Unpersuadable Deplorables?

What if we never convince them? 

Most of my daily media check-ins involve a range of right-leaning sources (currently RedState, The Resurgent, The National Review, The Dispatch, and The American Conservative--with occasional forays into Gateway Pundit or Fox). I spice these up with some more mainstream sources (NPR, Axios, Politico) and eclectic lefty-liberal stuff like Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, Hullabaloo, Echidne of the Snakes, The Root, and Crooked Timber.

Of these bluer sites, Lawyers, Guns & Money is the one I often have to visit infrequently. I find I have to store up some emotional energy before I dive in there, and often I have to take a break for a while before I dip back in. It's the site I go to to check the temperature of the angrier, more outraged segments of online lefty thinking. (The Root qualifies as that, too, but I visit there more often to reality check my lily white perspective.)

A post from Friday by site regular Paul Campos, "Feelings, Nothing More than Feelings," works as an example of what I'm talking about. (It's not the only kind of post on the site; it's just the kind I find most compelling/draining). There Campos quotes from an opinion piece on the NY Times website by Timothy Egan, "How the Insufferably Woke Help Trump." Egan discusses his sister, who "cleans toilets at Wal-Mart" and plans to vote for Trump. Campos quotes Egan's piece at length, focusing on passages like this by Egan:

Among the people I love is a sibling who works at Walmart cleaning toilets at night in a thinly populated part of eastern Oregon. She’s been there more than 25 years and has trouble saving a dime and certainly no path to retirement. She’s likely to vote, again, for President Trump.

No matter how much I point out that Trump is trying to take away her health care protections by litigating to kill Obamacare, that his tariffs have made it harder to pay her bills, that he is the most repulsive and creepy man ever to occupy the White House, she holds firm.

Why? One reason is what she hears from the other side. Many Democrats, she says, are dismissive of her religious beliefs and condescending of her lot in life. She’s turned off by the virtue-signaling know-it-alls.

Campos is unimpressed:

You will be shocked to learn that this column goes on to provide exactly zero instances of Egan’s sister actually experiencing any of these status injuries, that I suspect she endured by proxy, by watching Fox News et. al., which helpfully informed her that a bunch of Condescending Liberals look down on her. 

Egan quotes Barack Obama's recent speech where he chides the left for an obsession with purity and call-out culture. If anyone had reason to give up on Trump supporters, Egan writes, it would surely be Obama. Some significant part of Trump voters, Egan argues, can and must be persuaded to support the party that will (in Egan's view) actually address their needs rather than the party of the billionaire charlatan who dupes them.  

For Campos, who expresses the view of many writers and reader/commenters on LGM, racism provides explanation enough for Trump's appeal. 

And look, Tim, with all due respect your sister is an idiot, at best. Voting for a man who you yourself note is the most obviously crooked plutocrat of the second gilded age because you’re a temporarily embarrassed billionaire with a serious case of white fragility is contemptible. People like her aren’t gettable by Elizabeth Warren for the same reason I’m not winning the NBA slam dunk contest next spring. 

Trump voters aren't persuadable, in this view. They are by definition irredeemable racists.Think pieces about their view and calls to empathize with their situation are at best misguided and at worst apologies for fascist white supremacy.  and liberals are better off activating and mobilizing the nonwhite electorate (while also mitigating Republican efforts to hinder voting by people of color).

The top comments tend to be ringing endorsements of this view. Consider:

The hell with her. Enjoy your misery, you ignorant monochromosomal freak.
We gotta get those who didn't vote, who were discouraged from voting by both-sides idiots and bros, who were prevented from voting.
We're not going to get any trumpanzee, and I don't want to do what we would have to do to get one of the stupid sunzabitches. Fuck'em'all.

Or

 FUCK YOU AND YOUR HEBEPHRENIC BABOON OF A SISTER, YOU CARBUNCLE ON THE ASS OF THE NATION.

