Don't Care

Drawing by Peter Brookes.

Roger Cohen, a columnist from whom I sometimes learn sort of useful and nonpartisan things, in The Times, on the kinds of voters he thinks Democrats should be aiming at for 2020:

Chuck Hardwick, lifelong Republican, former Pfizer executive, now retired in Florida, voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but not without misgivings. He’d met him in the 1980s and noted a “consuming ego.” Still, elections are about choices, and he disliked the “scheming” Clintons. He was mad at the media for first mocking Trump during the primaries and then turning on him as nominee.

Three years later, Hardwick, 78, whose political career included a stint as speaker of the New Jersey General Assembly, is unsure how he will vote in November 2020. Trump confounds him. He admires the president’s energy, his courage in taking on difficult issues like China “stealing its way to prosperity,” his corporate tax cuts, and what he sees as a revitalizing impact on American ambition.

“But if I was on a board that had hired Trump as C.E.O.,” Hardwick tells me, “I’d have to say to him: ‘You’ve got good traits but you can’t manage people. You’re fired.’”

Steve M is pretty savage about the piece, which more or less pulls a Salena Zito on us in suggesting there is any possibility that this man, a mainstay of the New Jersey GOP though the 1980s who worked hard for National Right to Life and NRA endorsements, is a necessary element of a Democratic victory:

So Hardwick has been a Republican all his life and was an executive in the pharmaceutical industry and is so plugged in that he once had a chance to meet Trump personally. Hardwick's adjective for Bill and Hillary Clinton is "scheming" and he thinks Trump was treated badly by the media. (Translation: Like many white male septuagenarians, he watches Fox every day.)...

But I think that's a little unfair; Cohen says he has something a bit subtler than that in mind, which starts with fear of the kind of unpredictable disruption Trump might cause if the Democrats win narrowly. Will he refuse to accept the results? (Probably.) Will he demand endless recounts? (No doubt.) Will he foment a coup (you wouldn't be surprised if he tried), or lead an ill-regulated militia to try to seize the Capitol? (Uh-uh, but maybe Bannon would, on his behalf, or even some enterprising person under 65.) Cohen's asking the much more interesting question of how Democrats could achieve an electoral blowout on the Nixon vs. McGovern scale, so that it won't be questioned at all.

Which wouldn't work, obviously, on Trump, whose imagination is never weighed down by too much knowledge of mathematics. But it would probably have an effect on people inclined to back him up, and on the Republican party in general, as notice that they're not following a winning agenda if it's attached to him, and I wouldn't mind seeing that either.

On the other hand it should be clear that, for one thing, Mr. Hardwick is never going to vote for a Democrat for the Senate, and if we're basing our presidential strategy on him it could be a somewhat Pyrrhic victory: Democrats kept their congressional majorities in the Nixon landslide of 1972 and actually added a couple of senators. And how many 78-year-old former pharma execs and New Jersey politicians in Florida are there to make the difference, anyway? Relying on these people for the blowout victory is even less plausible than relying on them period.

What's got me fascinated about Cohen's story is that detail at the end, that he'd vote to fire Trump if he was on the board of a company that had Trump as CEO without hesitation, though he wasn't sure if he'd want to fire him as leader of the Free World and occupant of the Loneliest Job There Is. He would sack him from Pfizer or the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, but maybe not from the White House, because why? Maybe because he doesn't think the White House is that important, compared to a serious outfit like Pfizer? Or because he doesn't think ability to manage people is that important in the White House? Or because he thinks the prospect of a Pete Buttigieg or Joe Biden in the White House is so frightening that he'd prefer an incompetent?

Well, no, not that. If anything he's sending the message that Cohen received, that he might consider voting for a Democrat if the Democrats try to please him with their nomination. I figure he's probably lying and will vote for Trump or whatever the Republicans dredge up to replace him if necessary no matter what—but would like, in view of the likelihood that Republicans are going to lose, to influence the Democratic nomination process to come up with someone less likely to affect his taxes, which is why he's talking to Cohen.

But it seems certain that he means it when he suggests that what the president of the United States does matters less than what an important corporation does (at least as long as they're not "scheming", whatever that entails—I guess something that requires advance planning and thus beyond Trump's capacities, which is why Hardwick voted for him the first time). And this isn't some yahoo who failed civics in junior high—it's somebody who's been in and around government for a whole distinguished career, not only as a politician; his jobs at Pfizer were just about all in the company's government relations and public affairs department, from 1966 to his retirement in 2005. It's not ideal for the president to be stupid, verbally incontinent, and unable to work with others, but it's better than Clintonian "scheming" and it's not an insuperable handicap. What kind of thinking is this?

