The Undecideds

(I don’t typically write about politics here, but these days it can be hard to find headspace for anything else).

The trouble with me is I don't have a finely tuned sense of outrage, ready to blisterpop at the slightest provocation.  It’s not that I don’t get mad at calculated hypocrisy, the viciousness of willful ignorance, the pleasures some people take in attacking and demeaning others.  But I'm always making excuses for people, insistently tugged into trying to see things from their side.  It's hard for me to see people as evil.  It's hard for me to hate.  Not impossible.  But I rarely have the kind of clarifying outraged anger that fuels certainty and righteousness.  I'm always second-guessing myself.  It drove my first wife nuts.  She was a firm believer in the clarity of good and evil (although she was constantly re-assigning people to either paddock).  I see it all in the shimmering shades of gray.

After thirty years in the American South it’s impossible for me to neatly demonize the neighbors and colleagues and acquaintances who are Trump voters, Trump supporters (the latter being a subset of the former).  For the most part, just like anybody else, they seem to me generally good people, trying to do right by their families and in their communities.  Their sins are venal, the faults and omissions and slights that dog our days, driven by our pettiness, prides and fears.  They love their kids, often they’ll go out of their way to help others, their fears of what the “Democrat party” wants to do to the country are genuinely felt.  They want stability, security, and a life free from material worry.  They want to belong.  They suffer from the nostalgia affliction that affects so many, a belief that things were much better in the (imaginary) past, when the rules were clear and everybody (mostly) behaved and children respected their elders and yadda yadda yadda.  According to my lights, these beliefs lead them into making bad choices and doing bad things, but I can’t think of them as bad people.  It’s not that I won’t; it’s that I can’t.  It’s those damned shades of gray.

For all the keyboard ranting and tooth gnashing about our polarized electorate, the hard core MAGA – those who are all in for Trump, consider it obvious the 2020 election was stolen, rank immigration and discrimination against white people as the most serious of the problems the nation faces, have no doubt that the elites are engaged in a war on Christianity, and that the Democrats hate America – are no more than 15% of the adult population.¹ These are the repeat rally goers who love the camaraderie, the sense of belonging and validation.  They love the outlandish rhetoric, they love triggering the libs and insulting the press.  They love that their guy is a tough guy and they thrill to the violent tones in the rhetoric, even though they’re no more likely to believe in using violence than is the population at large.  But even here in deeply Republican suburban Alabama, few of our neighbors are decked out in Trump regalia (lawn signs are noticeably fewer than four years ago).  Their vote is just as likely the habit of a couple generations spent opposing Democrats on principle as it is Trump’s “policies”.   They're mostly wishing the chaos would end and things could just go back to the way they were.  However they imagine that to be.

There was always the loud mouth on the block, bitching about the stupidity of the government, showing up to make a scene at the city council meeting, writing angry letters to the local paper, ranting about crime and the laziness of kids nowadays.  No respect.  But he was generally isolated, tolerated and teased at the local bar, or avoided and ostracized if he was too mean.  In the social media age he’s no longer isolated.  Geography isn’t the barrier it was.  He’s found so many people who think just he does! He loves them.  He’s no longer alone.  He’s empowered and justified.  Now he’s part of a movement.  And because the people in the movement are loud and demonstrative and colorful, they get lots of attention from the press (because they’re easy to write clickbait stories about), and it can feel like they’re far more numerous than they are.  Stay in your bubble and it becomes easy to believe that nearly half the country is made up of racist evangelicals ready to burn the country down in order to save it from Haitian dog-eaters and Drag Queen sex traffickers. 

“I don’t understand how anybody can still be undecided!  You see what Trump is like!  How could anyone possibly consider voting for him?”  I see this a lot.  It’s not a plea for enlightenment.  It’s an expression of mystification and anger that anyone can look at the two candidates, their histories, rhetoric, plans, and associates and still be unsure who would be best for the country.  To those who despise Trump, the notion of undecidedness is even more perplexing than those who are all in.  Why can’t they see!?

Those who live and breathe politics forget that most people don’t.  I didn’t until the early eighties when I moved to DC and started reading the local paper every day.  In DC, the local news is the White House, Congress, and the administrative state.  I've been a politics junkie ever since.  But most people aren’t.  Those who now feel passionately invested in the election generally have only a vague notion of how the government and the economy actually works.²  They’re not making decisions based on a cool and analytical examination of the complexities of cause and effect filtered through a knowledgeable appreciation for the limitations of presidential power and the challenges of working with a divided congress.  Few people ever have.

