James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time has a really beautiful passage that I think taps into our moment:
The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They at, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they can be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. But these men are your brothers-your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.
How do we think about those who voted for Trump, knowing full well that he is responsible for Jan 6th, is adjudicated rapist, overturned Roe v. Wade, mismanaged COVID that led to a million deaths and so on? Do we treat them with contempt or curiosity as Ezra Klein argues:
I’ve seen plenty of contempt already. If Americans are still willing to vote for Trump, given all he’s said and done, then there’s nothing Democrats or Harris could have done to dissuade them. There’ll be a desire to retreat, to hunker down, to draw the boundaries of who is decent and who is deplorable ever more clearly.
But Trump sharply improved his margin in New York City. These are voters angry about prices, about immigration, about a sense of disorder and failure. Trump seems to have made huge gains among voters making less than $50,000 a year. The Democratic Party is losing voters who lie at the core of its conception of itself.
Part of losing is asking why. Why did lots of young men vote for him? The question must come from curiosity. Even the the irrelevant Raging Cajun himself, James Careville, wants to know where these young men are getting their information and wants a poll commission to find out. I can tell you it ain't coming from reading the Washington Post, New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Go look at Pew Research's demographics and political views of new audiences in 2012. As you can tell, that world is long gone. We are in a very different information ecology.
Scott Galloway writes that this was the podcast election. He posited that millions of young men across race, geography, and class listened to podcasts and got their political information filtered by a handful of podcast hosts, almost all a certain type of man. I've been a podcast listener since 2005, and listened to a lot of Loveline on 105.1 the Point in St. Louis in early 2000s. Adam Carolla has this working class, aggrieved young men demographic on lock since back in Man Show days. A lot of his listeners were elder millennials like me and since moved on from him.
That is to say I totally get the appeal of Joe Rogan or Theo Von. They have a certain kind of down-to-party charisma, let-me-tell-you-a-fucked-up-story earnestness to them, and also they have a fun degenerate aesthetic. I sometimes quote Winston Churchill who said, "Never trust a man who has not a single redeeming vice" whenever I hear about an overachiever. There's a gut feeling of not trusting them.
While a lot folks don't find Trump charming or funny, he is to a lot of his supporters and voters For those who do find Trump entertaining, they trust him more than some a know-it-all dork like me. They sense that wonky nerds like me are hiding from plain truths, like Biden being too old, or the rent is too damn high. They see a bunch of dull overachievers, with their fancy degrees and high power jobs on the coasts, telling them how to talk, think, and shit -- at least how these podcast hosts packaged it to them. They feel Vice President Harris and the Democrats didn't offered much to them, especially young men.
Part of me is spent. I want to focus on my family, work, and hobbies. And not be outraged by everything little thing he says. Another part of me is still asking why and how his power is still so deep among his base and supporters. I want to warn these folks that his tariffs will hurt you, mass deportations will break your business, and who really is in charge is President Musk.
I pray that I am wrong about what is to come. I pray for incompetence and overreach.
I'll leave you with this, an analogy: in going into to see a sequel, everyone will tell you it wasn't good as the original. Any good critic would tell you that the writing was way off from what was pitched; execution was chaotic, delayed, and bungled; and the actors involved kept fighting off-screen -- egos and pride got in the way from that magic from the first one. Yes the first one was much better. Sequels are tough.