I walked past an older white guy in a MAGA hat two mornings ago at the grocery store and he said good morning and I said it back.
It then occurred to me that that man definitely wants to re-elect Trump, and that he wanted to advertise his support of trump.
I had been thinking negative things about trump and, as one does, had begun to believe everyone reasonable agrees with me. If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention. That kind of thing. Though I have a bit of a commitment to not allowing myself to get to outrage, I was deeply annoyed by the combination of Trump’s approach to federal efforts on the coronavirus and was legitimately put off by the way in which federal troops had been apparently sent into Portland.
I was just personally bothered and annoyed and then let myself believe that it is irresponsible to have an alternative stance.
But because this guy with the hat on was a nice guy, and had a sort of kindness about him, I started thinking about what is actually true, which is, as usual, that reasonable people will disagree with my perspective.
I started thinking of a couple possibilities: 1) the set of basic facts I accept as true are different than the set of facts he accepts as true—and so we are evaluating two different men in our image of Donald Trump. 1a) Even if he accepts all the facts I hold as true there may be other things he is personally aware of or concerned about that, considered by a reasonable person, could give rise to support of Trump on that day in spite of agreement on the things I had in mind. 2) His support of Trump is not necessarily assured by his wearing of a Trump hat. He could be dealing with a slide away from support of trump, as some percentage of the population has been, and one way he might be handling that uncertainty is by doubling down on his representation of support.
I’ll put a quote I read in an interesting article about a conservative Fox News host that gets to the gist of what I mean by possibility 2:
The Polish writer Jacek Trznadel has described what it felt like, in Stalinist Poland, to be a loud advocate for the regime and to doubt it at the same time. “I was shouting from a tribune at some university meeting in Wrocław, and simultaneously felt panicked at the thought of myself shouting . . . I told myself I was trying to convince [the crowd] by shouting, but in reality I was trying to convince myself.” For some people, loud advocacy of Trump helps to cover up the deep doubt and even shame they feel about their support for Trump.
I would not ascribe this to the majority of Trump supporters. I think there are reasons for reasonable people to support trump separate from some cognitive defense against breakdown. Disagreement about facts and disagreement about the most important issues facing our country are two eternally defensible reasons, ultimately, for people to disagree about which of two parties to support in a two party system. But I do think that it’s actually helpful for me to remember this 3rd justifiable reason for support, because it’s talking about a certain kind of advertised support, a kind that is really more than wearing a hat supporting your candidate, though the hat can seem loud when we’ve been bathing in oppositional arguments. Basically, it’s a helpful reminder when you see support that feels loud that you don’t necessarily know what that volume indicates.
I know this mostly from my own experience yelling and slogan-ing, plus some logical thinking about reality: it’s mathematically impossible that when a group is yelling a slogan, each of them actually means it. It’s impossible that all the people in a march or a group shouting a message actually uniformly believe what they are yelling.
If the message rhymes or has good rhythm, that’s highly suspicious. It’s much more likely that it is being shouted because of its rhyme and rhythm than because each of the shouters holds the view deeply.
So whenever I see someone signaling their belonging to a group, and I feel the animal instinct to ascribe a bunch of negativity to them based on a critical view I take of the slogan or the group’s platform, I would like to remember that it’s simply not true that they as individuals can be accurately assigned all the negative stuff I want to assign the group.
Seeing someone as being on the wrong side of a thing, and then assigning them a giant stack of negativity, and then writing them off as evil or stupid or bad, or whatever, is just pure nonsense. It’s got Logical problems at every level.
And this election season I think it’s worth remembering, nobody has a shared set of facts. Nobody is operating on the same inputs. No two reasonable people will come up with total agreement about what is true, let alone what matters.
And ultimately the old guy with the MAGA hat was basically somebody who improved my morning by being so friendly and so validating of my existence by saying hello, and plus, he didn’t ask me to help him find anything. Don’t tell me there’s not usually a complex and predominantly good person under the hat you hate — I just don’t believe it.