A Step Toward
A response to Karlyn Borysenko
Hi Karlyn, I hope you don’t mind my taking a few minutes to respond to your thoughtful article, “After Attending a Trump Rally, I Realized Democrats Are Not Ready For 2020.” I had some thoughts that I hope you might find interesting. You pleaded in your article, “If we’re going to heal the country, we have to start taking steps toward one another rather than away.” Please take this in the spirit offered, as a step toward.
Angry Democrats
First, and most importantly, please let me apologize for any of my fellow Democrats who got up in your face when you considered the notion of attending a Trump rally. (And nope, I must admit — I had no idea knitting circles were such hotbeds of political fervor!) I might note, however, that social media by its nature tends to be a place where, even more than in real life, the loudest voice wins and where far too many people feel liberated to say things to a stranger they’d never say in person. It’s the mediation effect of a screen, where you don’t have to look another human being in the eye as you yell at them. Don’t have to see the confusion, the hurt. That makes it easy, but it doesn’t make it right.
And of course the moron who drove his truck into a Republican voter-registration tent is not at all representative of the liberal values of tolerance and inclusiveness, any more than the man who shot Rep. Scalise and others at a baseball practice. Those people horrify me, just as they horrify anyone with a normal conscience. And if my Republican friends and family will agree to overlook these outliers, I will happily agree to similarly overlook the Trump supporter who sent mail bombs to prominent Democrats, or the man who murdered Heather Heyer with his car at Charlottesville. Let’s not take the most extreme zealots as representative of either movement. Surely we can all agree on that.
The Social Media Problem
For years, I’ve had what I call “The Four Post Rule” about message boards and comment sections on the web. Basically, I always assume that within four posts, any comments thread will turn into complete nonsense. Someone with a pet peeve will seize upon the thread, no matter the subject, and hijack it completely. Put up a post saying that you’re excited about going to Disney World, and it’s just about guaranteed that someone will tell you you’re contributing to the corporate-capitalist takeover of the world and that everything that’s wrong with everyone is your fault and your fault alone. Probably in all-caps.
But of course online demagoguery is not limited to message boards. On an unmediated site like Medium, anyone can put up an article about anything, and facts are often considered optional. This is true for Democrats (I recently ran across a Medium article where a supporter of Senator Sanders called Mayor Buttigieg a “sociopath,” without offering up any evidence whatsoever to prove this remarkable assertion); it’s true for Republicans (any article where the writer seriously uses the word “libtards”); and apparently it’s even true in knitting circles. That’s a terrible shame, of course, but it seems to be the inescapable reality, and perhaps the only personal defense available to us is a thicker skin — and a refusal to take comment threads too seriously. Just say what you have to say, and get on with your day. Don’t feed the trolls, as so many have urged for years now.
But yes, I did take a look at the story you linked to about the knitters who got buried under an avalanche of criticism, which included a boycott of commercial Instagram accounts. That can’t be ignored, of course. Do I think there was some white privilege in the original poster’s text? Yeah, probably. Do I think she deserved what she got? Definitely not. There’s a difference between gently calling someone on a privilege she might not have looked at before, and burying her and anyone who tries to defend her. Some people can’t let go of anything, they have to be right at all costs, even if the measurement of that rightness comes at the cost of turning into a bully. Alas, no one knows how to curb such excesses.
With that said, I found it interesting that in your own article, no one prior to the Trump rally seems to have been abusive to you, which I’m glad of. Rather, they expressed concern for your welfare. Which is (a) on the whole a positive thing, showing concern rather than disapproval, and (b) not entirely unfounded, given that journalists at Trump rallies have been hounded, one man got sucker-punched, and the candidate himself infamously told people at a rally that if they hit someone he’d cover their legal fees. (FYI, when that actually did happen, as best I can tell, he did not cover that man’s legal fees.) So a concern for one’s welfare at a Trump rally is not something that springs spontaneously from the ether.
(For the record: the moment when I became unalterably opposed to Trump was when he urged violence at his rallies. No, I said. Absolutely not. This man must not be supported, ever. He went beyond the pale long before he was elected, and nothing since then suggests that his combative nature has been moderated at all.)