Anyhow, in context of an offsite conversation with Jordan Orlando (whose ideas have bled into this post in a way I can't even sort out), I happened to be spending some time yesterday, following a link from Tristero at Digby's place, staring at a collection of 15 pro-Trump letters to The Times which they ran in January 2018, commemorating the administration's first anniversary.

So a different constituency from the putatively hillbilly Trump voters the Times's assignment editors are so fascinated by—a sample of the opinions of Trump voters who read The Times, which presupposes enough education to recognize the president's ignorance, I'd think. Although they weren't all very happy with the paper, like Alexander Goldstein of Brooklyn

Before I respond to your questions, I have a question of my own: Did you run similar surveys for Obama voters? Or, for that matter, Eisenhower voters? Trump voters are not circus freaks to be displayed or singled out....

I think President Trump is doing just fine, particularly when one considers the sustained assault of the media, Hollywood, talk shows and, dare I say, “the paper of record,” which has abandoned all pretense of objectivity to join, if not lead, “the resistance.”

or the more-in-sorrow Ellen Mackler of New Haven, "a registered Democrat for 40 years"

I thank my dear New York Times for asking to hear from Trump voters. It’s been difficult to read the paper this past year. It’s anti-Trump in everything from the front page to fashion. It’s so pervasive that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there’s not another loyal New York Times reader out there who voted for Mr. Trump and that I’m sending the only submission. New York Times, I will always love you, despite our disagreement.

or with media in general, such as Sonia Schwartz of Valley Stream, with the now familiar complaint that they forced her to vote for Trump, apparently by triggering her Oppositional Defiance Disorder

Much of the media, as the hotbed of hatred against Mr. Trump, has pushed me more toward him than his social behavior has done the opposite.

and Daniel Irwin of North Syracuse

I do not understand why people still believe anything that the media, or politicians and pundits who have an agenda, say. They have been wrong about practically everything since long before November 2016.

Perhaps he liked it that Trump didn't have an agenda, more of an all-things-to-all-people aura, such that you might see him as a standard right winger, as did Ellen Mackler

So far I am thrilled with his performance. Numerous reasons, but here are a few: recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital; letting the generals crush ISIS; stronger plans to prevent North Korea and Iran from using nuclear weapons; getting out of biased United Nations organizations; and respect for the flag and the rule of law.

(wonder how she feels about the Iran and North Korea policy now, with Iran starting up its nuclear research program again and North Korea seemingly having won a permanent suspension of US-ROK military exercises), or a "white working class" hero of the kind the newspapers were seeing, like 28-year-old Dane Davis, hailing from distressed Newton Falls, OH, though living in New York at the time of writing

I’ve seen Newton Falls and its surrounding environs succumb to a despair reflected by the opioid crisis. I have seen Republicans and Democrats sell out through a false dogma of free trade. I have seen my friends sent abroad to foreign lands with ill-defined military missions, coming back mangled or not at all. I have seen a political class eager to replace a working class with an imported labor class, driving down wages.

or a counterculture icon, like Dan Lorey of Cincinnati

As a child of the ’60s I admire his iconoclastic nature, optimism and unapologetic humanity. When asked during the campaign about his truthfulness, he replied that maybe he is too truthful. He does ruffle feathers, but seems to end up being right about most important things. 

Numerous actual issues were cited, but few cited more than two or three times, including ISIS (5), judges or Supreme Court (4), immigration (4), and the tax cut (6). More consistent were assertions about successful opposition to other parties; Joshua Dawson of Underwood, IA, was

very happy with the number of executive orders he’s passed to get around an obstructionist Democratic Party that is out for his blood. His combative attitude with the Democrats and the media on Twitter never gets old with me either.

And Steven Sanabria of Oakdale, CA,

Donald Trump has succeeded where Barack Obama failed.... Who knew that all it would take to make progress was vision, chutzpah and some testosterone?

Margaret O. Tunnell of Alamo, CA, rejoiced that

He has undone many of President Barack Obama’s unconstitutional executive orders. He has been rolling back burdensome regulations. He shepherded through Congress a tax bill that most people think will be a boon to the economy and “lift all boats.” Obamacare is mortally wounded.

because "even though I’m a 'women’s libber' from the late ’60s, and I feel that we should have had a female president by now, Hillary Clinton was not worthy." This went along with some hostility to Democrats on the writers' part, like David McNeil of Chatham, NJ

Newsflash: Not all Trump voters are Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables.” Many of us are well-informed and highly educated, and we are weary of the Democrats’ tiresome focus on identity politics, class warfare, and disparagement of corporations and the “wealthy.”... I would give him high marks for policies and programs that are stimulating the private sector, which, after all, pays the bills for the Democrats’ extravagant welfare programs. And because of Mr. Trump we have an education secretary who actually cares more about educating children than appeasing the teachers’ unions.

