There are three questions which I don’t think that people are sufficiently distinguishing between, and I think distinguishing between them will make discourse about the election much clearer. They are:
- What are the characteristics of Trump’s base, his most fervent supporters?
- What are the characteristics of the average Trump voter?
- What are the characteristics of the people who pushed Trump over the edge, the ones that caused him to win?
I’m not sure anyone really knows the answer to #3 yet. I expect in a couple months Nate Silver will write a blog post about it and then I will have the answer. However, I think that it’s unlikely that #3 will provide any earth-shaking revelations for the average political junkie, as opposed to advice like “try to choose candidates people like” and “campaign in Wisconsin.”
Either way, the outcome of this election is embarrassing to both Republicans and Democrats. For Republicans, in an election in which they had every structural advantage, they barely eked out a win against a woman who’s been the right-wing Public Enemy #1 for twenty-five years. For Democrats, they lost to Donald Trump.
As for #2: the average Trump voter is the same as the average Republican voter in any other election. Given Trump’s record unfavorables, they probably weren’t super-enthusiastic about Trump (any more than people on the Democrat side were, as a whole, super-enthusiastic about Hillary). However, they probably didn’t want to waste their vote on a third party. Trump had some good policies, and probably the Republican elite will be able to help him in spite of his incompetence. And they despise Hillary; many Republicans would vote for a paper-bag puppet over Hillary Clinton. So they held their noses and voted for the lesser of two evils.
(A post I can’t find told Democrats to imagine choosing between Kanye West and Dick Cheney, which I think is accurate. [ETA: it’s here, thanks Amelia and Linch.])
With regards to how they could vote for Trump in spite of his repeated sexual assaults: think about your support for Bill Clinton. There you go. That isn’t even hard to understand.
With regards to #1: I believe that the evidence suggests that Trump’s base is motivated by ethnocentrism and white identity politics.
I think it is a problem that Republican voters who care about white identity politics seem willing to elect incompetent people. While identity politics also plays a role in the Democratic nominating process, at least identity-politics-motivated voters on the left seem to favor qualified centrists with a slight penchant for war crimes. I do not know how to get identity-politics-motivated voters on the right to share this preference; I think this is mostly a project for moderate Republicans, because I’m pretty sure Trump’s base is not going to listen to me.
I believe that reducing ethnocentrism is a good idea in general, but I’m not sure how tractable it is, particularly in the next four years. I suspect one possible strategy might be for centrist Republicans to play more explicitly to white identity politics while overall having fairly moderate views, in the same way that Obama played to black identity politics while overall having fairly moderate views. As long as we have white identity politics– which, again, I’m not sure how easy it is to eliminate in general, much less within one presidential term– it’s important to reduce the harm it might cause.
While Trump’s base is fairly upset about anti-racist and feminist activism, I do not think that changing anti-racist and feminist activism is necessarily a good way to get Trump voters not to vote for Trump. I think that Trump’s base’s primary objection to people like me is not to our tone but to our beliefs. No matter how politely we respectively speak, Trump voters object to the presence of large numbers of immigrants, and I object to people deporting my friends, sometimes to places where they’re in danger. These are incompatible goals, and they are likely to be quite angry at me about them (as well as I at them).
Thing of Things 
Surely it should be: “With regards to #1: I believe that the evidence suggests…”, not “#3”
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Thanks, fixed.
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Has the chance of nuclear war significantly increased with Trump’s election?
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I think the sample is too small for it to be significant…
More seriously, though, it depends on what you are talking about when you say “nuclear war”. If you only call it nuclear war if the nukes fly both ways, I’d go with ‘decreased’. Trump is less likely to antagonize Putin, and the Chinese government is way too sane to start shit.
On the other hand, the chance of nukes being used tactically in a conventional war, or used against someone who is not quite in a position to shoot back (like North Korea or Iran) has probably increased, though not by much.
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Oh, one consideration I forgot: The most dangerous thing about Trump is probably him being wishy-washy about NATO commitment to defend the Baltic states. If Putin takes that as a “Go ahead!”, but some other nuclear power like Britain or France will have none of it, the nukes may start flying. Same if Iran or Egypt have reason to doubt his commitment to defend Israel.
In both cases, it would not be him shooting first, though.
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Changing rhetoric might not help with Trump’s base, but it might help with the marginal voter. The increasing acceptance of homosexuality and marijuana use seems to come from a change in their association from deviant practices to compatible with the bourgeois lifestyle. Maybe the same can be done in other areas. Instead of celebrating diversity, emphasize commonality. Instead of a variety of cultures and perspectives, talk about how women or immigrants participate in and/or aspire to something within the space of archetypal middle-class life, security in their person and possessions, and so on, but are inhibited by cultural practices and sometimes legal barriers. Play up the “they’re like us, so why are they being treated differently?” angle. In the process, it also stretches the Overton Window of what “like us” includes.
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I do not think it is obvious that the concerns that motivate Trump’s base are the same as the concerns that motivate the marginal Trump voter. In fact, I would be rather surprised if that were the case.
If you mean peeling off marginal members of Trump’s base– those who care about white identity politics, but only a little bit– I am not sure that playing up the desire to be middle-class is the most effective tactic. The fact that many people of color aspire to a middle-class life is incorporated into in some of their grievances: for instance, they are upset because they believe it is hard for many white people to find a job because employers are hiring minorities instead, a belief that sort of requires knowing that minorities would like to have middle-class jobs.
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I agree. My impression comes from the pieces about Political Correctness Gone Mad people – “I voted for Obama and/or was apathetic, but then SJ came along and I voted for Trump to strike a blow against it”, or something like that. There are also the people for whom concerns about immigration were on the back burner until the flames of “this country will be different” were stoked by the SJ left and the nationalist right.
I agree that it wouldn’t do as much about people who are mainly concerned about economic competition from immigration (maybe for them we should emphasize the “high-skilled immigrants create jobs” angle), but it’d reduce cultural concerns.
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@Blacktrance:
I have no evidence, but my impression is that the sort of people who interact enough with SJ to develop a distaste for it to vote Trump would live in non-swing Blue states.