I ran across an article a while back that I thought was interesting. (I have tried to find it again, and could not, so please forgive me for summarizing from memory.) It asserted that one of the unintended consequences of social media was that suddenly, we all found out what our friends think about things, and it unnerved pretty much everybody. Used to be, you could have a perfectly fine relationship with someone for years without politics coming up much, if at all. Then we started friending people on Facebook and discovered they were anti-vaxxers, or Republicans, or Democrats, or whatever, and it changed our view of the person. A person couldn’t be just a friend anymore, suddenly they got put in a political box that had never been necessary before. Much of our current dysfunction can be attributed to this new reality, and clearly we haven’t figured out yet how to deal with it.
About the Rally
I’m genuinely glad you had a good time at the rally. But please permit me to tug a little at a couple of the threads in your article. You compared your experience at the Trump rally to your experience a few days earlier at a rally with most of the Democratic candidates, writing, “With Trump, every single person was unified around a singular goal. With the Democrats, the audience booed over candidates they didn’t like and got into literal shouting matches with each other.” It’s true that Democrats are famously fractious, but I suggest that that’s intrinsic to their appeal. If your watchword is inclusiveness, then by definition you’re a big tent with a large number of competing constituencies. Every party has that, of course, but Democrats are legendary for it. By contrast, the Republican constituency, it must be admitted, is, well, whiter. It’s easy to focus on a singular goal when most of your members are already part of the same group.
I’m not saying the people in the photo above are racists, but I am saying that it’s easier to align with someone who looks like you. And I suspect that there was a lot of that going on at the Trump rally you attended. The large majority of people probably already felt the same about certain key issues, and that simplicity is a huge part of this president’s appeal. (A New York Times article about that very rally quoted an attendee as saying, “‘Everybody here, they’re all on the same page,’ Mr. Rojas said. ‘It’s good energy.’”) Trump understands the sound-bite era, he knows in his bones that most people don’t have time to delve into the minutiae of politics, he’s never been interested in minutiae either, and he exploits that urge toward simplicity for all it’s worth.
He’s a Pusher Man
What Trump also understands is the emotion of politics, which may be his worst sin. Every politician, of course, appeals to voters’ emotions, but I liken Trump to a street-corner pusher with two pills: one called Rage, and one called Pride, and he peddles both of them endlessly to anyone who’s interested. (It’s worth pointing out that Wrath and Pride are two of the Seven Deadly Sins.) You refer directly to Pride in your article, when you write, “With Trump, there was a genuine feeling of pride of being an American. With the Democrats, they emphasized that the country was a racist place from top to bottom.”
The Democratic counter to that argument is that we’re every bit as patriotic as anyone else, but our patriotism is a bit more complex. Less monolithic, if you will. We love and treasure our country, but we are not blind to its faults. We are firm, ardent believers in the preamble to the Constitution, where it declares that its primary purpose is “to form a more perfect Union.” Implicit in the language is the idea that the United States is never static, that its mission is never done. We are always striving toward a more perfect union, and the only way to accomplish that is to be clear-eyed about our national faults, and to be vigilant about ensuring that those faults are never allowed to take root too deeply.
Trump, of course, is always declaring enemies of the state, which you could look at as his own version of a search for national faults. But Democrats find it terrifying that the enemies he finds are always, exclusively, people who disagree with him. He doesn’t find national enemies, he finds personal enemies and then declares them to be national enemies. The man who declared “I alone can fix it” (a phrase that should give anyone pause) sees anyone who is not in lockstep with him to be an enemy, even if they were once allies. (Particularly if they were once allies.) So it’s hardly a surprise to find unity of goals, unity of purpose at a Trump rally when everyone else has already been thrown out.
Will Democrats Get Wiped Out?
I have no idea. I worry, of course. But congratulations for casting your vote in New Hampshire, every vote is crucial. I’m not supporting Mayor Pete in the primaries but will be perfectly happy to vote for him in the general election. Because all the qualities you cited about Trump that give you pause (the Twitter posts, his lies, his policies) are not separable from the triumphant man you saw at the rally, basking in the adoration of his fans. The TV-trained showman in him understands how to be appealing, but this is the presidency. What matters is what he does. And as you’ve already noted, what he does is very troubling indeed.
Thanks for your time and attention.