Or

No, they can't be persuaded.
If they could be persuaded, the 29 different sexual assault allegations would have done it.
If they could be persuaded, mocking a disabled reporter would have done it.
If they could be persuaded, saying that Mexican migrants are all rapists and drug dealers would have done it.
If they could be persuaded, they would have chosen Kasich who is an equally terrible conservative without the open racism, misogyny, and criminality.
If they could be persuaded, They would have been by the grab them by the pussy tape.
If they could be persuaded, they would have been by his allegiance with Putin.
If they could be persuaded, they would have been by his lies.
If they could be persuaded, they would have been by his incompetence...
If they could be persuaded, they would have been by his failures in Syria, North Korea, and Iran...
If they could be persuaded, they would have turned against him over Yemen.
If they could be persuaded, they would support his impeachment for soliciting aid from a foreign country to harm a political rival.
If they could be persuaded, they wouldn't wear MAGA hats and go to his klan rallies.
If they are still on board with him and he still seems like a possibility to them because some imaginary college kids what you to use "them" and "their" as their pronouns, you're a lost cause.

Just to point out some obvious things: the first two comments traffic in frankly dehumanizing, stereotyped, and ableist (person-with-disability-hating) language that no lefty would countenance if it were directed at one of their own. Yeah, yeah, Trump supporters regularly aim such rhetoric at minorities. It's reprehensible when they do that. It's reprehensible when we progressives do it to other people (especially working-class people we know only third-hand).

Mind you--and at the risk of a "both sides do it" gesture I don't endorse (completely)--I read similar if not worse kinds of comments daily on right-wing sites. I'm sure I've read a similarly long list of "If they could be persuaded" points, except aimed against Obama, Hilary Rodham Clinton, or any other Democrat. Worse, I've read things like that within ideological sides: extreme right-leaners dismissing as irredeemable slightly less extreme right-leaners, "leftists" throwing up their hands at the thought of persuading "liberals" or centrists, black pessimists arguing that no amount of good will or reconciliatory gestures will ever eradicate the permanent animosity between black people and everyone else.

Depressing.

Suppose the LGM view is right. Suppose Democrats don't need to persuade white Trump voters in swing states but instead mobilize otherwise non-voting people of color. Yay! We won! That still leaves about 40% of the electorate seethingly angry and resentful--and united in their angry resentment. As I'm fond/weary of pointing out in my work, USAmerican politics has nothing like a Thanos Infinity Gauntlet. We can't just snap our fingers and have our opponents disintegrate into dust. They persist past their electoral losses. We can't do the things we promise, at least not in a lasting way, without some degree of persuasion, compromise, or (that most forbidden of words) civility--or civil war.

Actually, I suspect that one of the problems with the "I encountered X person from the other side, and I found it nearly impossible to persuade them" genre is that such pieces often premise civility on the perceived possibility of persuasion. I'll treat you as human because I think you can be persuaded to join my side. You are a potential recruit (or potential convert) before you're an enemy, so I'll refrain from treating you as an enemy to be destroyed--for now. 

What if they're really not persuadable? Suppose a genie appears to Egan and explains that, via infallible magic, she knows that Egan's Trump-supporting sister will never, ever be persuaded not to support Trump. He could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, be caught in bed with a dead girl and a live boy, or recorded using the power of his office to strong-arm foreign countries into exacting revenge on his personal enemies--none of that would matter. What would Egan do? Would that change his relationship to his sister? Would she cease to be a person he loves?

That scenario is a bit complicated due to the family tie. Imagine the genie appeared and wrote a post for LGM or an op-ed for the Times, explaining to Democrats that no Trump voter will ever, ever, ever vote for the Democratic ticket. Nor, the genie continues, can they be persuaded to simply stay home or vote for some non-Trump GOP alternative. Any and all persuasive overture is truly useless. How would that change our (Democrats') behavior? How ought it change?

More tomorrow.