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I basically agree with the things that you’ve said here. If I might add one factor?
I think Trump owes an enormous debt of gratitude to the ladies of the Pro Life faction. They are one-issue voters in a way that I don’t think gets understood enough, outside of republican circles. They are probably the other half of the answer to #1, with the first half being his identity politics believers.
They are also kind of a reverse answer to #3. That is, not what broke Trump at the last minute and pushed him across the line, but what didn’t break Clinton at the last minute and push her over. Trump beat Clinton in terms of white women, despite his rather colorful quotes, and I think that’s mostly down to abortion.
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I agree with this, though I’d group pro-life women with the “held their noses and voted for the lesser evil” crowd, not his fervent supporters. There’s a significant percentage of the Republican party that refuses to back democrats solely because democrats support abortion, no matter how abhorrent the Republican candidate may be. This motivation was especially strong this year, given the open supreme court seat and aging liberal justices. That said, it’s always there, and barring a candidate that is absolutely and very obviously evil in other ways, a large percentage of pro-lifers will always vote for the most pro-life candidate. I have no idea what the left can do about this, because I don’t think either side is particularly willing to compromise on this issue. I would say that includes me, but I voted for Clinton this time around, so apparently it doesn’t.
In my defense, I don’t think Trump actually cares about life issues at all, and I don’t think he’ll prioritize them when appointing justices. Still, he says he does, and for some people that’s enough.
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The way I had it explained to me, slightly paraphrased, was that she “didn’t have to believe Trump is pro-life. She believes Clinton is pro-choice. Trump might not be.”
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I think there is a compromise:
Woman’s choice first trimester, life in prison with no parole for anyone involved with late term abortions (or you can advocate the death penalty if you feel like being ironic.)
Then decide this with a referendum and not a court decision so that everyone can feel they had their say and a reversal won’t depend on the composition of SCOTUS.
You don’t even have to mention that in every pro-choice country in the entire world, first trimester has proven to be more than adequate so that there won’t even be a demand for late term abortions.
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Walter – This is more or less what my grandparents told me. Trump doesn’t explicitly support abortion, and Clinton does. If one candidate supports a horrific evil and the other doesn’t, you can’t vote for the horrific evil, no matter how many flaws the alternative may have. (I believe the phrase “for all have sinned” was used when Trump’s various personal shortcomings were brought up.)
This isn’t an effective argument from my perspective, because abortion is already the law of the land. Apathy is effectively support for the status quo, except insofar as Trump needs to pretend not to be apathetic in order to appeal to voters.
Fossegrimen – I suspect this would very obviously not be an acceptable compromise if you genuinely believed that abortion at any stage was morally equivalent to murder. Most of the pro-life movement does. Some are inconsistent enough to believe that murder is acceptable if the pregnancy causes extreme distress to the mother (ie, people who believe abortion is acceptable in cases of rape or incest), but very few believe that first-trimester abortions are acceptable in general. We focus on third trimester abortions because the horror is more obvious to those who are not already pro-life, and because preventing any number of deaths is still good, but most of us are aware that they already make up a very small percentage of abortions, and most of us see no moral difference between unborn children at various stages of development. Not all pro-lifers believe that life begins at conception, but I suspect that the vast majority would assign equal moral worth to the child before the end of the first trimester.
Possible compromises are things like the government more widely distributing contraception. Even this is controversial, as much of the pro-life movement (particularly the Catholic branch of it) also takes issue with contraception and believes it to be both a symptom and contributing cause of various social ills. I think most people would prefer it to widespread, socially accepted murder, but some will be unwilling to support it even then.
I’m not using the word “murder” in order to attack anyone in particular, but because I want to impress upon you the importance of the issue. If we lived in a society where parents were allowed to kill their children until age 18, and where parents frequently made use of this power, we would not all try to pass a measure saying that parents should only be allowed to kill children below age 10, and then say that we had won the fight when only children below ten were in danger. We would continue working until all children were both legally protected and socially perceived as beings with as much inherent moral worth as adults.
The pro-life movement will react similarly. I understand if you don’t agree with us, but it won’t help you to underestimate the importance we place on the issue.
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I agree with Fossegrimen that the debate in the US seems very ‘all or nothing.’ A lot of moderate people see abortion as the lesser evil compared to banning it, but still see it as a pretty big evil. IMO, a big marketing problem for the pro-abortion side is that many see them as being happy with abortion.
In many EU countries, the squabbling has gone from ‘should abortion be banned’ to ‘what should the limits be,’ which is a much safer debate for the pro-choice side (which in turn depoliticizes the issue, which makes it even safer).
Some things that can be done to change the debate to this:
– Put less emphasis on ‘choice’. This word is tribal and inherently appeals to individualists and creates unhappy feelings in ‘law & order’ people. So it makes the people who already agree with you, agree more; while pushing away the people where you can actually win more support.
– Don’t present abortion as a solution, but as a stopgap and try to present it together with your real solution that makes abortion obsolete (like proper sex education, which make people have sex more responsibly).
– Emphasize that abortions are going to happen no matter what. Better to regulate and make them unnecessary, than drive it underground.
– Limit to first trimester, except for emergencies (although I disagree with Fossegrimen that the harsh sentencing is necessary). Late abortions allow pro-life activists to use these gruesome images & show very developed fetus dolls as examples, without lying. Arguing for late abortions is a PR nightmare for minimal practical gain.
In politics, there is often a reverse correlation between demanding more and getting more support. If you highly value making abortion an inalienable right in the eyes of most people in society, it seems wise to keep your demands relatively low, so support is high.
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@apprenticebard
To be honest, I don’t really get what “murder” means to religious people who believe in immortal souls. If no one actually ever dies, then murder is just breaking one of God’s rules — but so is worshiping other gods, disrespecting your parents, coveting someone else’s house etc.
I’m sincerely struggling understand how it’s possible to appeal to the special gravity of murder from this position. Could you help me?
