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.
I sense that they are hiding something deeply dark. They might be using work as a mask to cloak themselves from anyone prying too much under the surface. That's Vice President Harris and the Democrats for a lot of young men. They see 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.
There is a politics of disorder that people plainly see in front of them. They witnessed migrants being put up in hotels.Welcome signs on display for asylum seekers. An immigration so broken that children (under the age of 5) are made to defend themselves in front of a judge. The rent is too damn high and no one is willing to move from their rock bottom mortgage rates. CVS locking up everything. A homeless people population growing out of control and human poop in alleyways and sidewalks.
Over 70% Metro Bus faresare evaded. From the perspective of a young Hispanic or Asian man who voted for Trump, the Democrats represent a party who gave out benefits to underserving people.