So this is all a bit surreal, but I do actually agree with one point in all of the above, which is that this essay is NOT about me personally! This "Kat Rosenfield" person — urbane, highly educated, comfortably entrenched in the Ivy League-to-elite media pipeline, probably does cocaine in the bathroom at parties— is a figment of the author's imagination, albeit one so much cooler than me that I’m almost tempted to let people think she exists.
But, in the interest of the truth (which we presumably all care about), I think I should probably correct the record. So: hi, I'm Kat. I'm 43 years old and was raised in a town of 3,000 people in deep red, rural upstate NY, where my dad was a physician at the local prison. My graduating class (public school) was 90 people and I went to a no-name college that gave me a scholarship, then applied for a Publishing Job in the Big City because I liked to read (yes, I was a massive rube, feel free to make fun of me). Unfortunately, this latter chapter of my life ended in 2008 when the economy crashed and was an absolutely extraordinary failure on all counts, except that I have been married for nearly two decades to a really handsome man who I met through my first job.
And yes, I've managed to build a career as a full time freelance writer since then, through a combination of hustle and sheer dumb luck— but that's because I've spent the past 17 years hammering on a keyboard in my living room in a random town in Connecticut where we moved for my husband's work, far from the giant high school cafeteria known as the Urbane Media Sphere. The elite club of "people who went to the same schools, live in the same neighborhoods, socialize with the same professional class, and consume the same cultural signals" described here is one in which I have never belonged, nor wanted to. I don't come from that world! It's not a milieu I'm comfortable in — and judging by the way its members (including the author of this piece) talk about me in public, I get the distinct sense that I wouldn't be welcome there even if I wanted to.
All of which is to say, flattered as I am to be mistaken for a member of this clique by one of its reigning Queen Bees, it is a mistake — as is his using me or my work to represent the modal clueless elitist who thinks Republicans are aliens. Half my family are Republicans! As are a number of my friends, although I couldn't necessarily tell you how any of them voted in the last election because, and I can't stress this enough, normal people don't care that much about this shit. We don't talk about politics when we get together; we talk about football, or people's kids, or where Michelle got her deviled egg recipe.
As for the post to which this piece is a purported response, as I personally explained to Jeremiah on X/Twitter yesterday, there is an obvious, substantive difference between "Trump's uniquely amoral behavior makes him a paradoxically flat character in the soap opera of American political culture," and "Trump is boring and uninteresting," which is not just an arguably illiterate interpretation of my post, but one belied by the fact that I've written hundreds of thousands of words about Trump and his place in the culture since 2016 (I'll leave a link to one of my favorites below if anyone's interested in reading it.) The fact that Jeremiah chose to ignore my clarification and write an entire article about how me and my work are a microcosm of "credentialed cosmopolitan snobbery" is, I have to say, a pretty incredible example of the phenomenon under discussion.
Anyway, to those who got to the end of this novel of a comment, thanks for reading! And if you want to read a little more, here you go:
Kat, I'm a longtime follower of your work and listener/erstwhile subscriber to your podcast. I say this not to claim that I understand the contents of your heart, but by way of pleading good faith.
But I also think that the critique leveled in this article is pretty spot-on. The very fact that your lens of viewing Trump is essentially literary criticism does, in fact, strike me as a particularly egregious example of shrugging rather than attempting to understand the phenomenon. His uniquely amoral behavior certainly does resist literary analysis, but it fits in reasonably well if you view it as pro wrestling-style kayfabe. And, of course, there's always the option of just not writing about it if it's out of your wheelhouse - being the President of the United States doesn't automatically make a person relevant to the broader culture that you typically cover.
I guess all this is to say that I don't think that your point is as strong as you seem to consider it to be. You do have the precise profile of a cultural elite, whether it's more accurate to call Drew a "no-name college" or a "private college in the northeast." Hell, you are even in this comment section pleading that you don't even talk about politics with people who probably disagree with you. That was kind of the point of the whole article!
The critique leveled at me, specifically, is absolute baloney and I’m extremely annoyed that I had to spend as much time as I did responding to it. As for the rest of your comment, “there's always the option of just not writing about it if it's out of your wheelhouse” is a pretty wild thing to say to me? There’s an article right there! But I am also not spending a single second more of my weekend dealing with or thinking about this, I’m already pissed at myself for replying at all, which was clearly a huge waste of time.
Okay, but you didn't respond! You took exception to the description of you, rewrote that description in a way that didn't actually address the general case, and then objected that you have Republican family members and then noted that you don't talk about politics with them. If you're going to say that you do in fact understand Republicans, noting that you have family members that are Republican - and may have even voted for Trump! - of course, you don't know because you don't talk about politics with them. This is not beating the charge.
