195. RECKONING WITH THE ELECTION - Reflections on a Soul-Crushing Week
Part of me just wanted this week’s post to be the following question:
Why is it that every election we are told there are large groups of working class voters who do not know what they are ‘really’ voting for and who ‘vote against their own interests’? If this is true, then is our continuing lack of meaningful political education in schools about what those interests might be, and how people routinely manipulate them to gain votes, a moral scandal, or simply evidence that the education system does not care about equipping the vast majority of the population for their participation in democracy?
However, the question led to more questions, and I didn’t like the question’s inherently condescending tone. (An alternative reading of history is, after all, that such voters do know what they are voting for and vote accordingly, and it is dismissing their claims that they do so which is the real problem).
Since the result of last Tuesday’s US election I have been wondering what my response should be. Which is, in itself, an interesting philosophical question: is what my response should be to Trump winning the US election what my response actually is?
What my immediate response is, or what it was as I woke up on Wednesday morning (UK time) and turned on the news at 5am, was a mixture of despair, frustration, and anger at my fellow Americans (I am a US citizen, and voter. And, obviously, from this response, and previous posts on here, I voted for Harris). But despair, frustration and anger is natural for any loss when the stakes are high and feel so existential. It’s not an interesting response. What interested me amongst the flood of emotions I felt that day, and for the rest of the week, was the persisting sense of bewilderment and confusion I felt. Like a rug had been pulled from under me. That sense of total epistemic disequilibrium i had first felt during the UK’s Brexit vote in 2016 and then by Trump’s first victory. How had what had seemed so obvious to me not seemed equally as obvious to so many other people?
Trump the felon, the liar, the racist, the rapist…so obviously unfit for public office and so brazenly authoritarian and fascistic in his promises of what a second term might look like. How on earth could a man like that have won so overwhelmingly? Not merely through the antiquated electoral college system, but the popular vote as well? A resounding yes at every swing-state. The Senate and the House too. A mandate!
Either I’d got Trump wrong, or I’d got the morality of my fellow citizens wrong? And neither explanation was particularly comforting to me.
If it is my interpretation of Trump’s character and Trump’s threat that is wrong, then it would turn out that despite my best efforts across an entire lifetime to inoculate myself against misinformation and be a perpetually critical thinker, I have still been duped by a steady stream of lies and distortions these last ten years. And if it is the morality of my fellow citizens that I got wrong instead, then what little faith and hope I have ever had in humanity’s potential to ultimately do the right thing amidst the pulling tides of stupidity are on their way to being extinguished. With neither option desirable, therefore, I began to question an alternative possibility: could I be right about Trump but wrong about the people who voted for Trump? Might Trump be all the things I think he is, and this still be exactly what people knowingly voted for, but their motivations might not be as monstrous as I think they are?
Racism and sexism are a deceptively easy explanation about why a black women lost an election to a white man, and one can’t underestimate the possible impact such things played. But as the recent election of Kemi Badenoch to be leader of the British Conservative Party shows (and the response of frustration at that outcome from anti-racist and feminist groups not celebrating the victory of Badenoch), a group of people traditionally connected to forms of racism and sexism seem capable of overcoming those superficial identifiers of prejudice if the candidate they like aligns with other values they hold. Racism and sexism is not enough to explain the large-scale rejection of Harris by so many voters, even if it might play a part in the story. When the exit poll had come out on Tuesday night, citing people claiming the protection of democracy to be their major motivation for voting, I already felt the pit of dread. To me, the threat to democracy was clearly the man who had already had a four year term undermining democratic norms and institutions to protect his own narcissistic interests. But I could see that the worldview of Trump supporters might equally perceive the election of Kamala Harris as a threat to democracy far more readily than they would reject her as a candidate because of her race or gender. I might disagree with their position myself, but if they actually believed the repeated lies they have heard about the election being rigged against Trump, both this year and in 2020, that had been spread by Trump himself and his supporters in the media and across politics, then they would have the perception going into the polls that democracy was in danger. If you believe the ‘deep state’ has worked to subvert the will of the people - if you perceive the January 6th insurrection as a righteous revolution against injustice rather than a petulant attack against the popular will - and if you are troubled by Harris being handed the nomination rather than going through a rigorous primary process, then of course you might see a victory by anyone other than Trump as a threat to democracy. Furthermore, where we on the left speak furiously of Trump ‘stacking the deck’ in the Supreme Court to do away with things like abortion rights and presidential accountability, and of needing to sign executive orders to undo their damage, those on the right who see the appointment of those judges, and the consequences of their decisions, as a wholly legitimate part and parcel of what democracy allowed their favoured president to do, then one might imagine hearing our promise to stop that agenda as yet another threat from the left to subvert democracy.
