as the sex whose duty it is to succor everyone and be Most Enlightened. Women are also seen as the sex that can be told what to do. This of course also does much to explain why there is so much ranting and raving about “TERFs” when there is no equivalent ranting and raving about the male equivalent (which is so neglected it doesn’t even have an acronym). Women are compassionate Mommy, and women are also to blame for everything that goes wrong.
The assumption is that we have the right ideas; we just haven’t been conveying them persuasively enough to win the other side over. But let me ask a question: When was the last time someone persuaded you to change your worldview? I have written this column for over 20 years, and I doubt I’ve brought more than a handful of people to my way of thinking.
It depends on what kind of point of view we mean, though. Big general category, like left v right, the last time was more or less never, but there are smaller, more particular subcategories, on which I can change my view (worldview probably doesn’t apply) at a moment’s notice. Left v right is what Katha’s talking about here, but at the same time, changes in smaller particulars can add up to shifts even there. Several famous lifelong Republicans have stopped identifying as such thanks to Trump – James Comey and Richard Painter, for two, and there are others. There are also people like David Frum and Bill Kristol who remain Republicans and conservatives (I think) but exercise much of their punditry on explaining what’s wrong about Trump.
So why is it so hard to believe that white women who voted for Trump are mostly as fixed in their views as you are? They voted for him for dozens of reasons: to fit in with their family and community, to preserve or gain status, to piss off the libtards, to ally with their menfolk, to keep MS-13 from killing their children, to bring back jobs stolen by Mexico and China, to keep taxes low and black children out of their schools, or because it’s what Jesus wants. You may think their beliefs are bigoted and ill-informed and illogical—which they are. You may marvel that women who think the polite and scandal-free Barack Obama is the Antichrist can believe that foul-mouthed, abusive Donald Trump is God’s instrument, like King David. What you are not going to do is make them see it differently by reminding them that at least 15 women have accused Trump of a range of sexual offenses.
It may be impossible to change their minds, but it could be possible to get explanations, I think, and I wouldn’t mind getting some explanations, because even after all this time I still don’t get it.
Another set of minds I have found to be intractable – left-wing anti-Hillary voters who voted for someone else to not vote for Hillary. Left-wing types who believe that a candidate has to be perfect, and that being a thousand million times better than Trump is not enough. Very, very hard. Facts don’t sway them, because they know the facts. Hillary had e-mails. Hillary wore pantsuits. Hillary wasn’t likable. And the worst of all, there was essentially no difference between Hillary and Trump. WTF?
I can have my mind changed by persuasion, but only if I’m open to having it changed. I have to be ready. I have to be willing. And that is why I have had some major shifts – right to left (yes, I started out with many Republican ideas, mostly because all I had ever heard were from my Republican parents and family members; I shifted my views somewhere between the age of 10 and 16. It was a process, and no one person could claim to have shifted my view, it was many people with much persuasion and many facts). I shifted from true-blue Jesus believer to hard-line atheist. I switched from believing in ghosts to skepticism.
It is possible, and that’s why I talk to people, because we can’t know what point that person is in their life. They might be ready. It might be they need only one more push. But I don’t beat myself over the head if I fail, and I do not see it as my job to fix everything that has gotten messed up. And I resent being treated as though, since I am a white woman, I am by default to blame for Trump. My husband never gets told that (and he isn’t a Trumpist, either, as you can probably guess from the fact that I am still with him). I don’t know any of my white male friends who get harangued about Trump, even though the odds are much higher that they are Trump voters (they are not, but with the percentage of white males who voted for Trump, it’s much more reasonable than with white females, who only voted about 52% for Trump).
It’s all explained here:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/
On forever chasing after rural, blue collar voters: David Frum recently pointed out that more Americans do yoga than watch NASCAR, and more are employed as yoga instructors than as coal miners, yet somehow NASCAR fans are the “real Americans,” and coal mining is treated as some essential way of life that must be preserved. Of course, some of this is probably due to the non-representative quirks of the political system: a lot of those yoga practitioners are clustered in solid Democratic districts or states and therefore aren’t considered politically relevant.
On why women are supposed to be the persuadable ones: perhaps it’s a cultural bias towards thinking that men have well-thought-out, consistent political ideologies, whereas women don’t care as much about politics (don’t do thinky!) and therefore supposedly have more fickle views. I remember reading supposedly serious, thoughtful political pundits musing over whether the good looks of Dan Quayle or John Edwards or whoever would “help with women voters,” as if women voters approach the presidency like it’s a season of The Bachelorette.
On the “hard left” as described by iknklast: it seems to me that these are people who see voting, or political advocacy in general, as a sort of moral purity test. They love being able to say “well,*I* didn’t vote for him/her.” They might prefer Clinton to Trump in the abstract sense that sure, if it could happen without them having to vote for her, that would be fine, but if they had to vote to make that happen, they would actually prefer having Trump as president rather than stain their soul by voting for the “lesser evil.” There is no public policy that matters more to (e.g.) Glenn Greenwald than making sure that people know that Greenwald is morally superior to them.
Well, I’ll tell you something, at the risk of causing you all to view me with profound contempt: in 2000 I voted for Nader. I did it knowing it wouldn’t cost Gore any electoral votes (because of where I live), and I don’t think I would have if it would have (if you follow me), but I did, and it wasn’t because I wanted to be pure. It was because the Democrats were always saying, tacitly and sometimes explicitly, that we had nowhere else to go. It was because of that and the fact that Bill Clinton had said money should buy you access and because of welfare “reform.” It was because of the way the Democrats ALWAYS throw sops to the right while the Republicans NEVER throw sops to the left. It was because of the Overton window. It was because both Clintons had contempt for people who were appalled by welfare “reform,” including people who were friends of theirs.
@OB #4:
I also voted for Bernie in the primary but Hillary in the general for much the same reason because, well, Oregon…
I still sent Hillary a thank you note for Xmas.
Yeah, I wouldn’t include in my description above those people who will vote third party in certain strategically justifiable situations.
Some suggestions about what the some reason might be?
I think it is simply because in our culture, men can have different traits, being the default person. For a woman, the main defining trait is “being a woman”, so all women are automatically in the same category. It’s like character classes in role-playing or computer games: You have a defining class and some modifying secondary attributes. The defining class is what makes you you and is thus unchangeable, secondary attributes are more malleable. The defining class of a man in this context is “democratic” or “republican”, with additional (and more changeable) secondary traits, but for a women the defining trait is “being a woman”, so “democratic” or “republican” are secondary traits and are thus more easy to change.
Yes, that too.