I read the article you linked. It was good! It contributed just fine to the discourse! Which is why it's silly to post on X about how Trump isn't an interesting literary character and then get mad when people point out that's an asinine thing for a commentator to say.
I think the issue is that her comments about Trump *himself* being a weird anomaly were interpreted as *his voters* being a weird anomaly. I'd be pissed off too if I was mischaracterised, and you did come across as patronising, probably unintentional.
"Amoral is telling, but not in the way you thought.
This is because you on the hard Left have a different moral compass, and the moral compass of anyone to the right of Mao Zedong looks like Hitler to you. I'm not exaggerating; this is what you really think. That rarest of birds, replicable social science, has proved this.
Haidt finds that conservatives use all of them but Leftists use about half of them, and of that half mostly just one. There's no conservative moral foundation that is not also a Left one, but half of the conservative foundations are external to, and inaccessible by, Left cognition.
Haidt has an quick TED talk (the good kind)
on where differences from liberals and conservatives originate from.
1. Harm/care – as a species care a lot about others
2. Fairness/reciprocity
3. In group/out group – only among humans are there large groups that are united together for common purposes, and as a species we self-consciously produce or reinforce tribes (for wars, sports team loyalty, etc.)
4. Authority/respect – often based out of love
5. Purity/sanctity (either with regard to things like sex, or the foods we put in our body)
Many on the hard Left are unaware that they are complicit in acts of evildoing because adherence to their moral foundations provides them with justifications and excuses for their actions. "It's for the greater good."
"Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion," Harvey Weinstein said. "We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for the victims of 9/11. We were there for the victims of Katrina and any world catastrophe."
Note that this was before he was exposed as a rapist in #metoo and before #metoo was cancelled due to widespread, well-founded accusations of antisemitism.
As an otherwise lurker who has enjoyed a lot of your writing I wanted to say thank you for coming and commenting here Kat, I don't think replying was a waste of time, there are plenty of people who read your reply and it adjusted their perceptions, but who didn't comment, so you wouldn't know.
You're elite in that the "elite" that Republicans attack doesn't mean powerful, rich or even necessarily elitely educated.
They mean "capable of reading, writing and reasoning at an adult level."
You know, something Trump will never be.
"Having empathy" also counts.
Or "having integrity."
If you look at what they violently insist that a policeman or soldier should be, NOT someone who does their duty at the risk of their life, NOT someone who protects the innocent, NOT someone who will disobey an immoral or illegal order - then maybe having any discernable virtues makes you unacceptably elite in their eyes.
As someone who also grew up rural and moved away this long screed does not excuse the journalistic malpractice of not giving them agency because they're boring to write about
You didn’t address the subject of the article, which was about how you choose to frame the Trump phenomenon rhetorically rather than about your personal biography. If you disagree with “Jeremiah Johnson” you should actually make a counterargument to his main point, as he used your twitter text thread as an example of a phenomenon, not a specific focus of “criticism.” It isn’t apparent that you read his post any more closely than you accuse him of misreading your thread.
Your evaluation of the Trump political phenomenon here (and possibly other politically inflected topics) is that it can be “interesting” or “not interesting” from a literary point of view, not that it is “good” or “bad” in a social sense or a moral sense. You don’t really defend the premise that this is an appropriate framing in general or do much to contextualize a very narrow frame in which ONLY literary merit is a subject of discussion. There are multiple problems with this:
1. Anything can be a good literary subject. You’re bounded only by your imagination and your own peculiar sensibilities as a writer. Good criticism should focus on the artfulness of the work first, and its connection to various cultural contexts second. By not discussing the specifics of a particular work in this thread, the implication is that any context where Trump is interrogated as a human being cannot be handled artfully. Trump is a *character* if nothing else, and it would be a better observation that his ubiquity has made this character culturally trite. But you didn’t say he was trite; you said he was uninteresting. My counterargument to you is that this is categorically untrue.
2. The actual social effects of Trump and the MAGA movement are cultural, but they primarily change our physical, economic and political culture, not aesthetic or literary output. If you’re not *writing literature* (or doing focused literary analysis), the main social reality of Trump’s behavior on the country should be the topical focus of non-fiction articles and books. What you’re implying here, pragmatically, is that you don’t care deeply about Trump’s degradation of the American social fabric. It’s not a stretch to guess that you feel insulated personally from this degradation, not just in this moment but on ongoing basis; which, regardless of your historiography of yourself, means that either you’re historically obtuse, or very privileged.
