A few months back, I posted the Richard Rorty quote below.  This morning I circulated it to a dozen friends who voted for Trump with the question: “does this resonate for people you know who support Trump”.  I haven’t heard back from a few, but the 7 who have responded, said “Yes, except for the last paragraph” in one form or another.

members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots….

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion…. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

Since we’re learning that political conversations no longer have to begin and end with data (and that data might be neither when it comes to understanding voter identity and movement formation), I’m not going to apologize for it being a small sample.

I’m in mourning, of course.  And I’m scared – more for my friends who aren’t white or who live outside of Capitol City (NYC is mine), but a little for my family too.  But that’s done.  I used to visit Mother Jones’s grave every time I drove to Decatur, IL and it’s her that’s my kick in the ass: “Pray for the dead, fight like hell for the living.”

I present the Rorty quote not as a provocation or a defense but more as a “bug description.”  When you have a software defect or bug, your first task is to describe it accurately, see what steps led to it, and then work on a fix.  One bug description is based on character flaw: “People are racist and misogynist and generally assholes.”  I’m not sure that has explanatory power as it leaves us with the question of where did this racism come from?  Why is it spiking when there are indicators – in polls, popular culture, and some voting patterns – that racism is declining?  Why did it happen so quickly?

More important to me is that the character flaw explanation has no viable solution:  liberals are quite skilled at lecturing and hectoring people about their un-evolved attitudes and social media has made them as efficient in hitting people with that message as one can be (unless you actually wanted to talk to a person).  But despite their skill and many channels for conveying these lectures, it doesn’t seem to be working.

The Rorty quote offers a different bug report:  “people have decided the system has failed them at a fundamental level and are turning to any alternative that looks like not the system.”  (This is paragraph one and two, and with a less specific paragraph three, one in which it might not have been the strongman, it might have been a Democratic Socialist, or a preacher, or . . . ).

I’m going to work on that bug and highlight a few things that come out of taking that bug seriously:

• we have to turn our attention from “why didn’t they vote for us” to “why can’t we earn their votes when it should be so easy?”
• we need to recognize that people’s lives as citizen aren’t made up exclusivelyof policy comparisons and resumes but are bounded by stories,  community, and a sense of trust and identity.
• we’ve had strong electoral outcomes when the country was considerably less educated and intelligent, so we may need to re-frame that argument.
• that said, we’ve lost the ability as a polis to have conversations around evidence, causal effects.
• we no longer have a clear sense of citizens who must work on “e pluribus unum” – on either or any side of the debate.

For too long, we’ve watched Dems actively target a knowledge worker, pro-business, white collar base while hoping union, working, black and latino folks will stick with them.  Each time they lose, they turn to better get out the vote efforts.  With the exception of Obama’s two elections, they rarely acknowledge that they need to bring people back in – earn votes (insert the full text of “cling to their guns” for the 100th time on this blog).  The biggest surprise for me last night was how much these rural, small town, small city areas got out the votes and defeated the polling predictions.  We thought having no ground game would kill Trump – turns out he didn’t need one.  You don’t need to get out votes when people really, really want to win.  However tragic and misguided, he earned their votes – getting mocked and abused while acting like their friend, risking social ostracism in Capitol City because he liked them more – and they came out.

Time to fight for the living . . . and to start with the long hard work of resisting the urge to improve their manners and focus instead on earning their trust back.