Just one of the 15 was a complete nihilist of the kind I'm always looking out for, Philip Maynin, of Greenwich, CT, associate professor of analytics and finance at Bridgeport University:

I’ve voted twice in my life: once for myself when I ran for Congress 10 years ago, and once for Donald Trump last year. Virtually all of my friends or colleagues actively hate Mr. Trump. I’m a minority in every circle I move in. I have a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and a bachelor’s and master’s from Harvard; I’m a former hedge fund trader and now an academic; I’m a journalist and author. Imagine being a Trump supporter in even one of those circles! We learn to stay quiet.

How’s he doing? He has turned a fragile nation “anti-fragile” (the scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s term). Before Mr. Trump, we were scared of any volatility. Oh no, ISIS! Oh no, banks! The more chaos there was, the worse we were.

Now volatility is our friend. The more chaos, the better! Entrepreneurship up. Optimism up. Good old American problem solving is back! You know who loves change? Capitalists. Mr. Trump has led us on that spiritual exodus.

(My bold.)

Most were aware to one degree or another of Trump's personal deficits, though Joshua Dawson absolutely didn't care:

If I wanted a scripted smooth talker for president, I’d have voted for someone else. An unscripted Mr. Trump feels more authentic to me, and I still don’t see him as a politician.  

Emily Robertson of Austin was only concerned about the Twitter activity,

What I like least about his presidency so far is the tweeting. It’s often immature and lowers the tone of the debate while debasing the office of the presidency.

and Ms. Tunnell, the '60s "women's libber", was concerned about his vulgarity

Mr. Trump is a vulgarian in the way he tweets and sometimes talks. However, as Rich Lowry wrote in National Review, his presidency is better than his tweets, and he has made significant progress in nominating and appointing conservative judges.

Similarly Anne Minich of Milford, CT, who claimed to have been voting Democrat for 60 years, an immigrant who backs Trump's immigration policies, had problems, but thought his manner might make up for his words. Just watch him with the sound off:

Mr. Trump’s language is often inappropriate and juvenile, and I had hoped he would rise to his new position. But although words are indeed important, I thought his tough take-no-prisoners manner and, yes, even his unpredictability might be what was needed at this particular time to cause offending persons and countries to sit up, consider us seriously, and think twice about taking advantage of us financially and otherwise.

This looks like a variation on Richard Nixon's "madman" theory; if you haven't got a politician who's willing or able to pretend to be a madman, then a genuine madman might be a good second choice.

Jason Peck of Holtsville, NY, regretted that "Yes, he is embarrassing. Yes, he picks unnecessary fights" but then

I loved George W. Bush, but he failed on policy over and over again. If it takes putting up with Mr. Trump’s brash ways to see things get done, that is a deal I’m willing to accept. To be honest, I’m not sure he would have accomplished what he has so far without being an unrelenting public bully.

"Opinion polls," said David MacNeil, "give Mr. Trump a low rating, and I would, too, for character, personality and temperament." Daniel Irwin "went to the polls with a clothespin on my nose. I had very low expectations for a Trump presidency," but was pleasantly surprised. Steven Landis called him "the most unpresidential president of our time. Crude, rude, clueless dude — but I believe, with the help of his friends, he’s stumbling through one of the most effective presidencies in memory." That one's really telling to me. He's clueless and stumbling, but but the writer is completely confident that it, the presidency, is effective in ways he doesn't specify.

Nobody, of course, discusses the possibility of Trump's corruption, his profiting from his presidency, his payoffs to women he's had sex with, or the way Russians worked to elect him, not to mention his reputed sexual assaults, though all of these were a matter of common conversation at the time, months after Comey was fired and a couple of months after Flynn's guilty plea, in our circles, and it doesn't look as if any of them had even heard any of these stories, or they would at least have added them to their complaints about Democrats. I also believe they more or less pardon Trump for his sexual sins, which none of the writers mention but surely have heard about, and don't understand that the legal case against him and Cohen is not about fucking but structuring payments and laundering money to disguise enormous and illegal or illegally unreported campaign contributions, and I don't think they ever will.

Do we learn anything from this exercise?