What do people want from a President?  What do they expect?  I think often of Lyndon Johnson’s transactional relationship with the truth, a disregard for objective fact that rivals Trump’s.  The list of his war crimes is long.  He was abusive to colleagues and the press, had numerous affairs during his long marriage, was outrageously egotistical and petty.  And yet, aside (arguably) from FDR, he did more to expand the American ideal to more of its citizens than any other president in the 20^th century.  Jimmy Carter was among the most honorable and intelligent to ever occupy the office, but he was miserably ineffective.  With that in mind, I can just about understand how so many people can look at Trump’s behavior through that aforementioned nostalgia and not find it disqualifying.

Let me be clear.  I’m not making excuses.  Trump is a deeply fucked-up and pathetic human being.  His history persuades me that if he regains the White House, his actions will cause terrible suffering to millions of people both directly, through the policies he will attempt to implement and indirectly, through the permission it will give others to demean, belittle, and physically attack those who’ve been judged to be “the other”.  It grieves me that millions of Americans are deluded enough to believe that another Trump presidency would be good for the country as a whole.  It would certainly be good for some.  Unfortunately, it would not turn out to be good for many of his devoted fans and it saddens me that so many of them don't see this.

(Sure, I might be wrong.  I can’t even type that straightforward of a paragraph without the what-ifs and what-abouts and have-you-considereds smokily wafting around my head, tinging my convictions with doubt.) 

How do people make decisions anyway?  I long ago came to understand that in most of the big decisions in our lives we don’t rationally assess the pros and cons against some mental map of what we think might be best for us.  We might go days or even weeks pondering our options, agonizing over the uncertainties, the tragedies certain to befall us if we make the wrong choice.  Eventually we wake up knowing what we’re going to do even though there’s no moment of decision and we can’t articulate how we got there.  But the Rubicon’s been crossed and off we march, muddy boots and all.  We figure out how to justify it to ourselves after the fact.³ 

It's an illusion that elections are won and lost on the basis of carefully considered analyses of the pros and cons of well-developed policy positions.  The press has been hammering the Harris campaign for not doing more in-depth interviews, not articulating sophisticated policy positions, not putting her in the position of facing tough questions from hard-hitting journalists.  That’s what the press needs.  They need that stuff to write about, but the campaign understands that’s not what’s going to win or lose the election.  In These Truths, Jill Lepore sketches the parallel rise of product advertising and propaganda in the middle of the 20^th century.  Political consultants are well aware that the same techniques that convince shoppers to buy these products rather than those are the essential tools for winning elections.  Despite the endless calls for rational debate on the issues, that is not now, nor has it ever been what pushes the electoral needle in one direction rather than another.  Trump’s political genius has been his deep understanding of this and his shameless willingness to go all in.  Vance was offended by the fact-checking at the VP debate (“The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!”)⁴ and Trump pulled out of the 60 Minutes interview over the same objection.  They’re in the business of creating stories that draw attention to the issues they want people glued to.  The more outrageous and bombastic the claims, the more effective the manipulation.  Just look at the packaging on grocery store shelves, the whack-a-mole fruitless efforts by the FDA to root out deceptive advertising.  What shocks (some people) about T&V’s lies is how blatant they are.  Their fans, who’ve long since come to believe (with some justification) that this is what all politicians always do anyway find this tactical openness refreshing.

Media professionals are intensely interested in trying to figure out the undecideds.  Here's Viviana, 23, mother of twin six month old boys.  “Formula is expensive, clothing is expensive, diapers are expensive, rent is expensive. You name it. It’s all expensive.”  She blames the Democrats, because the way she remembers it, when Trump was President, things weren’t so expensive.⁵  She misses the way the world used to be.  She doesn't trust Harris, doesn't know much about her, doesn’t feel a connection.  Like most Americans she has little detailed understanding of how government works or how the economy operates or what the powers of the presidency are.  Maybe, if Trump were President again, prices would go back to what they were.  Maybe the wars would go away.  Maybe that's enough to make her vote for him.  Or maybe Harris will say a thing, one thing, that will resonate.  She doesn't know what that thing might be, but she'll know when she hears it.  And maybe that will be enough to make her vote for Harris.  She doesn't know.  But the election is getting closer and she feels a responsibility to vote.  Unless, when the day arrives, the uncertainty of her life and the demands of the boys will be enough for her to decide that this time she can skip it.  What do any of them really care about people like her anyway?