3. Many of us see Trump’s ascendance as a moral crisis. It isn’t apparent in your work that you agree with this sentiment. If you do think Trump represents a moral crisis, you should talk like it and act like it consistently. If not, feel free to defend that premise, but you will continue to get pushback and if we ever get over this as a country, your cultural contributions will not be remembered fondly. My sense, without being able to ask you direct socratic questions, is that your writing expresses an annoyance at having to pick sides morally, rather than principled and highly developed aesthetic ideas about cultural production. As someone who cares deeply about literature, I think that such a position is spiritually vacuous.
What you have written is so true. Every year we are bombarded by articles telling us how to struggle through politics at family gatherings. I feel sorry for people who let politics ruin their holidays. I attended five gatherings this season and politics never came up. This is typical. What I do remember talking about is music, travel, boats, history, and whatever was going on in the lives of those we hadn’t seen since last year.
Most people realize that bringing up politics is rude, self-centered, and passive aggressive. It is the hijacking of someone else’s event for entirely personal purposes. People work hard putting these things together. Normal people recognize this and act accordingly.
People literally alienated their entire families permanently in 2004 because they voted for George Bush.
This happened again to other cohorts of people in 2016 and 2024.
It's because The Other lives in their heads, rent-free, 24/7. It eats at them and they've got to get it out, like one vomits out e.coli contaminated curry made in a kitchen with no hot running water.
The political Left, especially the hard Left, are high in trait Neuroticism, which means they feel negative feelings very intensely.
I almost felt sorry for them when I understood this and got that they weren't faking it, they really were living through Hell.
Then I remembered they put gay men in lingerie in contact with kindergarteners, shot up schools full of white Christians and specifically cited DEI ideology in their manifestos, and then tried to stop these manifestos from being released.
Harvey Milk, hard Left hero, lived with an underage minor runaway boy while he was in his 30s and nobody batted an eye. They elected him mayor of San Francisco. His pederasty was so morally acceptable to not just the hard Left but mainstream liberals that Obama named a Navy ship after him.
Citation: _The Mayor of Castro Street_
This biography of Milk written by a gay journalist won awards for openly admitting with no shame Milk's depraved (to normal Americans) morals. Large portions used to be available on freely on Google Books but the book has since been withdrawn because it's too damaging.
John Stuart Mill famously wrote:
"He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion."
thanks so much for engaging and sharing your story. I am now more informed. I think we are all very frustrated with the way the media is treating Trump with kit gloves, but it doesnt seem fair for this either to use you as a shibboleth. I also very much identify with you on having many Republican family members and friends, and having lots of conversations that are pretty much could of politics because I just don't want to argue with these people and isolate myself unless I'm drawn into something that they say, and they seem to be happy to avoid talking about politics as well for the same reason. This is really something that people on the left who do not know any Republicans don't understand. It's really hard for the average person to have substantive discussions with people without causing conflict that is uncomfortable to all involved, but I so much wish I could do it. Anyway, you can take heart that even Hannah Arendt had this experience where people criticized a 'Hannah Arendt' that didn't actually exist which said things that she didn't actually say. Another reason to read Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship 🙂.
this tracks with what Hannah Arendt wrote in Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship. You have to maintain that people have agency, and can choose alternatives, in order to be able to logically judge them for their choices. Another idea by Arendt was that Totalitarian governments need for people to view their acts as inescapable Fait Accompli, a.k.a. forces of nature. We most resist this and respectfully engage Trump supporters as humans with agency if we have any hope of turning our society away from Totalitarianism.
I agree with a lot of the article. Seems a little overly loaded on Kat specifically though… if you go back to the original brouhaha, the point she was making (implicitly, vaguely, in a media brained way, admittedly) is that expecting these Kennedy Center boycotts to have a material effect is foolhardy and likely counterproductive, making it not worth the political costs. From my reading, she’s saying this exact same thing: it’s incumbent on us to engage with people as humans, not as big-O Others to be shamed and avoided, as if they are somehow going to magically respond positively to elite snobbery and cultural exclusion.
I’m trying to figure out how we got from there to here… you both have valid points but this all feels a little Too Online.
How does respectful engagement of Trump supporters work at this point? If I am to treat them as people with agency, then the only kind of people they can be is bad people. They had every opportunity to inform themselves of the nature of their cult leader and turn around, to have failed to do so at this point proves an unacceptable failing in at least one essential capacity as a human being. Presumably I'm supposed to tell them something other than "Calling you a basket of deplorables was only a mistake in that it was too kind"?
Something that’s helped me maintain full and loving relationships regardless of political differences (and this is an intentional change over the past 5 years) is remembering that no one opinion held, regardless of how terrible (IMO!), defines the totality of your character.