In my belief system, the moral weight of murder is due to death being real and final. When a woman dies because the law considered her pregnancy more important than her life (1, 2), she is gone forever — a whole inner world of personality and experience extinguished because some people believe in souls. So, abortion bans are a serious moral issue from my point of view as well, albeit for a different reason.
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Those all sound like potentially effective strategies for peeling off marginal pro-life voters, though it should be noted that many people who support abortion are already privately opposed to it, and are already using the thought process you describe, so there’s a limit to how much more support you can peel off. As I understand it, the US in general is much more religious than most EU countries, so it makes sense that things would be more polarized here.
I honestly don’t know what the pro-life movement can do. We can’t give ground, not on this, but the surrounding culture has developed into a form where abortion seems almost necessary for its preservation, and changing underlying cultural values like sex positivity and extreme individualism sounds…. difficult.
I do want to say that I think that both sides are unusually unwilling to compromise on life issues, compared to other issues in play. This is an area where, as Ozy says, our goals are genuinely incompatible. But I don’t think that’s true of eg. immigration. I disagree that a substantial number of Americans are highly invested in white identity politics. Many are concerned about security or economic issues, and some are even neutral on the issue but insist that laws on the books must be enforced. If Democrats could answer those objections while allowing people to immigrate freely, a significant chunk of the opposition would evaporate.
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Sure, but being privately opposed and not saying that because it is anathema to your tribe is exactly what creates this polarized environment. The same thing is happening on the pro-life side (Trump is perhaps the clearest example, he went from pro-choice to pro-life just to gain tribe approval).
Personally I blame much of these bad dynamics on the American political system, which is so bad that it’s not even funny. It’s pretty amazing that Alexis de Tocqueville already noted how shitty is was and 150 years later, not much has improved.
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I don’t think apprenticebard meant “privately opposed” in the sense of “not saying it”, as opposed to in the sense of “not supporting legal restraints on abortion”. I am personally opposed to abortion, but I do not support making it illegal.
I also think that late-term abortions are a good idea– nearly all are deeply wanted children that for health reasons the parents cannot have.
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First-time commenter here, but as someone like Ozy who opposes abortion but does not support making medically unnecessary abortion illegal (let alone medically necessary abortion), I wanted to mention that one reason I continue to take this stance is that, in my opinion, the pro-choice side is doing much more to ameliorate the conditions that make abortion less necessary and are more likely to decrease its frequency than the pro-life side is. I’d love to see a coalition of pro-choice and pro-life people working together on these kinds of issues. I can never vote pro-life while they continue to seemingly revel in the underlying social conditions that make it so women (and their children) bear a disproportionate amount of the shame and economic disadvantage associated with unplanned pregnancy.
I also think that the “life begins at conception” idea is misguided, especially when it makes pro-lifers oppose forms of birth control that prevent implantation. If I believed that life begins at conception, rather than at implantation, I would have to do things like
1. Try to mourn every period if I’d had sex during my menstrual cycle, just in case there was a spontaneously aborted human being in there.
2. Adamantly oppose the “horrors” of IVF.
Unfortunately, a majority of pro-lifers actually seem to strongly support the conditions that hurt women and increase the likelihood of abortion (whether it’s legal or not), care nothing for the children after they leave the womb, and hardly stress at all that men should bear any of the responsibility. In addition, many of the messages I hear from them take a completely heartless view of women’s lives and make me feel like they consider women (other than unborn ones) subhuman. I often wonder whether there aren’t a tiny little portion of them who don’t privately believe that it’s only really wrong to abort male fetuses.
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Nita – Sorry, I didn’t see your comment before. Disclaimer: I am not a theologian, and I would not expect the best explanations for my beliefs to come from me personally.
One, I would say that people are definitely lost forever all the time. Not everyone goes to heaven. I would certainly hope that unborn children, who are never exposed to information that would allow them to gain saving faith in Christ, are allowed to enter heaven due to God’s mercy. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be comfortable saying that I’m certain of it. I don’t actually know what happens to them.
Two, a central tenet of Catholicism (and most branches of Christianity in general) is the idea that all humans are made in the image and likeness of God. Their lives are therefore sacred, and they are entitled to a certain degree of basic dignity. Any action which ignores the dignity and value of other humans is a sin, and murder is a very serious affront to this basic human dignity. To murder someone is to utterly reject the idea that they are a person with inherent value who is worthy of respect and protection. It is a much more fundamental breach of the moral law than, say, disrespecting one’s parents.
Three, while Christians don’t have to be afraid of death in the sense that, if they are genuinely repentant and faithful, it won’t be the end for them, I would still say that death is a serious loss. It means they won’t have the opportunity to continue growing as a person or helping other people. They’re going to miss out on everything good and cool and interesting about this life. I mean, sure, this life has a lot of problems and the one to come will be easier, but I still think the time we spend here is valuable, and I don’t think that others should be deprived of it.
I would also like to say that offering chemotherapy to a pregnant person is not morally equivalent to abortion, as the goal of the procedure is not to kill the unborn child. Also, presuming that women who miscarry are guilty of abortion and should be sent to prison is horrific. I wouldn’t want to send them to prison even if they *had* intentionally aborted their children; I don’t think that doing so will help anyone.
Ozy – Yes, that’s what I meant. “Personally opposed” would have been better phrasing, sorry.
Belladonna – I should note that the Catholic Church *is* opposed to IVF. I wouldn’t say that we have an obligation to mourn for people we’ve never met, though. I’m not sure we ever have an obligation to mourn. Mourning is more of a personal processing grief thing. I’d also say that we don’t currently have the ability to save any children who may be lost before implantation, so it’s sad, but it’s not sad in the same way. If a large amount of people are killed in a natural disaster, that’s a tragedy, but it’s not the same as when a large amount of people are killed due to, say, government brutality. There’s a sense in which losses caused by human evil are worse than losses due to uncontrollable natural events, because people should know better. (I expect this is the sort of thought that makes more sense to people who are not consequentialists. Not that you are or aren’t, but I know a lot of people here are.)
