Trump shoots the messenger, though not on 5th avenue…and why he gets away with it

If Democrats would stop blaming voters’ bigotry and ignorance for their election losses and pay attention to the legitimate concerns behind the rise of Trump they might better understand why their approval rating is still significantly lower than his.

AI generated image.  Gemini refused to depict
Trump standing on 5th Avenue with a smoking gun.

The president may not have been standing in Fifth Avenue when he metaphorically shot his labor statistics messenger, but close enough.

There is widespread agreement that Trump’s firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, poses great danger to the future health of the economy. To quote one expert reaction:

If policymakers and the public can’t trust the data—or suspect the data are being manipulated—confidence collapses and reasonable economic decision-making becomes impossible. It’s like trying to drive a car blindfolded. This manufactured chaos will reduce business investment and consumer spending, making a recession—and soaring unemployment—far more likely in coming months.

Trump’s political instincts, however, are almost always better than the reasoned judgement of establishment thinkers like Heidi Shierholz, who wrote that paragraph for the Economic Policy Institute.

How can that be?

A day or so before the commissioner lost her job, journalist Jesse Singal (a liberal journalist) told an interviewer that his reporting on social science research has revealed a disturbing pattern of shoddy methods, ideological bias, groupthink, and outright corruption. Experts, he said, “have screwed up so badly so often”

The crisis in expert authority is a disaster in its own right—we should be able to trust the studies that are published—but one of the knock-on effects of it is it does fuel folks like Trump who take the burn-it-down-approach.

Singal spoke before the firing of Ms. McEntarfer, but he had no trouble coming up with an example of a Trump administrator burning something down: Robert F. Kennedy’s attack on expert vaccine consensus. As if on cue, a week after Singal’s interview, Kennedy announced a $500m cut to  mRNA vaccine research funding.

Singal’s findings turn liberals’ “believe science” lawn sign narrative on its head. In that story, scientists are the heroes. They give us a set of uncontested facts that make our lives better. Those who attack scientific consensus are the villains who are causing the crisis in expert authority, which undermines reasonable decision-making and leads to chaos.

Singal suggests a somewhat different story, in which failings of scientific expertise are at least partially responsible for the “crisis in expert authority.”

And the crisis extends beyond science to every kind of expert in government, education, the media—just about every institution and by extension, democracy itself.  In every case, there is at least some kernel of truth to the sense that experts and institutions have failed us.  And Democrats have become the party that defends the experts and institutions against Trump's attacks on them. 

Meanwhile, Trump has a plan for reviving the middle class that requires attacking those institutions and, in spite of his many blunders, his low approval rating is still significantly higher than the Democrats’.

Democrats could stop blaming voters’ bigotry and ignorance for their losses, acknowledge the failings of elite experts and institutions, and come up with a better plan to restore working class prosperity.

Or they can keep doing what they've been doing and wait for the anti-incumbency cycle to run it's course after Trump’s policies inevitably fail and voters decide they hate the Republican Party even more than they hate Democrats.

Then the party of experts will have a slim majority for a few years until their policies inevitable fail again. 

Notes

This recent Atlantic article offers a list of the ways that Trump is likely to fail. Note to self: read this again in a couple of years to see which of these predictions came true.

It’s Trump’s economy now. The latest financial numbers offer some warning signs (AP, Aug. 2).

Even if Trump manages to revive the manufacturing sector, it's not going to restore middle class prosperity.  Here's why. 

Jesse Singal’s book, “The Quick Fix” focuses on bad science in psychology. 

Here's an example of a left wing party that defeated a Trump-like opposition by admitting past mistakes.

Lies, damned lies, and politics

There’s been a lot of commentary in the press this past week about the role of lies in politics.

In his Tuesday column on Donald Trump’s lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene, Jamelle Bouie wrote: “Politics is not the place for perfect honesty, but some measure of truth telling is necessary to the project of collective self-government.”

We all know that politicians bend the truth in making their case. Joe Biden and Tim Waltz, to name two prominent examples on the other side of the isle, have gotten caught in some whoppers.