And while certain opinions may be correlated with certain behavioral characteristics, it is definitely not 1:1.
It’s cliche, but people actually do contain multitudes. It turns out that when you really listen to someone whose opinion you abhor, and then SINCERELY (and this is the key I believe) let them know “I DEEPLY disagree with you, but I love you anyway”, they will feel heard and they will be more inclined to hear your opinions that they may abhor themselves.
I’ve realized that my own basket of opinions (many of which have flipped 180 degrees multiple times over the course of my life) doesn’t make me a “good” person as if I were the keeper of whatever that means.
Letting go of that concept has been probably my greatest source of growth and happiness over the past 5 years.
in Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship, Arendt was responding to people criticizing the criminal prosecution of Adolph Eichmann by saying essentially that he did not have agency, he was afraid for his life, and who are we to judge if we would do the same thing in the same circumstances. Her point was that we cannot hold them accountable at all if we don't believe they have agency. This will, undoubtedly, be the argument made to undermine any future prosecutions, should we be lucky enough to get to prosecute Trump, and his highest associates. Your anger and frustration are real. I agree it can seem futile to discuss things with his supporters. But we have a responsibility to do so, unfortunately. Using words like 'Deplorables' isn't useful, in my humble opinion. And really be careful with words like 'proves an unacceptable failing in at least one essential capacity as a human being.' De-humanization is wrong, and can lead to inhumane treatment of people.
Thank you for your response. I'm sorry if I came off as hostile, I just genuinely don't know what kind of conversation I am supposed to have with them. You're right that insults are unproductive and also that we need to say without compromise that MAGAs have committed indefensible wrongs in supporting their movement.
And I am well and truly done with anyone on either side making excuses for MAGAs. For all the noise about the harm done by misinformation, it's trivially easy to avoid by prioritizing mainstream sources of news. If they had read even a single headline news article per month they would have had enough information to understand that voting for Trump was the wrong choice. That they voted for him anyway proves that either they understood the harms and didn't care or they didn't put in the bare minimum of effort necessary to act as an informed citizen. Either one is deserving of harsh condemnation.
And yet we need to win at least some of these people back and shouting that from the rooftops is hardly likely to increase Democrat poll numbers. What I've read on the science of persuasion tells me that one of the best ways to get someone to change their mind is to leave them an out so they don't have to admit any personal fault, but that runs directly counter to Arendt's point. So what are responsible persuaders supposed to do?
I'll let you know when I figure it out 😂 it likely is different depending on which Trump supporter you are talking to. The person who voted for Trump to lower prices may be easier to persuade than the person who voted for Trump to cause the stock market to rise. As a Christian myself, it saddens me to say that Conservative Christians may be the hardest to persuade due to the constant stream of propaganda they receive from their preachers, and news feeds. I am hoping Trump will divide Christians along sectarian lines himself but being completely ignorant about existing fault lines between the different denominations and traditions. I am waiting to see how my fellow Catholics are doing to respond to him bombing a mostly Catholic nation last night, fingers crossed on that one.
The Catholics are about the only group I have hope will course-correct given they have an external source of wisdom in the Pope and because they really do emphasize moral obligations beyond just banning abortion and birth control. I have my issues with the Catholic Church, but they really do fund a massive global network of charitable interventions. The evangelicals have sold out hard enough it's difficult to imagine a path back for them.
The irony in this comment is you are guilty of exactly what this essay suggests. You’re the one who sees the subtle decline into totalitarianism that Trump supporters are causing, and you need to save them.
Many see Trump as fighting for democracy. For example, do you blindly support the undemocratically elected NGO-plex? Completely unaccountable to the American people in many cases? Cause democrats do. USAID had a big role in that. The day care centers in Minnesota. Epsteins companies. Many Trump voters view Trump as restoring democracy from a two-tiered justice system that targeted him and others (like Jan 6ers) unnecessarily. The deep state is a very believable concept and the Epstein files are evidence of that.