I agree with you that the pro-life movement is fundamentally failing to address many of the underlying causes of abortion. A truly effective pro-life movement would need to provide nonjudgmental financial and social support to unwed mothers, provide resources for children in general, and emphasize that anyone connected to the situation (certainly the father, but also family, friends, and the community as a whole) has an obligation to see that mothers and children (and honestly, anyone at all who needs special support) are offered access to necessary resources, like housing and childcare. The most visible branches of the pro-life movement are seriously failing on this front. I think there are a lot of people who do attempt to work on both levels, but clearly we need to do better.
I don’t think that a majority of pro-lifers ignore the needs of children in general or consider women to be subhuman. Some do, but I wouldn’t say it’s a majority. I would say that classism is a very serious problem within the movement, though, and that there is a serious lack of empathy when it comes to people who have fewer resources than those at the front and center of the movement. Many don’t realize how much they rely on their wealth, families, and church communities for support, so it can be hard for them to understand that something which is merely a significant inconvenience to them might seem like an insurmountable challenge to someone with fewer resources. I do think that sexism and general callousness are serious problems within the movement, but I would rank classism above them in terms of both prevalence and total harm caused.
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Ozy, here’s the post you were looking for.
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I loathe Dick Cheney deeply, but if he were on the ballot against Kanye West, I’d totally vote for Cheney.
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“at least identity-politics-motivated voters on the left seem to favor qualified centrists with a slight penchant for war crimes”
I sure hope this remains so. This: http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/CoverStory-9-14-15-1200.jpg New Yorker was funny, but I’d really rather it not be prophetic (note to any omnipotent entities that may be reading this: Trump actually defeating Kanye wouldn’t really address my complaint).
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Kanye doesn’t happen for the democrats because of superdelegates. The party gets to send way stronger signals to their voters then the repubs do to theirs. Us nevertrumpers never had a chance in our fight once it got going.
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#3 isn’t any specific group of people. *Any* cluster with the requisite presence in swing states is #3.
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A few things:
thing 1:
I really think you are wrong about the tone/belief thing. Let me illustrate with how gay marriage was introduced in my home country:
30 years ago, gays were advancing the idea of gay marriage and were opposed by the churches and the conservatives. They then went “OK, how about we call it a “Civil Union” and have the churches opt-in, would that work for you?”
Then everyone went: “Sure, we don’t care who lives with whom, we just don’t want them to use the word “Marriage”, and preventing a church from opting in to anything it wants sounds suspiciously like communism, we sure wouldn’t want that!”
Then gays started getting married and we had an openly gay prime minister for a while (1992 IIRC) and nobody was talking about the “Civil union” of Bill and George. After a while, people noticed that all the churches thad had opted in had huge congregations and lots of money while the ones that opted out had tiny congregations and no money and a few years ago we got an openly lesbian bishop and nobody even lifted an eyebrow. I don’t think there is a single mainstream church that is still opting out, but there may be a few strange sects I guess.
Now, most of my US friends are Trump supporters of various kinds and if I ask them “what if we call gay marriage a “Civil Union” and have the churches opt-in, would that work for you?”
And every single one, even the alt-right types and the Mormons and the Creationists go “Sure, we don’t care who lives with whom, we just don’t want them to use the word “Marriage”, and preventing a church from opting in to anything it wants sounds suspiciously like communism, we sure wouldn’t want that!” (Though preciously few actually know how to use the word ‘whom’.)
I have found that a confrontational tone very rarely accomplishes anything.
thing 2:
The Trump “base” is so small it can be ignored for all practical purposes, so spending the firing of neurones necessary to figure out who it is seems like a waste. Nobody actually likes the man. If he turns out do do a good job, this may or may not change.
thing 3:
Identity politics are either good or bad by itself. If black identity politics are good, then so are white and vice versa. Anything else sounds suspiciously like racism. (I think they are all bad, but YMMV)
thing 4:
The conservatives who actually care about identity politics are also few and far between, but they do care about freedom of speech (a LOT) and identity politics comes off to them as language policing which (on a gut level) they extrapolate to mean thought policing which equals 1984 and COMMUNISM !1!11!!
In fact I suspect that the failure to grasp 1 and 4 may be the main failing of the US left and that using less inflammatory rhetoric and more compromises would go a long way towards Making America Sane Again. Let’s hope someone tries after the next election.
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As an atheist, I don’t like the idea that religious groups somehow “own” the word “marriage” just because they say so. (What’s next? “Good”? “Justice”?)
I would be willing to compromise on this, but only if we stopped discriminating on the basis on genitals — let’s always call the non-religious legal institution “civil union”, regardless of the sexes of the people involved. And then churches can keep “marriage” — a religious ritual with no legal implications.
But that’s not going to happen. So, I guess having this dumb fight over “marriage” is the best we can do.
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It seems the two of us have some very different values then. You see, I think that when it comes to on one hand actual practical rights that make an everyday difference in peoples lives, and on the other hand what label you put on those rights, on is important and the other is not. I also think that sacrificing the least important bit for the important bit is the best kind of compromise.
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As I said, I would be in favor of converting “marriage” to a purely religious term in exchange for stable equality. I would gladly be “civilly united” with my husband instead of “married” to him if that was an option.
But currently, it is not just an arbitrary label. The word “marriage” is embedded in many different laws. If religious groups decide what “marriage” means, then they effectively decide what the law says.
Theoretically, all of these laws could be amended to say “marriage or civil union” in every single case. But it would be a long and hard struggle, with no definitive end in sight.
Think of all those conservative pro-civil-union people you’ve talked to. Would they truly be in favor of granting civil unions the exact same legal status as marriages — including, e.g., adoption rights? I’m asking because many such “tolerant” people I’ve met do not, in fact, want that sort of equality.
And in the long term, maintaining a separate legal concept for committed relationships between people of the same sex sets a precedent for keeping “different” people in a separate legal category, and creates a temptation to treat them worse when times are hard and a scapegoat group might come in handy.
Well, that’s my position, anyway. There are also religious people who believe that religious marriage should be available to same-sex couples — obviously, I cannot speak for them, but let’s not forget that “religious conservatives” and “liberal atheists” are not the only two groups involved.