If lying is an unavoidable part of politics, where is the line between what Bouie refers to as “some measure of truth” and lying that could destroy “collective self-government.”

It's a question that has become particularly urgent this hurricane season as Trump-flavored politicians circulate lies as brazen as Margorie Taylor Greene’s suggestion that the government is somehow causing catastrophic weather events.

Bouie vaguely suggests the line between acceptable and unacceptable lying is whether politicos “strive for some correspondence to reality when they make their case to the public.”

You-tuber Vlad Vexler is more precise. He defines the unacceptable liars as “post-truth populists” who “have consciously given up on trying to make their lies internally consistent,” so that it becomes impossible to tell the difference between truth and lies.” Their goal, he argues, is to destroy faith in institutions and politics itself and to foster the feeling that leaders “prioritize others over you.”

Vexler said this before Trump started claiming that FEMA disaster relief money was being channeled to illegal immigrants.

Where Bouie argues that brazen lies are anti-democratic, Vexler suggests instead that they are anti-political. They lead citizens to believe that “there is nothing you can do to inflect the political process.”

I think that’s a better explanation.

Bouie writes that without access to the truth, we can’t perform what he says is an essential part of democracy : reasoning and deliberating with fellow citizens.

In his book, In Defence of Politics, Bernard Crick separates democracy from politics, and the book includes a chapter with the title “A Defence of Politics Against Democracy.”

The democratic concept of “sovereignty of the people”—the right of “the people to choose the government they want”—suggests that in democracy, the people get their way.   In theory, “all power is supposed to stem from an undivided and indivisible ‘people,’” Crick writes.

But another essential concept of democracy—“majority rule”—means that minorities—the losers in elections—do not get their way.

“Sovereignty of the people” doesn’t address Crick’s incisive question: “which people?” (Crick, 59-60).

A key feature of populism is to define “The people” against an enemy. Trump has referred to journalists as “enemies of the people”; Bernie Sanders’ to “billionaires.” Enemies like that must be suppressed, populists say, but Crick defines politics as “the activity by which differing interests within a given territory are conciliated,” not suppressed.

But if democracy is elevated over politics, democracy is at risk. Tocqueville spoke of "democratic despotism" and worried that if ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority."

Hannah Arendt, a survivor of totalitarianism, was quoted in my local newspaper last week on how the destruction of politics in a democratic system leads to authoritarian government: “Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strong man who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up.” Established authoritarian dictatorships, Anne Applebaum wrote in the June Atlantic, suppress citizens yearning for democracy not by discrediting the notions of popular sovereignty or majority rule, but by promoting apathy and cynicism about the potential of political action to create a better world. “Their goal is to persuade people to stay out of politics.”

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Leftovers

Hannah Arendt was quoted by Lynn Wurzburg of St. J. Oct. 9, 2024, Caledonian Record Crick talks about the problem of sovereignty on pp. 59-60 of Defence of Politics. Danielle Allen also confronts this problem in her book on citizenship, which I wrote about elsewhere on this blog:

One of the most important lessons students need to learn to become democratic citizens is that in spite of the individual freedom and sovereignty that democracies promise their citizens, we don’t always get our way even in a well-functioning democracy and are often asked to sacrifice our personal preferences and interests for the good of the whole, the survival of democracy, and the maintenance of peace. When our candidate loses the election, when we are drafted and sent into battle, and when policies favored by the majority disadvantage us or go against what we think is good, we are sacrificing something. https://www.billjordan.net/2022/08/teaching-citizenship-in-polarized.html

In defense of MAGA voters

The neighbors' place.

The people I mostly interact with are adamantly anti-Trump.  Well, so am I. After Joe Biden's disastrous debate performance, I started saying I'd vote for a ham sandwich before I'd vote for Trump in November.  Thankfully the Democrats came up with a better option than ham for the next president. 

