Don't Belittle Trump Supporters?

Nick Kristof has a terrific column today, about the importance of not belittling Trump supporters, given the reasons for that support—grounded in decades of failure to support communities and working-class people—and the fact that prejudice against Trump voters is still prejudice, full stop.

Toward the end of the piece, Kristof notes that an earlier tweet on the same theme prompted readers to write him saying, “but they deserve to be demeaned!” This statement caught my eye, because it reflects a power dynamic that often causes trouble.

I’d argue that the liberals who say “they deserve it” see Trump and his voters as a powerful force—one poised to change the very nature of the US government and culture. These liberals likely see their prejudices as a just reaction to that threatening power. They are fighting up—bullying the bully, they believe—and it’s only fair. Feeling powerless makes people feel that hostility and aggression are justified.

Contrast this with the Trump voters profiled in Kristof’s piece—people scarred by family addiction, loss of jobs and local industries, and, as Kristof put it, the “unraveling” of the “social fabric.” (Let’s acknowledge that these descriptions don’t apply to all Trump voters—many of whom are well-to-do and driven by motives that seem less legitimate—but stick with Kristof’s focus.) These voters are the proverbial “left behind.” They have little control at work, little choice of job or vocation. Family members who want more opportunities often move away, leaving a rip in the family—and unlike transplants from more privileged families, they may be unable to visit home. Or they may change, thanks to their new contexts and experiences, so that the leavers and the stayers can’t connect as easily and find it simpler to just stay apart. Companies tend to feel no loyalty to their workforces anymore, so if it makes financial sense to close a location on which hundreds or thousands of workers depend, they will. For the abandoned workers, it’s as if a loyal relationship has been broken. Just as when a romantic partner suddenly leaves, this can leave someone feeling fragile and unsure about their whole belief system.

So consider this environment of disruption, and loss, where people thought they were doing exactly what the world told them to do, and the prizes all disappeared anyway. This would certainly feel like powerlessness, and I argue it is—that the daily, on-the-ground existential powerlessness driving Kristof’s Trump supporters trumps (sorry!) the symbolic and epistemic powerlessness of his opponents. Trump supporters say and do some ugly things. Again, feeling powerless makes such behavior feel justified.

It can be easier to see such dynamics from the outside, so let me, with some trepidation, offer another example. Israel was founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust, in the context of deep opposition and hostility from its neighbors—to the extent that Israel has had to fight wars, repeatedly, to preserve its existence. How could the mindset of Israel be anything other than that of a beleaguered underdog just struggling to exist? At the same time, founding Israel meant dispossessing the Palestinian people who already lived on the land. The Palestinians who remained were mostly moved to controllable territories within Israel. For Israel, this must seem like a way to contain a power within their own country. For Palestinians, though: Their land was taken, they were forced to move, their daily movements are restricted, and their rights are less than those of Israeli citizens. This would feel like deep powerlessness. And, say it with me: People who feel powerless see aggression as justified. So Hamas felt justified in attacking Israelis on October 7th. Attacked, Israel felt weak, and thus justified in attacking Gaza. The spiral only gets worse.

I want to close with a far more mundane example of how being the weak party seems to entitle someone to express hostility. Several years ago, in my academic field, a small group of scholars started highlighting bad scientific practices and urging researchers to be more rigorous and transparent. Doing so felt like a huge career risk: These activists were typically junior faculty and PhD students, and they were criticizing the work of senior scholars. In academe, senior faculty have enormous power over the futures of the juniors. They decide who gets to earn a degree, who gets hired, and who gets tenure. It’s not ideal, but for decades juniors have tread cautiously to the point of self-censorship as they established their careers. Getting tenure was the point of transformation from powerless to power holder.

In their advocacy, the junior scholars were often brash and insulting. They imputed bad motives and poor ethics to scientific violators. From the outside, it could look as if a sense of glee accompanied each take-down of a famous academic. It got so bad that one eminent scholar wrote a piece calling the activists “methodological terrorists.” (The phrase was ultimately removed from her piece before publication.) And of course they acted aggressively: Junior academics, who by custom and history had tremendously low power, felt justified in using whatever they could to fight against far more powerful figures.

But on the other side, the senior scholars were increasingly terrified. The “mob” seemed to descend, unpredictably, on one person after another who had, through a decades-long career, excelled at all the things academics are supposed to do. They had done everything right and suddenly their reputations (and, in some cases, careers) were being stripped away. They may not have confronted, before, how powerful they were; they certainly felt now that the power had inverted. So they felt entitled to insult and malign the activists (if somewhat afraid of doing so publicly).¹

Do all people who feel powerless respond with such negative behavior? Of course not. Key to the examples I’ve described is a competitive relationship between the party who feels powerless and the one they see as holding the power. Hierarchical relationships can be stable, cordial, and even healthy—provided that the power differences occur within our team and are designed to help move everyone forward, not just the powerful. In an era of increasing inequality, those at the top would do well to remember that power differences lead to resentment, even revolution; but only when the powerless feel they’ve played by the right rules, but somehow still keep losing.