Also the bigger thing is the erosion of common morals. Transiting children, abortion up to birth, antifa and rent-a-riots, etc. The irony of the working class supporting republicans (all the tradies and most of the middle class) even though democrats claim they represent the working class. If you want to understand republicans you have to find ones that are coherent and know what they’re talking about, but the elitism of your comment is why so many people hate the media.
you are accusing me of things that I did not say without knowing anything about me. Most of my friends are Republicans. They are good people. I do actually understand why they voted for Trump, though I dont agree with them. What astonishes me is how malleable the Republican party has caused them to be. 10 years ago the party platform was against big government, talked about the unintended consequences of laws and regulations, and denounced any attempt by government to bully companies into correct behavior. Now they celebrate a President that does exactly that, and they now support the idea that Conservatives should use all the power of the Government to coerce people into behaving how they think they should behave when they get elected to office. We once had a choice between Big Government Democrats and Small Government Republicans. Now the choice is between Democrat Big Government and Republican Big Government. You talk about 'The Media' as if it's a monolith, but it is not, as evidenced by your list of public events that are currently big news on the media that you consume. We are both consuming media right here on substack. I don't think that Trump voters cause Totalitarianism. That responsibility falls squarely on the heads of Trump, the conservative Supreme Court Justices, Congress, and the elites that organize and direct his government policy. As for the Democratic party, I do think they have a lot of problems. Yet another thing that Arendt discussed in The Rise of Totalitarianism is the collapse of the Two Party system in Germany that helped Hitler rise to power. Chuck Schumer is the face of that decline today. The New Maga Right's ability to push us towards Totalitarianism is enabled by the feckless, technocratic, neo liberalism of the modern Democratic party. I really don't understand how you can talk about moral decline while turning a blind eye at the sheer immorality of Trump, and all of the people he has elevated into his government. Is Elon Musk a paragon of morality with his harem of women to raise his kids without marrying him? How about Gay Peter Theil talking endlessly about antichrist because he thinks he can manipulate Christians to vote Republican so he doesn't have to pay taxes or have the government looking over his surveillance company Palintir. Isn't it odd that Republicans only talk about Trans people now, while quietly dropping meeting of the rest of the LGBTQ+ Agenda? Don't get me wrong. I don't think it's up to the government to force gay people not to be gay or trans people not to be trans. Throughout history, poeple have thought society was in moral decline. It's no different today than it was 2000 years ago when Christ was traveling around healing the sick and railing against the fake piety of the leaders of his day. I think you should broaden your media diet, and read Arendt.
Maybe I did come across heavy handed. Sorry. But then you go on to assert the Trump is causing totalitarianism, as if dems don’t dominate all the schools, tech companies, and media. I guess I don’t see a substantive difference between Trump supporters causing it and Trump cause they voted for him.
I can’t say I necessarily agree that Trump is for big government. I wouldn’t say I turn a blind eye to Trump. It’s just that *in principle* I see democrats as being immoral with their sexual ethics and abortion policies. Elon mask is one person along with thiel. But I don’t support thiel and agree with you. If you look at opinion polls though I would argue that republicans are more moral imo than democrats (like abortion up to birth, sexual ethics, transitioning kids).
And personally I do find it interesting that somehow we got the gay tech bros. I think it’s cause of trumps position on gay marriage. And as of recent our society has gotten a lot worse. I hope you’re not saying society has always been in decline to just justify voting dem because they have lost their minds.
I don't want to convince you to vote Democratic. I want you to have better Republicans to vote for. We have to have policy discussions knowing full well that the majority of politicians running as an R or D are corrupt. The reason they are corrupt has to do with the outsized influence that a few hundred people, especially 4-5 single individuals, have on our political system. You and I cannot buy thousands of copies of a book like Hillbilly Elegy to get it on the NYT best seller list, but Peter Theil can. You are correct that most of those 5 were Democrats as late as 2014 or so. But it's pretty clear that their support was out of self interest. As Marc Andreesen stated in his interview with Ross Douthat, Al Gore really did have a big influence in the promotion of policies that handed billions of our tax dollars to tech companies like PayPal, Google, Netscape, etc. Once Democrats started to get worried about the potential impact of AI, and pushing regulation, they all switched to voting Republican. I don't believe Dems dominate the schools either. Have you heard of the Chicago School of Economics? How about Andrian Vermeule, out of Harvard? which school did Stephen Miller attend? Which school was Jay Bhattacharya President of? Pete Hegseth graduated from Princeton. J. D. Vance and Scott Bessent attended Yale. I will try to convince you that Trump is a morally repugnant, self dealing conman who has thoroughly corrupted the Republican party. Can you share a policy paper explaining the noble reason that Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras to convince me that it wasn't a bribe that led to that decision? Can you really convince me that Stephen Miller isn't actively courting white nationalists with theatrical cruelty towards Hispanic people based on his own personal hatred of the Hispanics in his high school? I actually thought Roe vs. Wade was a pretty good compromise between the extremes of Abortion up to Birth, and forcing women to die of sepsis because a Dr will not remove an already dead fetus from their body. it wouldn't have prevented the Georgia government from keeping a dead woman on life support, at tremendous expense for her family, the hospital, and Georgia taxpayers, to deliver a baby that will be taken care of by the state. I'm not Pro Choice or Pro Life. I don't think women have a right to kill an unborn child, but I also don't think a government that sanctions the killing of humans for political and economic expediency, such as putting people to Death, or blowing up already capsized boats with people clinging for their life, or killing Venezuelans and Cubans to steal Oil, has any legitimacy in forcing women not to make that same decision, even for economic expediency. Finally, Dems are not forcing kids to become gender dysphoric. I don't know why it happens, but it is happening, and those kids and their parents are doing what anyone else in our Democratic system would do to get help for them, fighting for the right to make their own medical decisions with their doctors without a nanny state government getting in the way. Isn't that what Peter Theil wants? Government keeping out of his life and his affairs? Why is it that a bunch of poor and middle class families are immoral for wanting that, but not Peter Theil? And you will forgive me if I find it hard to believe that Donald Trump is going to allow a bunch of moralists to take over his government and force him to stop throwing parties with scantily clad women swimming in giant martini glasses. I really don't know what Republicans are supposed to do. It sucks to be given such poor choices. Trust me, I know. I had to hold my nose and vote for George Bush because Bill Clinton was so corrupt. At least Bush was a decent person, though I didn't agree with much of what he did in office. I hope you can figure it out though.