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@Nita
My country was the first to legalize gay marriage. Three years before we did that, we introduced ‘registered partnerships’ which is a civil union mostly the same as marriage, but open to same-sex couples. So in our case, it was not a final destination, but a stepping stone.
I think that many progressives underestimate how worried many people are about making irreversible changes, which they fear can have very bad outcomes. Of course, you can consider these fears idiotic, backwards, etc. However, you are going to be much more effective if you have empathy with these people and respond to their fears.
If you truly believe in the wisdom of your proposals, you should have faith that a step towards your desired future will work out well and will thereby convince people to take the next step. Slow and steady wins the race, as they say. And who knows, you might even be wrong once in a blue moon and then you cause less damage, by taking more modest steps.
I realize that many progressives feel that taking a detour is unacceptable, as there are people right now that deserve to have gay marriage. However, I think that the direct approach is often actually slower than the long way around, as the short route is straight through a muddy field where you constantly get stuck, while the slow and steady road is paved and allows you to make good pace.
PS. Note that in my country, before gay marriage was legal, 1/3 of registered partnerships were entered into by opposite-sex couples, as it turned out that quite a few people dislike the societal norms for what marriage should be. So it turned out that by trying to cater to same-sex couples, we actually made many non-LGBT people happy too. So after legalizing gay marriage, we kept the registered partnerships. The detour turned out to be valuable in itself!
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I’d generally favor getting the state out of the marriage business altogether. If people want to sign “mutual support contracts” or whatever, they’re still free to do so, of course. And if they want to have rituals around it and call it marriage, that’s their private business.
Some laws that refer to marriage might have to be fixed, but that would be a good idea regardless because “Are these people married?” is generally asking the wrong question. In most cases, you should much rather ask “Are these people raising a child together?” or “Have these people been living together and sharing resources for a long time?”.
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@Aapje
I think you underestimate how many people are worried about “stepping stones” after seeing what happened in your country (and others). Believe it or not, conservatives in other countries have thought a couple of steps ahead and will now accuse even the most innocuous liberal proposals of endangering “family values” and such.
They’re not thinking, “Oh, look at those nice liberals — going for civil unions first to let conservatives adjust.” They’re thinking, “Look at those treacherous liberals — pretending they wanted civil unions, and then pushing for marriage anyway!”
I agree that it makes sense to move slowly enough for individual experience and culture to keep up. But you can’t move slowly enough to persuade careful observers that you’re not moving at all.
So, we might as well talk to them openly about the end result we want, and hope that honest persuasion and generational change will get us somewhere eventually.
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@Nita
The point is not that you convince everyone. There will always be naysayers. The issue is that they are powerless unless they can convince a large group of fairly moderate people. Those are the ones who you need to convince.
And I disagree that the American left is always engaging in ‘honest persuasion and generational change’. There were many attempts to push through gay marriage by court rulings, which is exactly the kind of covert politicking that teaches people that mostly irreversible changes are made if they don’t stomp on that brake pedal right away and that teaches people that rigging the system is more important than democracy.
So you get this huge focus on getting ‘our’ people in the supreme court. To get ‘our’ amendments into state constitutions to prevent judges from making political rulings. To ensure that ‘we’ have a majority in the house, so we can stop the other side doing bad things or appointing people who manipulate the system in the wrong way (while ‘we’ will appoint the people who manipulate the system correctly). To ensure that ‘we’ have the President so we can single-handedly make law with executive orders.
It’s tribal warfare and the American left has been at it for a long time and the right has figured it out too. So now everything has become this battle for dominance. Disgusting.
And no….the American left doesn’t have the moral high ground as they been escalating this tribal warfare at least as much. Of course, whenever they do it, it is for the right cause, so it’s OK. Our tribe is (Michael Moore voice) gooooooood.
I’m not even American and I get really, really angry about this and the impact it has on the world and on this country that is supposed to be our freedom-loving ally, but is circling the drain faster and faster & spreading toxic waste rather than serve as an inspiration to people in other nations.
It is not OK. It will not just get better. This is about more than your values. It needs to change.
/rant over
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@Aapje
Getting majorities to stop discriminating against minorities is exactly what courts are for. (As well as stopping people from making other kinds of laws they shouldn’t be able to make.) The whole point of having a constitution is that not everything should be up for democratic decisionmaking – some kinds of laws should be off the table, and laws that discriminate by demographic are exactly that kind of thing.
(It’s not like I agree with all major court decisions, and I do get frustrated at court decisions I dislike, of course. But I don’t see this sort of thing as illegitimate.)
Anyway it’s really implausible to me that the power of courts is an actual driver of “tribal warfare” other than among members of Congress on the specific issue of court appointments.
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@tcheasdfjkl
That is nice in theory. The problem is that in practice, ‘discrimination’ is not an objective term. The subjectivity makes it political, rather than something where you can make the obvious correct decision.
Take conscription. There is no objective reason why women cannot serve, although there are biological differences that on average make them worse at some things the army does. However, there is no reason why they couldn’t do things at their own level.
Take sports in colleges. There is no objective reason why women cannot do sports, although there are biological differences that on average make them worse at some things that athletes do. However, there is no reason why they couldn’t do things at their own level.
In the first case, the courts allow discrimination, in the second they don’t. There is no general principle that makes this difference logical, it is purely a value judgement.
IMO, there is actually a discriminatory pattern in these things, where judges allow their biases to decide many things. Then these biases become systemic by becoming jurisprudence.
I prefer that we recognize the subjectivity for what it is and not enshrine past cultural biases in law, so that they become hard to change.
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In the US, the only reason the courts haven’t shut down the draft for being sex discrimination is that you need standing to sue, and there hasn’t been a draft in decades.
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@Aapje
Yes of course the courts are imperfect because they too are staffed by humans who have biases. Still, we have a pattern of civil rights victories being made through the courts because the courts figure out that something is discrimination faster than lawmakers want to stop doing it. I think it’s silly to say that because the system contains biased humans, the system itself is wrong.