The view might be false, but it would still be convincing. And even my claim that it is ‘false’ made me wonder about my own liberal biases. Would I be so happy with the way things turned out if the shoe had been on the other foot? I do, after all, remember 2000 and the long-argued claim that I myself made about faulty election machines and a corrupt supreme court selecting an unelected (in my eyes) George W Bush. ‘Not my President’ and all that. While I still fully believe that my worldview is correct regarding the legitimacy of the 2020 outcome (and, sadly, the 2024 one) and that I am right in my own view about what will follow, as much as we on the left like to call out just how divorced from reality everything Donald Trump says often is, one can imagine that to a conservative American, dubious about transgender people, scared of what they perceive to be an ‘influx’ of ethnicities different than their own, incredulous about sexualities that seem to violate everything they had previously been told to be true about human relationships, and content with traditional gender roles and patriarchal conventions that they had never previously had cause to question, it might quite plausibly be we on the left who seem unhinged and divorced from reality when we try to tell them to accept someone they perceive as a man to be a woman, to celebrate the radical cultural transformation and increased ethnic diversity of their country that they perceive as a loss of identity, accept as normal these seemingly transgressive relationships that have become OK, and disrupt generations of accepted wisdom around gender.
Again - I personally think the worldview just described is incorrect. To my mind, trans men and women are men and women. People are people. You should be able to identify in whatever way you want to. There should be no borders at all, let alone concern about immigration, and every person who wants to come join the party should be welcomed. Cultures and ethnicities merge and blend all over everywhere and it is wonderful. Love is love and you should be free to love freely, whether same-sex, other-sex, or neither, and men need to get over themselves and recognise how damaging patriarchy has been to the freedoms of women for generations. Traditional gender roles are unnecessary cages intentionally designed to restrict what women can do and must be torn dow. But… what I am saying is that everything I have just stated about my beliefs here sounds crazy to someone who doesn’t think what I think, and it is their traditional set of prejudiced views which have been the vocalised mainstream norm for far longer than mine.
Consider, as analogy, my vegetarianism. Or the fact that I don’t drink alcohol or do drugs. I also think all of these positions are the morally right ones to hold, but I am well aware that these things are not the conventional norm in the country where I live. While nowadays most restaurants offer a vegetarian, or vegan, option, there was a time in recent memory when many didn’t. And although restaurants do today, individuals don’t always assume people they feed in their homes might not eat meat. Often my dietary stance has been considered a nuisance to someone, or something strange they don’t feel the need to cater for. And the drinking culture in the UK is such that whenever I reveal that I do not drink alcohol it makes people uncomfortable and usually subject me to hours of questioning about why. Drugs, too, though less explicitly mainstream due to their illegality, are still taken by many people across the UK, and my own personal decision to decline such drugs at every point has always been met as an outlier view rather than something people embrace. In each of these cases though, I know that my views are outside the scope of most people’s ‘normal’. I never begrudge them their questions, their opposition, and even their frustrations at time (wedding toasts really upset people - no one likes seeing me lift a champagne flute full of water). It is just a truism of holding views that go against the conventional grain. And if I hope to change people’s minds and make them agree with me, it will be a long, uphill struggle.
As the Trump victory rolled in, I began to realise that these seemingly obvious moral beliefs that I hold around equality, equity, diversity, inclusion and identity are far more like my beliefs around meat, drugs and alcohol than they are like my beliefs around generally agreed and settled things such as murder or theft. When I make the case to my neighbour that I think a murder I read about on the news is wrong, or that it’s awful someone’s car was stolen up the road, I can assume that they will feel much the same way that I do. Disagreement would come as a shock. However, when I, instead, groan to my neighbour about how immature I find this country to be when they cheer Rachel Reeves knocking a penny off the cost of a pint of beer in the pub, I do so knowing that my neighbour will probably disagree with me. That they themselves most likely cheered the announcement of cheaper beer too. I know, because they are not yet conventional, that my vegetarian, straightedge beliefs need a bit more explaining and, despite me thinking that they are morally correct and definitely much healthier beliefs than those who eat meat, drink alcohol and do drugs, they are beliefs I know - due to the tidal pressure of entrenched social convention - are highly unlikely to be adopted by everyone anytime soon, even if they respect my own right to hold them.
