Peering Over the Partisan Divide: The Problem of Contempt

People like myself who are (admittedly) virulently anti-Trump often look at Trump supporters and think, “they’re crazy.” My good friends don’t need much more convincing than that to agree with me. But it’s instructive to take the time to talk to the people I’ve sometimes called “Trumpers.” Through these occasional conversations, I’ve learned that they often think I’m crazy, too. (Really? Me?!) After a couple attempts at some polite (albeit heated) political disagreements with two Trump partisans from very different backgrounds, I learned that they both thought I exhibited all the signs of “TDS,” or “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” “If Trump cured cancer you wouldn’t support him,” one of them concluded.

Trump’s hidden talents aside, what struck me with both my interlocutors was how quickly their voices and messages became super-heated. They also trotted out many supporting “facts,” of course … so many at once in one occasion I lost track of what exactly we were arguing about. Nonetheless, I tried my best to “hate the sin and not the sinner” and attempted to steer us towards a reasonable conversation about a few of the specifics that had been brought up. This seemed to lead to what might be called a shallow victory, or a “non-negative” result: we both stood our ground and disagreed, but the conversation didn’t devolve into name-calling or hurt feelings on either side. But the anger or disparagement I felt directed at me in the middle of these exchanges led me to another small discovery: if I’m going to change the minds of these fellow human beings, it’s not going to start with logic. They’re too angry, it seems to me, to be persuaded by the weak tonic of facts or an appeal to a code of (public) conduct. So what to do?

In 2016, the political activist and CNN commentator Van Jones also tried to find some positive way to respond to the anger and contempt felt for Obama and Clinton by part of the electorate. In the aftermath of the election, he called for the creation of a “love army.” That cool description of his goal was an over-reach, I think. It seemed that love was hard to summon on the left for those who seemed to have voted for a guy who supported hateful policies and language. But in a December 2016 article in Rolling Stone magazine, Jones seemed closer to the mark when he said:

We have to build a bridge of respect to the Trump voters who don’t subscribe to every thing he ever said. For us, those crazy things were disqualifying. For a lot of his voters, they were distasteful but not disqualifying. We can overreact to that and say, “If you vote for a bigot, you are a bigot.” That’s just not true. That kind of language – and that kind of approach – is actually helping Trump to build his coalition.

“A bridge of respect” for any human being seems like an easier thing to create and support than “an army of love.” Love demands a lot; basic respect, in contrast, demands acknowledgement of another person’s humanity that is just like mine – flawed AND in need of being taken seriously. Nobody likes or responds well to being looked down upon. Those of us suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome no more or less than anybody else.

So, this is my introduction to dealing with the contempt that people often feel for one another these days – and barriers created by contempt to real conversation and discussion about political and policy differences. There’s little hope for a just society if we give up trying to persuade each other through an appeal to both emotions and logic. In the conversations I mention above, I certainly didn’t feel vindicated. I did feel some relief, however, that I didn’t reinforce the stereotype held about me, that I’m an unreasonable and unthinking, knee-jerk liberal … just like all the others. And, possibly, that I didn’t reinforce any feelings of anger and contempt those two Trump supporters might have felt for me and, especially, others who disagreed with them.

In short, before we can persuade, we need to turn down the emotional heat around politics, which might have more chance for success right now at the individual or micro level rather than the collective or macro level. I’m not sure, but that’s the hunch I’ll be pursuing in the next few posts.