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@ozymandias
Refusing to register in the US can result in legal repercussions. Also, a major problem I have with waiting for an actual draft is that at that point, it is unlikely that the courts will be willing to make progressive decisions (due to the emergency conditions that require the draft). So then the best case scenario is that the courts order a change after the war, which means that the war will be fought in a gender discriminatory manner.
@tcheasdfjkl
‘We got what we wanted, so who cares whether it happened in a democratic way’ is a really, really dangerous position.
These kind of wins have a nasty habit of causing very negative long term repercussions. Again, the American democratic system is really bad and has been so for a long time. Instead of fixing it, ‘you’ have opted for anti-democratic patchwork solutions (most recently, a much greater use of ‘executive orders’) that just further compromises the system and undermines the trust in democracy.
It’s not hard to see how this results in more and more focus on gaming the system (gerrymandering, voter suppression laws, stalling nominations until favorable elections, etc), which we don’t see in most other Western nations, AFAIK. Such gaming tends to benefit the majority over the minority, so it is a severe threat to minority rights.
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@Aapje
My position is NOT “we got what we wanted, so who cares if we got it in a democratic way”. I don’t understand how you got that from what I said.
My position is “to prevent tyranny of the majority, democracy needs to come with some guarantees of what the majority cannot do even if it wants to, and discrimination is one such thing, and straight-marriage-only is a form of discrimination”.
I don’t only accept court decisions when I think they will have a good outcome. I think courts are a legitimate part of the government.
Executive orders are murkier, agreed. I’m not sure if I’m completely opposed to them like you seem to be, but they’re probably overused.
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@tcheasdfjkl
I thought that you implied that the non-democratic mechanisms were worth it, because they sped up the adoption of this legislation:
“Still, we have a pattern of civil rights victories being made through the courts because the courts figure out that something is discrimination faster than lawmakers want to stop doing it.”
But in hindsight you might have meant: it is bad, but there are also advantages to it. I’ve argued in another post that these advantages may not actually be there, because:
A. The existence/use of an non-democratic way to get legislation pushes people away from compromise, which results in strong opposition. Because of that strong opposition it may seem that the courts/executive orders managed to push through legislation long before a compromise was possible, but that strong opposition was caused by the practice of using these non-democratic means in the first place.
B. When legislation lacks democratic legitimacy, people are more likely to keep fighting it, so your speed of change is hampered by having to do the same fight over and over again (in every US election during my life, ‘vote us to stop abortion/vote us to keep abortion’ has been a major issue).
Anyway, both on the supreme court and executive orders my opinion is the same: their existence is fine, but they are overused to push through legislation that ought to be decided on by democratically chosen representatives.
Nowadays, there are discussions about whether an election may result in the balance between the left and the right changing in the supreme court, which is evidence that people see it as a (partially) legislative, rather than primarily judicial entity. That violates the trias politica and is very dangerous. You also see discussions by fans of one side who worry that if the president of the other side is elected, (s)he will use executive orders to end democracy or do other bad things. Again, this shows a very dangerous loss of faith in the democratic process and increases the chance that polarization will result in a ‘preemptive strike’ by one side to gain dictatorial control before the other side can do so.
And again, these things weren’t always like this, they are getting worse over time.
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Empirically, black identity politics led to the nomination of a civil rights attorney and senator who was the first black president of the Harvard Law review, while white identity politics led to the nomination of a reality TV star. Therefore, I would suggest that white identity politics seems to have far worse consequences than black identity politics.
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This is a rather narrow sample size, no? Black identity politics has had ~40 years for good results, while white identity politics have only really cropped up in their present form in the last few years.
(Unless we’re counting the KKK etc., but you didn’t mention those as negatives so I assume we’re distinguishing now from then.)
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1) We tried the “civil unions, churches opt-in” thing in Ireland, using exactly the rhetoric you describe. Immediately after the law passed, the rhetoric changed to “civil unions aren’t good enough, we need full equality”, and this eventually succeeded.
This perceived betrayal is the reason one religious acquaintance of mine, who supported civil unions, gave for turning away from the Left.
2) I think you underestimate how many people disagree with you. I don’t know where you live, but I doubt the Catholic Church there blesses civil unions. Many people genuinely like Donald Trump. Many people do disagree that civil unions are an acceptable compromise, some of them in this very comment section.
Many (most?) conservatives, at least in the US, are fully in favor of censorship when it’s employed against e.g. gay marriage, and do not consider it “communism”.
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I’ve always theoretically supported the idea that legal unions should perhaps not be called marriage, at all (as long as it is true for everyone). In fact, I further think that any two consenting adults should be able get a legion union, regardless of whether or not they want to have sex with one another. For example, if my sister and I decided that we were interested in joining together in a civil union for the economic and implicit powers of attorney reasons, why not? Other than rape and child sexual abuse, I think the government should stay out of people’s bedrooms.
But this is a pipe dream in the U.S., where the word marriage has widespread legal, as well as religious, as well as sexual implications, and where “civil union” feels like some kind of “separate but equal” proposition. A system like the French one where religious marriage has no legal meaning, anyway, might better lend itself to such an idea.
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My problem with the phrase “identity politics” is that it makes no distinction between racism and anti-racism. By which I don’t just mean “are we talking about white people or black people”, I mean like, Jim Crow laws and MLK’s activism can both be described as “identity politics”. For this reason I would be much happier if we never used the phrase “identity politics” anymore.
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I see identity politics as the equivocation of identity and politics. For example, you are a woman, you have experienced patriarchal oppression and can understand feminism. You are a man, you must have patriarchal tendencies and you can never really understand feminism.
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@Aapje
I think that is an idiosyncratic and overly narrow definition. Then again, since I never use this word myself I’m not confident I understand it well.
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Also, civil unions were in fact used in some U.S. states as well. They just quickly became unnecessary since the state of both public opinion and the law on this issue has changed really quickly in the U.S. If the way to get those who are still against same-gender marriage to stop being unhappy is to go back to civil unions, that’s really just too bad, we’re not going to roll back already existing progress in order to change someone’s mind.