How, my friends, family and colleagues at work, often wonder, could ANYONE vote for someone so horrible?  How can they believe his lies? How can they excuse his glaring character flaws? How can they think he cares about their interests?

We don't find an explanation in the media we consume.  Sometimes I find myself scrolling liberal YouTube or other social media, watching clips from various man-on-the-street interviews of the Trump voter done by slick late-night comedians, or random You Tubers with a camera and a microphone.  They give preposterous answers to questions about current events, public policy or history. They spout absurdly implausible conspiracy theories.  They offer elaborate, logic-defying explanations for Trump's lies, exaggerations and foibles. It's quite satisfying. It makes me feel so smart.

Those of us marinating in these presentations without any alternative sources of information about these fellow citizens of ours, conclude that MAGA world is made up of the least intelligent, least educated, least rational, most racist, sexist, xenophobic, gullible people among us. Those who have tried to enlighten them out of their MAGA delusions generally conclude that they are impervious to facts and reason. 

I recall a moment of shock and humility among the the people around me after Trump's victory in 2016, and some folks were saying that it was time to start listening to some of the voters outside of our own blue bubble and understand the source of their discontent.  

I was in a book group at the time and suggested that we read Arlie Hochschild's book, Strangers in their Own Land, a five-year study of conservative working class Louisianans who were reliable voters for a Republican Party that opposed environmental regulations that curbed oil company practices that were causing catastrophic destruction of their homes and communities, creating among other things, a "cancer ally" and home-swallowing sink holes. 

I think Hochschild's aim was to create empathy and understanding of these voters in the hopes of opening up dialogues and eroding the alienation and polarization that has made it increasingly difficult for people with opposing views to hash out compromises—or to even see the opposition as legitimate.  The book didn't seem to have that effect on most of my fellow book-readers, but to confirm their negative assumptions and bafflement. 

The book had a different effect on me, I guess, because I'd spend the summer of 2016, after the Brexit vote, and Trump's primary victory, trying to understand what was going on with those voters as I was preparing to teach my fall course on American Politics and Public Policy. I also happened to be writing a meditation on the subject to be delivered at the start of the term.

Since then I've kept seeking out explanations for the Trump voters and I think there's more than what we see on late night comedy. Here's a list: 

1. Support for Trump is based in both rational and irrational thinking, solid facts and delusions.  That's true of lots of thinking here in Blue America, too.  I include a segment in my politics class about the cognitive distortions that cloud everyone's thinking, especially when it comes to politics.

2. Trump voters are a varied bunch, like Blue voters, they don't all agree with each other. They range from rabidly angry anti-democratic hooligans who see Trump as divinely inspired, to average middle class voters who only reluctantly pull the MAGA lever, more out of opposition to the Democratic policies than love of Trump. Similarly, Democratic voters include some people with views I'd rather not have to align myself with.

3. Trump emerged from a rising populist sentiment in the 2010s that was justifiably revolting against  what Thomas Frank calls "elite failure"—de-industrialization, hollowing out of the middle class, forever wars, the opioid epidemic, the Great Recession, uncontrolled immigration, the catastrophic decline of private-sector unions, corporate money in politics. But after Trump captured the Republican Party, the Democratic establishment put its finger on the nomination scale to make sure the left populist lost to Clinton, who had become a symbol of elite rule.  Pre-convention polls suggested Sanders would have done better than Clinton in the general election. So we got right- instead of left-wing populism. 

Whatever. The point of this, is to share a few things I've read recently in the off-chance you might want to have a more nuanced understanding of the Trump voter.  