As far as our starting question goes, yeah, I kind of think we do: They know he's stupid and gross, and they don't think it's a problem, as they certainly would if senior management in their own working lives were like that.

It looks as if they generally take a pretty dim, Reaganite view of what government does, and can do, which they don't know very much about, in spite of being Times readers; whatever it is, they want less of it, and they don't like the idea of "the Clintons" (still not admitting that Hillary minus Bill really has any fully realized existence) and their scheming, or Obama changing the national direction, which was where everything began to go wrong (no dog whistles there). Cutting government is OK, but it doesn't take an intellectual, it takes "chutzpah and testosterone". Obviously they make an exception for deploying force: they should have government stronger to "make our enemies fear us" and crack down on illegal immigrants, but you don't need to be smart or subtle for that either—you need to be "tough" and "unpredictable" and maybe a "bully".

And they had no idea of Trump's misbehavior going beyond these elements of rudeness to actual corruption. I'd like to know if that would hold up now; nobody's polled the question very recently, but as of last May voters thought Trump had committed crimes before he became president 57% (down from 64% before the Mueller Report was issued) to 28%, and were divided on whether he had committed crimes since entering office at 46% on each side. It's clear that even now there are voters who don't think it's disabling for a president to be a criminal, but I don't think we know exactly how many, or whether they've just never thought about the two questions at the same time. I think many voters really did believe Hillary Clinton must have done something terribly bad, thanks to the propaganda assault, without any clear idea of what it was, and did think it was disqualifying in her case, including younger voters on the "left" who were getting their propaganda from Russia and bad actors from all over our journalism (not naming them today). Democrats wouldn't be able to tell lies about Trump, but it's possible a good deployment of truth would convince a significant number of Republicans to stay home next year, and obviously I believe chance of that can only improve with the flow of information coming out of Congress over the next few months, as this impeachment case winds up and other issues (notably those relating to his finances, and hopefully Russia too) come out.

Are we more partisan now than we were two years ago, or more "tribal" to use the word as Ezra Klein does in a recent post (which I think I disagree with but you should absolutely read)? Klein says that Republicans have fallen victim to a "tribal epistemology", a way of deciding what's true and false according to what the tribe dictates, and this is why we can't even argue with them any more, because they can't accept the normal rule of evidence and logic. It's striking to me that none of the Times letter writers used the terms "liberal" or "progressive", let alone "socialist", to abuse their enemies—"Democrat" was good enough—and I can't believe that would still happen today. I'm also struck by how much their party line varied from one respondent to the next in the particular Trumpian accomplishments they were proud of, or what they wanted to happen to America; their partisanship was entirely negative, as Steve's been telling us more or less all along, a dislike and mistrust of Democrats (even among those who identify tribally as Democrats).

These respondents read The New York Times. They've most likely been to college (I love that the stupidest one in the list has a PhD, though evidently in some stupid finance subject), they're professionals rather than shopkeepers. They're all different from each other in what they like, though united to some degree in what they hate. They hardly belong to the "tribe" around which mythology has been growing since 2016 of the abandoned white boys (the one who identifies that way is clearly faking it: he doesn't know anybody in his own generation who lost a job due to NAFTA, and I can't believe he knows anybody who came home "mangled" from Iraq or Afghanistan either),  or the nasty old white petits-bourgeois I always think of as the primal Trump voters. But what they do have in common is something they also share with those others, and what it is is not an identity, but an attitude: the thought I got from the great A.R. Moxon:

They don't care so much, they resent even the suggestion they should care.

They use the fact that people think they should care as a reason to not care.

Again, any reason will do.

It's not about the reason. It's about not caring.

The appeal of Trump is permission to not care.

— A.R. Moxon (@JuliusGoat) June 28, 2019

Not quite psychopaths like Trump who are incapable of feeling empathy, just ordinary burghers who don't want to. And I may add that we all know what that's like, we all walk by the guy wrapped in a blanket on the sidewalk at least sometimes and usually more, we can't be Simone Weil and feel everybody's pain for them.

But these are people whose resentment at being asked to care is so great that at long last they've voted it into office and voted to destroy government, because government kept pissing them off with its emotional demands. That's what I believe these voices are saying. Belonging to a tribe would be too effortful for them (the evangelicals don't belong to a proper church but go to a drive-in where nobody knows each other, congregations of 5,000 people). They just want to consume their stuff in peace and quiet.

My hope is that it's too negative to maintain itself, and maybe we've even seem some signs in November 2018 and special elections since then. It's not really natural for humans to not care, that's a biological fact.