On a different note, I’m curious how someone outside the U.S. has U.S. friends who are mostly Trump supporters. This seems unusual.
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@Ozy
I think that it is a mistake to treat the Trump supporters as one. The characteristic of elections with limited choice is that people with different opinions have to fit in the mold of the available options. A two choice election maximizes this. To make this clearer, let’s talk about the Clinton voters:
A libertarian immigrant with no interest in SJ might have voted for her, just because he is also a globalist and wants to keep his worker visa. A radical communist who strongly cares about SJ might have voted for her, just because she is a woman. If the Republican party wanted to convince either of these people to vote Republican, they would need totally different solutions (which in turn would alienate people who voted Republican in the past, so they have to be smart to pull in more people than they repel with any policy change).
The exact same thing is true vice versa. So if you want to win over people, the best way is to identify groups that you can win over without losing too many voters. It is smarter to focus on the 10 or 20% of Republican voters that you can reasonably cater to, than to try to appeal to all Republican/Trump voters.
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All I said about “average Trump voter” is “unenthusiastic about Trump and hates Hillary”, which can be applied to a wide variety of voters for a wide variety of reasons.
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You said more than that, such as:
It is very dangerous to draw these kinds of conclusions.
Take a drug that statistically works better than a placebo when tested on patients with disease X. Yet it may actually work work perfectly on 25% of those patients and do nothing but produce side effects on the other 75%. It turns out that we split up our groups incorrectly and we are actually dealing with patients with disease X1 and X2, where each need different treatment.
Just because you care about Trump supporters vs Clinton supporters, doesn’t mean that this is an actual meaningful way to divide the world into groups that you can reason about effectively.
I explained to you that two-party elections are extremely likely to cause disparate groups to converge on one candidate.
Now, when you go from making these broad brush statements to dismissing all Trump voters as fans of ethnocentrism and white identity politics that you don’t need to listen to, I just read tribalist superiority in it.
You phrase it in a less objectionable way than the ‘Trump supporters are all racists and we can’t learn anything from them’ people, but the mechanism is the same.
PS. There are other issues too, such as that ethnocentrism and white identity politics are surely not their terminal values, but ways to make sense of the world and seek solutions to their actual problems. Surely you must see that this is partly shaped by progressive actions, so the behavior of your tribe affects how they think and act. So regardless of whether you think that their beliefs have value, you can still critically examine your tribe for how its messaging, prioritizing, actions, etc cause resistance (and may have helped Trump get elected).
None of that means that you have to hand over your friends to the deportation police, but you can oppose that and also improve yourself. It is not this false choice: capitulate or ignore.
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@Aapje:
Ozy clearly defines in their post that they are defining “base” and “average” as different things. Therefore applying descriptions of Trump’s base in this post as their opinion on the average is disingenuous.
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‘Base’ is actually not defined in the post, you have to follow the link, then follow a link from there and then you have to assume that Ozy uses that definition. That definition is actually also Trump voters, but for the primaries, I just now noticed.
“Average” is defined by assuming that there were no differences between Trump and Romney voters, which is a weird assumption, because:
A. I would think that the difference is actually very interesting if you want to figure out how to win next time.
B. We know for a fact that Clinton drew fewer/different voters than Obama and Trump appears at least as different from Obama as Trump is different than Romney.
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In question #3 I defined “his base” as “his most fervent supporters”. I think asking how Trump primary voters are different from other Republicans is a reasonable way of getting at this.
Electoral coalitions don’t shift that much; the median Trump voter is probably the same as the median Romney voter. The entire point of my post is that “who are Trump’s most fervent supporters?”, “who is the average Trump voter?”, and “who are the tipping-point voters?” are three different questions.
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As I argued in the other post, to win elections you don’t have to win over the ‘average Republican voter,’ you have to win over the people that you can reasonably attract without losing (too many) of your existing voters.
It’s perfectly possible that a group of conservative Christians stayed home and that their places were filled by first time voters. The totals for Trump and Romney might have been similar, but that doesn’t mean that there was no churn.
I know from my country that when the anti-multiculturalists popped up, they drew many voters who had abandoned the voting booth before they got that option. I’ve heard many people in this group state that they felt betrayed by the Dutch moderate left. They believe that these politicians should work for them due to the terminal values that the politicians claim to uphold, but feel that they don’t actually follow through.
Such a pattern strongly indicates lost voter potential (and the politicians living in a bubble).
You also made the rather far reaching claim that you cannot cater to Trump voters without giving up your terminal values.
Do you think that your globalism is incompatible with economic prosperity for these unhappy Americans? Because I see that as their primary concern.
What you see as their ethnocentrism and white identity politics is their way of explaining why they were left behind by the elite.
Their understanding of the world is clearly often stupid. That said, the beliefs by many people on the left are often equally stupid. Yet you don’t write off fellow Democrats because of that.
That is tribalism. You are engaging in it, IMO. I think that it locks you into a bubble where you build a mirage in your mind where you believe you are helping these people, even though they themselves see you as hurting them. It’s a place without real empathy, where you paternalistically tell these people that your policies are right for them and they just don’t get it, while you are actually the one rationalizing policies that objectively harm these people, because you actually care more about other groups. However, it would harm your self-image to admit that you do care about your ingroup more than the outgroup and that you prioritize ‘our’ concerns over ‘theirs’.
By doing so you are doing the exact same thing that SJ is supposed to be against, but usually isn’t….
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@Ozy
The problem that I have with your argumentation (and the article) is that it is strongly based on what the mainstream left considers acceptable ethnocentrism and identity politics.
Much of the left currently considers globalist, progressive culture to be superior to more isolationist, conservative culture. People who mostly like their culture and want to keep it (and don’t want to force it on other nations, but merely want people who come into their country to mostly adopt that culture) are called ethnocentric, while the people who want to force these people to change their culture to another culture are somehow not. People on the right (and deviant progressives like me) notice this hypocrisy and call the mainstream left out on this.