This kind of ignorance cuts across economic classes, although it skews towards the less well-off and those with less formal education.  Still, it's easy to emerge into your mid-twenties with degrees from elite universities and have little conception of how government works and how the majority of your fellow citizens live.  Sam Bankman-Fried’s widely quoted skepticism about books⁶ may be an extreme example, but I’ve no doubt there were many well-educated heads nodding in agreement when the quote started making the rounds.

Combine a lack of understanding of the actual mechanics of government and economics with a very thin knowledge of history, nostalgia for an imaginary uncomplicated past, a quite natural desire for security and certainty about the future and a resultant desire for a strong individual “who alone can fix it” and you don’t need to throw in racism, misogyny, and a taste for casual cruelty to see why people might be vulnerable to the siren call of a master marketer.

At least, I don’t.  I can’t help craving empathy for the rank and file Trump voters and the undecideds who are honestly trying to work their way to the right decision.  Even when the "right" decision seems so obvious to me.  It seems just as obvious to the MAGA faithful.  I feel mostly pity for the undecideds, for whom none of it is obvious at all.

Most people aren't interested in that sort of empathy.  I get that.  I'm not trying to get anybody to think the way I do;⁷ I'm trying to better understand why I think the way I do.  It's certainly not that I have any ambiguity in my own mind about the right course of action in this monumental election year.  I'm not suggesting that the Trumpists "have a point".  But here in the red state South, I can’t help seeing that people can, and usually are, kind and well-meaning,⁸ generally honest and caring, wanting the best for their families and their neighbors, not consciously racist or intentionally cruel, but still fervently believing that Trump is the president that we need in these scary and uncertain times.

Like most people, I long for it to be over.  But there’s no telling when it will be.  Certainly not on November 6.  If Trump loses, it’s quite clear that he and his faithful won’t accept the results.  How it will unfold is far from clear.  Maybe the prosecutions of the J6 insurrectionists will have a deterrent effect and there won’t be a day as horrific as the assault on the Capitol.  But there’s going to be a lot of pent up rage.  Maybe it’ll be worse. 

If he wins, he’s promised his followers retribution and vengeance and here, at least, I see no reason not to take him at his word.  He may have disavowed Project 2025, but he’ll still staff his administration with the people in that database, all ambitious loyalists first and foremost.  There will be more state laws restricting access to books and mandating bible study.  Civil liberty protections will be weakened.  Regulations designed to protect the food supply, the environment, and job safety will be systematically eviscerated.  His plans for mass deportations are logistically and financially impossible, but that won’t stop him from creating a humanitarian catastrophe.  His plans for massive tariffs will certainly plunge the country into the recession that the Biden administration has miraculously managed to avoid.  Permission will have been given for the worst of his followers to unleash the worst of their behavior.  Hate crimes will escalate.

And then what use will my empathy for the good people on my street be? 

We all struggle to make do with the way we’re made, that original clay pinched and rolled and pulled by the people and circumstances we rub and ricochet against, believing and disbelieving according to our values, trimmed by our appetites, looking for a better life.  Come February, when we begin to find out what kind of government we’ve ended up with, and what the winners and losers and less-than-innocent bystanders will try to make of it, there I’ll be, still trying to see the best in each of us.  And always in the background, like the low hum of the speed bikes hurtling along the highway across the lake, sounds that I only hear in the middle of the night, the inescapable murmur of Hannah Arendt’s grimly terrifying phrase.

1. “Progressives” on the left are even fewer.  Pew estimates about 6% of the adult population.  I lean in that direction, although I’m more of a free speech absolutist than seems to be the case for the typical political progressive these days.

2. This vagueness is widespread.  At the time he was elected, the senior Senator from Alabama could not name the three branches of government.  There’s little evidence that his knowledge has increased significantly in the nearly four years he’s been in office.  And then there’s the never-disappointing MTG (no need to point to the latest example – by the time you read this, she’ll have uttered another one).

3. One of my all-time favorite Dylan lyrics (written w/ Sam Shepard) comes from Brownsville Girl – “You always said people don’t do what they believe in, / they just do what’s most convenient, then they repent.”

4. The moderator corrected Vance by pointing out that the Haitians in Springfield are here legally.

5. That she was 19 and not trying to take care of two babies doesn’t, apparently, factor into her remembrance.

6. “I don't want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that”.  Made at the peak of his glory and having nothing to do, I’m sure, with his 25 year prison sentence.

7. Well, yes, maybe a little bit.

8. I’m reminded of what Butler says of Ernest’s mother in The Way of All Flesh, “If it was not such an awful thing to say of anyone, I should say that she meant well.”