If you just look up the share of professors that are liberal vs conservative you will be astounded. They are always liberal and very liberal everywhere:
Honduras thing and Stephen Miller don't invalidate the entire administration. If we're gonna play that game then I could just throw a bunch of anecdotes at you too about Biden and Dems. I don't think Trump is the most ethical, so trying to convince me would be strange. I voted for him because the other party was worse. I'm convinced Biden's policies (the open border in particular and his weak foreign policy) have gotten tons of people killed and ruined our democracy by convincing libs that somehow it's okay to just let illegals vote (now all of a sudden liberals are like "TRUMP IS SENDING ICE TO WATCH POLLING PLACES," which shouldnt be a problem to them????).
Killing narco terrorists brining in drugs that will kill hundreds (fentanyl is the number one cause of death for those under 50) is not remotely the same as aborting your own innocent child. My goodness. Also an envoy from China was in Venezuela the night before Maduro was kidnapped because they want Venezuelan oil. No women, except for in the case of literal rape, is forced to "have" a child, and they can give them up for adoption. Giving birth is safer than abortion. These moral comparisons are just not the same. But yeah trump is not the most moral and not even a super prolife candidate. It seems to be an establishment position to groom kids and take them away from their parents. GAC is a human rights catastrophe, and it castrates kids. Not the same as what Peter Thiel wants (and I dont agree with him or surrogacy). No sane person should support that. That's the law in California (you dont have to tell parents if you are trans and the school will help transition you). Also school board meetings are full of angry parents showing p**nographic books that their kids were being taught because it's lgtbq (yay diversity?). The sexual perversion has to stop. But yeah Trump is not moral and kind of perverted but compared to dems he's not as much to me.
also it is factually untrue that giving birth is safer than having an abortion. Many many more women die from complications due to pregnancy than die after abortions.
I think the disconnect is that Trump and MAGA is (maybe?) the only political movement in American history that is explicitly anti-Democratic and unconcerned with upholding the norms of American constitutionalism. The educated elite bubble thought that at least we were all on the same page about peaceful transfers of power, not prosecuting political opponents, and not politicizing law enforcement, among the many many many illiberal actions of this administration. And all of this to the cheering and hooting of the MAGA masses. We don't share the same reality much less the same civilizational framework, and no one has really figured out a way to bridge that gap. How do you do objective reporting on a political figure that is not responsive to Democratic frameworks?
Interesting perspective, although it was definitely the Democrats who broke the seal on prosecuting political opponents (albeit perhaps for more legitimate charges *on average* than Trump's flimsy prosecutions of his enemies)
I don't know how you can count the legitimate prosecutions of Trump's very real crimes against the Country in the same league as the sham prosecutions of Comey or Letitia James. Thankfully the judicial system isn't completely cowed yet, but the message was sent, which is the problem. But then again maybe I'm not a super smart Substack heterodox thinker so I'm not both-sidesing this.
Yeah, this is a terrible take. Being a "political opponent" does not give one carte blanche to be a wanton criminal. Given the nature of the two-party system and how the pendulum swings in the US, if the opposition doesn't allow bad actors to be prosecuted, it will never happen at all.
There is an enormous difference between someone being prosecuted for legitimate crimes who happens to be a Republican and someone overtly stating that they intend to prosecute someone because they are a political enemy.