Ultimately, there is a lot of common ground between many conservatives and progressives. They both don’t like crime. They both want pleasant communities where people take care of each other and live in harmony. They both don’t actually like real multiculturalism, but want only acceptable, ‘fun’ diversity. They both have a ton of dogma about the problems that we face. They both prefer to ignore the issues in their own community, rationalize away their biases and blame the other.
IMO, you can only cross the divide by improving yourself so the ‘other’ actually sees that you are working for a common goal. The flaws you see in the other are often a reflection of the flaws that you have. Learn from how they react to you to become better.
Frankly, I don’t believe you. I think that you want these people to adopt the culture that you consider superior (which is not so bad), in the wrong way (which is bad).
The first step in AA is to be honest: you don’t just like a beer, you are a drunk. Embrace your flaws and work to fix them.
You admit to simply wanting to help your ingroup. Now look at the poorly educated Trump voter who has seen her community been ravaged by the loss of manufacturing jobs, drugs, etc and sees many of the jobs that she can do filled by underpaid illegal immigrants who she cannot compete with legally. Then she sees the mainstream left focus specifically on helping ‘oppressed’ groups, while she sees her community deteriorate more and more. She feels powerless, discriminated and hated for her skin color, hated for not being able to articulate her concerns in a PC way (which people use to justify ignoring her concerns or paying mere lip service to them). This person doesn’t see Clinton as the inclusive candidate, she sees an oppressor. She votes to help her ingroup. Same as you.
Now look at the Trump voter that believes that large scale immigration creates more problems than it solves. He argues that we can take in only a relatively minimal number of people, so we can’t meaningfully solve oppression in other countries in this way. He is called heartless by leftists. He argues that there is a huge cultural divide that takes generations to resolve. He is called a racist. He argues that new migrants with the most integration issues keep landing in poor areas (and move on once they landed on their feet, making room for a new group), greatly harming these poor communities. He is ignored as the left has no good answers to this. Then he concludes that the left value dogma, virtue signaling and PCness, over being right. So he votes for the party that he considers more rational. Same as you.
Of course, these are just one sided stories with plenty of stereotyping/simplification. But they are the kind of stories that you need to examine as critical thinking exercises to figure out where your culture has issues and fix them. It is a fact that fewer and fewer union members are voting Democrat. It makes no sense to think that they suddenly became racist, ethnocentric, etc; when surveys show that people are becoming less and less racist. Your answer simply cannot be correct, as it denies/cherry picks the facts.
How about changing because white people, men, etc are also human beings that deserve to see their problems addressed?
How about changing because a lot of that activism is based on dogma that makes the activism ineffective or counter effective?
How about changing because quite a bit of that activism consists of the exact same things that you claim to abhor (othering, silencing, victim blaming, bullying, etc).
How about changing because no one is perfect and we should always strive to improve ourselves?
I do think that if you do these things, fewer people will vote for Trump(alikes), not (just) because your rhetoric will improve, but because you will actually have become better people and more effective at changing society to match your terminal values AND the terminal values of many Trump voters. Even if no Trump voter would change his mind, wouldn’t it still be worth it?
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I was using “ethnocentrism” to refer to a feeling of primary concern about one’s own ethnicity, not to being chauvinistic about one’s culture. I admit that this is not precisely the dictionary definition of the term, but in my defense every word that means in the dictionary what I was trying to say would cause great offense.
I agree that many people’s political viewpoints are based on their personal affiliations and on what seems rational to them.
I think it is perfectly compatible that people in general are becoming less ethnocentric and Trump’s base happens to consist primarily of ethnocentric individuals– after all, his base is only a small proportion of Republicans, and it is significantly more ethnocentric than the average Republican.
I have written many blog posts about things in social justice culture that I wish would change, and I agree these would have positive effects. However, I do not think that even if I got the entirety of social justice culture to agree with me about how we should behave, it would have an appreciable effect on how Trump’s base votes. I think that activism to change their viewpoints is a good idea, but I am agnostic about the correct strategy to do so, and I think it is extremely poor rationality to assume that things which happen to repel you also don’t work.
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Mainstream SJ often celebrates ‘primary concern about one’s own ethnicity’, as long as that ethnicity is not white.
Mainstream SJ often celebrates ‘primary concern about one’s own gender’, as long as that ethnicity is not male.
White people are becoming less ethnocentric and men are becoming less sexist, but mainstream SJ is doing its best to advocate for special treatment aka inequality or interprets reality in ways where white people or men are unjustly accused. Of course, the research by your tribe never does surveys with flipped racism and sexism questions, because the dogma is that racism and sexism only counts one way.
However, it feels just as shitty if you get treated worse because you are white or male, than because you are black or female.
If people believe that they are treated unfairly due to their race, they gain racial camaraderie and a racial ingroup awareness. This is true for Jews, black people, Muslims and yes, also white people. You only have to pay attention to what white people say. Of course, the left makes fun of them when they say this. They are ignorant, afraid of losing unwarranted ‘privilege’ or just racists.
Perhaps I am reading you wrong, but I read you as being in denial on how your side can act as a force that works against a more egalitarian society and pushes white people and men back into that antagonistic mode.
“I think that Trump’s base’s primary objection to people like me is not to our tone but to our beliefs” “These are incompatible goals”
“I think that activism to change their viewpoints is a good idea”
I see no self-reflection in these statements. No understanding of how these Trump voters could be blaming you because they see you as targeting them. Now, I’m not blaming you personally for the ‘entirety of social justice culture’, but what hope is there if even the most rational SJs that I’ve found can’t see how SJ culture can justifiably antagonize people on the other side?
Perhaps a race war is inevitable. You don’t want it. I don’t want it. But perhaps the short-sighted forces are stronger than the forces that bring us together. Sigh.
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I don’t think that the miss-steps and excesses SJ culture/ activism is likely to have motivated all that many people to vote Trump, but I do think that it could have caused a lot of people who “should” have been voting Democrat staying home. Competence ain’t a virtue you’ll prize in someone leading a movement you think is out to get you.
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