I have been hugely critical of the ‘culture wars’ and the prejudicial dismissiveness by the right of those like me whom they call ‘woke’. And I remain critical. These discourses have been exaggerated and weaponised and jeopardise real people’s lives as a result; collateral damage in a battle to win cheap polling points by demonising the vulnerable. But… the reason the right do this for their own political gain is because it is so successful. And the reason it is so successful is because there is a genuine nerve being touched when people hear views like mine. People are scared about the barrage of changes we advocate on the left, and the liberalisations we want of old norms which overturn their way of looking at the word. We might be ultimately in the right. We might have justice on our side. But we ignore people’s fears and resistance at our peril. They might seem stupid, naive, ignorant, etc. to us. But they exist. And worse, because we actively need to change those minds, we need to start from a position of respect, and not ridicule.
Which brings up another one of their seemingly irrational fears - we are, in fact, trying to brainwash them. Some of their fears are true! We just don’t think of it as brainwashing, we think of it as educating. But whether you call it education or indoctrination, we agree that if we want to end racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc., then we are seeking to change the minds of racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, etc. For racists, sexists, homophobes and transphobes, however, this is a pretty scary thought. Because, remember also, our analysis on the left has expanded our definition of what exactly - and who exactly - counts as racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic. Expanded it to the point that many who might fall under the umbrella of such terms within our analysis wouldn’t personally recognise this of themselves. Again - making what we say to them appear completely divorced from reality.
Trump is a racist, we say, rightly, and those who voted for him will have emboldened racists. Also true. But at the same time we have to confront that Black voters, Latino voters, etc. - traditional victims of racism in the US - voted for Trump in large numbers. If the analysis of racism we operate on is one which alienates and seems unfamiliar to some of the very people whose lived experience it is trying to describe, it doesn’t matter how correct that analysis might be on paper. Something isn’t quite right about it. Likewise, Trump is a misogynist and a sexist. A sexual predator even. All claims which can be supported. And yet the significant number of women who didn’t seem to mind and voted for him anyway is another thing which needs to be confronted. Who is our analysis of misogyny intended to help? Why doesn’t it resonate?
We are back to the idea of voting against our own interests. Groups of people have often ‘voted against their own interests’. But can we hear how patronising this sounds to the people to which it refers? How infantilising? It may be true, and there might be a considerable historical record of evidence of it happening over and over again, and a significant number of influencing factors that we can see repeatedly informing (and misinforming) people’s supposedly autonomous voting behaviours. But no-one has ever voted against their own interests knowingly. The whole reason we do it is because we think, wrongly, that our interests are being served by our decisions. So while it might also be true that we can be incredulous of Trump’s support amongst working class voters when all he has ever done is serve the interests of the super-rich, instead of dismissing this behaviour as stupidity we need to listen to what these voters are actually telling us. Lives of poverty. A cost of living they cannot meet. Jobs that are abandoning their towns. Jobs that no longer pay the bills. A sense of being tossed aside by government. Again, we might have our lofty analyses about capitalism and the real cause of these troubles, but how does our analysis put bread on these people’s tables or money in their pockets? Trump’s analysis won’t either, but he presented his promises - and his scapegoats - in a way which resonated and sounded like he cared. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs reminds us that people who are worried about where their next meal is coming from, or keeping a roof over their heads, are not people in the right mental space to worry about anything loftier - be that theories about the abolition of capitalism or the ambitions we might hold for greater equality, diversity, equity and inclusion to make a kinder world.
Trump might well be a racist, a felon, a misogynist and even a fascist. His re-election might well be a sign that social media and the internet has successfully broken whatever small gains of social and political progress humanity has made across the last century. But the large group of humanity who voted for him - like the other large groups of human beings across the world who have voted for, and continue to vote for, populist authoritarian leaders - are not necessarily idiots, monsters, or even as racist, sexist and phobic as the people they voted for. They are people like you and me, just wanting a better life within a flawed and broken political system and believing that the person they vote for is the key to achieving that goal.
So those seem to be my options in these new dark ages: either it is my interpretation of Trump’s character and Trump’s threat that is wrong (unlikely); it is the morality of my fellow citizens I got wrong (devastating if true); or their motivations that I do not understand. Given the unlikelihood of the first option, and bleakness of the second, for now, waiting to see how this awful result pans out and hoping that my worst fears shall be proved wrong, I shall choose to believe the third. The option which gives me lots to listen to, and lots to learn, about the ways in which my own worldview, and the worldview of so many, diverge. And the option which gives us the best hope for finding a way to restore some mutual common ground from out of that divergence and return to open-minded dialogue with each other about the direction we want our country to move in instead of just more battle-lines drawn in the sand.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere now on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.
My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.
My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book.
I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.
Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com
If you liked this post and appreciate what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.