• NYT columnist Ross Douthat is not a Trump supporter, but he is a conservative who has no trouble coming up with justifiable reasons to vote for Trump again, for example in a Sept. 14, 2024 piece, "What Undecided Voters Might Be Thinking."
• This podcast, Batya Ungar-Sargon, a 2016 Sanders supporter explaining why Harris's debate performance might not have won working class Trump voters. 
• Thomas Frank does a good job of explaning the populist revolt against the Democratic Party in his books Listen Liberal and The People, No.  
• The writings of John Judis and Ruy Tuxiera blame the Democratic Party for losing voters more than the blame the irrationality of Trump voters.  For example, their last collaboration, Where Have all the Democrats Gone, Tuxiera's Substack blog, "Liberal Patriot," and Judis's primers on populism and nationalism combined along with a book on socialism in "The Politics of our Time."
• Kaitlyn Flannigan's Atlantic article, "How Late Night Comedy Feuled the Rise of Trump," argues that our gleeful riducule of Trump voters probably cements their support of him.

Last but best, the organization Braver Angels has had great success in bringing voters from the opposing sides together to at least listen to each other and sometimes even find common ground. I witnessed this in person at their annual convention in Kenosha Wisconsin this past June. 

Should we teach social justice?

(Second in a series: Could I Be Wrong?  Believe Science? 11 Strategies for Depolarizing Tomorrow's Citizens)

Diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice. Who could be against any of these things?

Protest movements for social justice are undeniably an essential element of democracy. My book looks at African American social justice advocacy during World War I and my US history courses spend a lot of time on how social movements improved American democracy. From time to time, I’ve joined campaigns for contemporary causes.

In the absence of protest, modern representative democracies act almost exclusively in the interest of the classes that control the levers of government—at best about 20 percent of the population. Only under pressure from protest movements do they sometimes throw the bottom 80 a bone. The history of American democracy is unthinkable without the abolition, women’s suffrage, labor, and civil rights movements.

But while I want my students to understand the role those movements played in history, I think it would run counter to my role as a teacher to recruit them into a movement that I support or to embrace one particular vision of social justice. I know that many of my colleagues disagree with me about this. And it has often seemed that my school does too.

But we don’t all agree on the same vision of social justice. If teachers can promote a particular partisan agenda, half the nation’s schools will cultivate right-wing crusaders, and the other half will produce left-wingers, and the electorate will become ever more polarized.

And the dispositions, inclinations and tactics of citizens are the opposite of those required for a political campaign. Where citizens should be open minded, aware of the likely flaws in their thinking and open to compromise, activists and campaigners must suppress their doubts as they crusade for the cause.

I do think it’s possible to play the role of citizen in a spirit of “political friendship” with rivals and still campaign for certain partisan outcomes—but it’s essential to understand the difference between the two and to be able to make the shift into the different roles as appropriate.*

As a teacher at Exeter I try to be as politically neutral as possible in the classroom. When students try to guess my politics, they are wrong more than half the time. But in my free time, I helped students canvass for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 New Hampshire primaries. These students came to support Sanders on their own. I just gave them rides in my car—which still has a “Feel the Bern” bumper sticker.

Meanwhile, in the classroom, I make a special effort to support conservative students because they are in such a small minority at the school and I value their presence because it makes for a more realistic political environment in my classroom. They also improve the thinking of liberal students by forcing them to defend their positions.

But we are increasingly living in ideological bubbles. The US is “more geographically polarized today” by party affiliation “than at any point since 1860.”  Which means that public schools have less ideological diversity, and students encounter fewer people with different viewpoints than their parents. Private—especially boarding—schools might offer more diversity, since they can bring students together from different communities, yet they seem to be getting more polarized as well, as Michael Powell showed in his reporting on liberal, elite New York City independent schools and as the recent 12% rise in enrollments in conservative Christian schools suggests.

Teachers can open students’ minds to opposing views by playing the devil’s advocate. But that’s less useful in helping students develop cognitive empathy than encountering real people with sincerely held views (Hess and McAvoy, 117). But in a school where the devil’s advocate is seen as an actual devil, teachers may be wary of making his case.

For example, during a DEI faculty workshop I attended, I posed a question to the presenter we had invited to speak. How do we protect the feelings of African-American students in a discussion about Affirmative Action? I was concerned that the conversation might turn to questions about the qualifications of students at our highly selective school who might be perceived as beneficiaries of racial preferences.

His answer: the teacher should intercede in the debate and explain why the student opposing affirmative action is wrong.