The reason MAGA seems so alien is the way the movement snaps in line whenever Trump wants it to. We saw this with the murder of Rob Reiner. For about 12 hours MAGA influencers patted themselves on the back for being compassionate, unlike the evil leftists who celebrated Charlie Kirk's murder. Then Trump weighed in with his awful rant about Reiner having TDS, and all of a sudden these same influencers pivoted to "Reiner promoted the Russiagate hoax, he was not a good guy!"
The Epstein files is degrading that somewhat. But remember that Charlie Kirk -- who was all in on the Epstein stuff when it was a useful political weapon -- tried to end the discussion by saying he was done talking about it because he trusted his friends in the White House.
This is not true. This is acting like MAGA is a hive mind rather than independent individuals choosing to subsume themselves for their own respective reasons. You can gauge from internet metrics whether they are collectively on board with something or if there is faction splintering. They will never say outright they are against say Trump attacking Rob Reiner once their top influencers defend the action, but they will engage with and offer voluntary, full throated defences of that action far less and try to bury it in history, because harping on it more may spur defections.
“All of these people are conscious, feeling actors who respond to incentives, pressure, social status, and persuasion just like anyone else.”
One of these things—persuasion—is not like the others. And I don’t have much reason to think that MAGA Republicans who believe the 2020 election was stolen, that mass shootings are faked by gun control groups, and that the US government was behind 9/11 are persuadable at all. They did not reason their way into those positions, and they won’t reason their way out. I’ve tried too hard for too long with too many of them to believe that.
They are not just like me. They form their political beliefs differently than my tribe does. It may be that we are more alien and they are more human - see my blog's title! - but either way, recognizing the cognitive differences is a sign you DO understand these people, not a sign that you don't.
This is not a reason to give up or strip them of agency or responsibility, I agree with you on that. But we should have a different strategy for how to engage with these people that is lighter on the rational argument and heavier on emotional resonance. They may be “flattered, threatened, nudged, or embarrassed into changing course,” but they won’t be reasoned into changing course, because that’s not how their minds work.
You believe persuasion is a logical game, it is actually--even for you--a game of emotion and rhetoric. You yourself could never be fact-checked out of believing something you tie your own identity to, so how could you expect them to be? If you read a report stating that all Infinite Scroll subscribers are lower IQ than the general populace you would be the first to rabidly seek out counter narratives that convincingly argue for the report not being true, and cling to those counter narratives and avoid reading any more counter-counter narratives for as long as you possibly can.
You persuade MAGAs by providing a substitute for the emotional closure and feelings of normalcy that believing in election lies gives them. You learn own to do this by using your right brain rather than your left.
My point is that the extent to which persuasion is a game of logic vs. a game of emotion and rhetoric varies from person to person. In America today, it also varies from tribe to tribe.
I myself absolutely could be, and absolutely have been fact-checked into changing my fundamental beliefs - about animals, about abortion, about immigration, about the merits of two political labels I formerly identified with. I may be an outlier in that regard, but I belong to a tribe of political elites who pride themselves on that ability and are frustrated that so many people try much less hard than we do.
This is exactly what I mean, when you cordon yourself off as being on a higher plane than others, that is a vanity-based declaration that also precludes you from recognizing your faculties that overlap with those of fascists.
The fact is your own political conversion likely came from a combination of willful self-education and happenstance, and when you narrativize it as a conversion brought on entirely of your own logical agency for self flattery you suppress the memories of the mental and somatic journey you actually underwent, and render yourself incapable of developing theory of mind of the people Jeremiah is talking about. You make both them and your past self uncanny figures rather than acknowledge you once reveled in the same primitive mental state they are in.
> And I don’t have much reason to think that MAGA Republicans who believe the 2020 election was stolen, that mass shootings are faked by gun control groups, and that the US government was behind 9/11 are persuadable at all.
Do you really think they all reasoned themselves into those positions independently without influence?
Of course they're persuadable. Someone is very clearly persuading them all the time on a daily basis.
We're using different meanings of "persuade." Mine is "to cause someone to do or believe something *through reasoning or argument.*" It's not just outside influence that matters, but influence through appeal to careful reasoning.
I think people who believe those things latched onto a story that someone else created because they liked how it made them feel. They want to feel as if they understand the world, and they gravitate towards explanations that frame them as the good guys and minimize cognitive dissonance. We should not confuse those cognitive processes with reasoning.
There are plenty on the left who make similar stories, but they are more likely to be reasoned out of them.
This isn't just a problem with MAGA folks, either. Lots of reliable Democratic voters are not college-educated or white collar. For many people who work in journalism, the closest they ever came to blue-collar work is waiting tables in college for beer money.