I agree that some opinions should not be given serious consideration in any classroom. But an important difference between, say, slavery and affirmative action is that one is a settled question in contemporary national politics, and the other is still open and subject to debate. A majority of the US population and the Supreme Court and a significant minority of African Americans oppose affirmative action according to some polls, and opponents raise legitimate questions about its effectiveness.

If we shut off debate on unresolved questions, how will we resolve them if not through violence and intimidation, or the suppression of basic political rights? And if they can be discussed in Congress and the courts and the nation’s press, to shut them down in schools is to prepare students for a political fantasy world.

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Things to read in relation to the above. 

The other Blog posts in this series: Could I be Wrong? Believe Science? and 11 Strategies for Teaching Politics.

I wrote on this topic back in 2022.  See "On Teaching Social Justice."  Here's a passage: "To advance any version of social justice in a democracy (or republic, if that’s your preferred term), we need to be willing and able to deliberate, compromise and form coalitions with fellow citizens and that requires mutual respect even between rivals. The best contribution teachers can make to advancing social justice is to graduate citizens with that sort of democratic disposition."

*In The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It, Amy Gutman and Dennis Thompson argue that in a representative democracy elected leaders need to be able to shift back and forth between campaign mode and governing mode if they want to govern effectively. One cause of polarization, they argue, is that US election seasons—especially for the presidency—last so long.

For a more useful answer to my question about affirmative action, see Hess and McAvoy, Chapter 5, “A case of Political Friendship,” which looks at the methods that a masterful teacher of politics, Joel Kushner, employed to “mitigate negative costs” in discussions of controversial topics. Also relevant to teaching affirmative action is chapter 8, “Ethics of Framing and Selecting Issues” which makes a helpful distinction between open and closed political debates and how to deal with them differently. I wrote a summary of the chapter here. 

Public opinion on affirmative action varies according to how the question is asked and who is doing the polling. This June, 2023 poll by Pew says 50% of Americans (including 29% of African Americans) oppose affirmative action in selective college admissions, while only 33% approve.  Like so many issues, if you search hard enough, you can find a poll to support many different positions on affirmative action, but you will never find one that suggests it is not still a matter of controversy. On the other hand, no one even bothers to run polls on whether slavery is a legitimate system of labor.

For an example of an essay that raises legitimate questions about the effectiveness of race-based affirmative action by an Exeter Latina student, see Nataly Delcid, “At private school, my family’s income sets me apart more than ethnicity,” Washington Post, July 12, 2023. She agrees with the 60% of surveyed Americans who told Rice University pollsters in 2019 that affirmative action should be based on family income not race or ethnicity.

Quite understandably, DEI training like the session I mentioned, often backfires. See “Is Your Company’s Diversity Training Making You More Biased?” Psychology Today, June 7, 2017.

According to a recent paper by the economists Ethan Kaplan, Jörg Spenkuch, and Rebecca Sullivan, the U.S. is more geographically polarized today than at any point since 1860, when a geographic cleavage in political preferences was about to send the nation into the Civil War.  See: “The Real Culprit Behind Geographic Polarization,” Atlantic, Nov. 26, 2018.

The term social justice is associated with left-wing causes, but conservatives have their own version of what is socially just—they just call it something different. Efforts in New Hampshire and Florida by conservative politicians to insert content from the conservative online propaganda website PragerU into public school curricula are no better than liberal teachers basing their history courses on content from the Howard Zinn Education Project.  See Steven Porter, “Top education official in NH recommends unaccredited PragerU course for academic credit,” Boston Globe, Aug. 9, 2023. See also my thoughts about the NYT 1619 project as a source for US history educators. 

 This series: Part 1: Could I Be Wrong?  (civics education and epistemic humility); Part 2: Social Justice?  (Teaching citizenship to students with different values) and Part 3: Believe Science?  (curbing meritocratic hubris in tomorrow's leaders); Part 4: 11 Strategies for Depolarizing Tomorrow's Citizens.