This happens around having kids, too, kind of sneakily! I listen to a lot of Ringer podcasts, and the hosts definitely fall into the categories you were describing...Sean and Amanda on The Big Pic, I love them to death, but they are both a little older than 40 and their kids are under 5, meanwhile the median age is 27ish. Yglesias' kid is a little bit older than that, but Ezra Klein's pretty young, too. I never see any discourse on "why are us college-educated whites having kids when we're so damn old?" it's just kind of the water they swim in.
Amazing piece Jeremiah. I've always felt like a bit of an alien because I personally know Trump voters who I get along with just fine while being an urbane centrist myself, meanwhile my parents and many of my friends repeat "how could *anyone* vote for Trump?" as if it's some kind of religious refrain. To change minds and election outcomes you have to engage with everyone, not just people on "your side". As you describe here, most of the media class is utterly failing at this task.
You sometimes see the same thing happening in reverse - Trumpworld people utterly unable to understand the left. For instance, I saw a panicky piece about how Zohran Mamdani is an Islamist, which seemed to be mostly sincere - and misses entirely that someone from zohran's background is almost certainly not a deeply religious person, even if they identify as Muslim. Total failure to understand the other side.
But the problem is worse on the left. I've seen academic studies that show conservatives are better at parroting liberal positions than liberals are at parroting conservative positions. The left, broadly speaking, has very little idea how conservatives think or what they value.
I like the Scott Alexander article you linked to and think that's mostly the answer. People are far more interested in signalling they are part of the tribe than finding out what their opponents think.
Those studies are shit and made by the pseudo-centrist Heterodox Academy headed by that pedophile grifter Jonathan Haidt. But actual day-to-day interactions with people on the right suggest the complete opposite.
A quick plug for the Focus Group podcast at the Bulwark. Sarah Longwell has run hundreds of focus groups with Trump voters since 2018. If anyone understands their concerns, it's her.
But can MAGA voters be reasoned with? If they believe that God literally created the world in under a week and that the 2020 election was stolen, what makes you think these people can accept empirical fact? For a rhetorical/Dialectical conversation to happen, both sides must be in stasis with each other. MAGA is simply incapable of reasoning their way out of positions they didn't reason their way into.
To add my own scattered thoughts (coming at this as a former republican who left the right during his first term)
1) the time to stop Trump from being normalized was a decade ago. Some people tried, but they failed. Simple fact is that Trump is here now, and even if he has a heart attack tomorrow he has left his mark on political discourse that will not simply go away.
2) this applies less to Trump (or high-level actors or pundits of any form), but if you only start treating people like they have agency when you want to judge them for something…then you have waited too long. That will just lead to your opinions being ignored.
This is sort of a weird point. Having spoken to some Republicans myself recently, I can attest that they are human, as I expected they would be. What they are not really is persuadable, at least by appeals to things like facts or morality. It becomes extremely apparent when talking with them about anything political that this not a matter of policy to them, but rather one of deep, personally felt identification with and allegiance to this one man, for whom they are willing to make endless excuses and double standards.
It is a cult. Otherwise good normal people can be cult members, although it turns them into worse people. And while the cult members are certainly mostly normal humans, I am not so sure the same can be said of the cult leader.
Even the way you describe him here, as capable of being “nudged”, “flattered”, “threatened”, sounds less like a grown man, never mind a politician, than a child or an animal. And that is weirdly how both his critics and even his supporters treat him: as some sort of wild beast, that no one has any real control over or reliable means of influencing. European leaders have been trying to make him see reason all year, only for him to change his mind out of nowhere the next day. His supporters just think he is a beast (or perhaps capricious god) that they believe is ultimately somehow on their side.
Because of this I think it is 100% reasonable to treat him like a force of nature, not really capable of being reasoned with, and I think anyone seriously approaching him already does so whether they admit it or not.
Agree on the overall point but I think you mischaracterised Rosenfield here. She wasn't talking about Trump voters, just Trump the man. And he is a force of nature in a lot of ways. Whether you like what he does or not, basically he'll do it anyway so no sense in getting worked up.
Weirdly enough she wrote an article in unherd about how people keep thinking she's a conservative, just because she will often criticise progressive groupthink in the arts.
Media libs and their audiences who ape them are actually on a subconscious level willfully misunderstanding MAGAs.
These libs publicly present themselves as being without an id and being pure superego, and when you do that enough times you start to believe the lie that you are indeed pure superego. This stems from the socialization of the highly educated, so devoted to impressing the teacher over a lifetime that they have convinced themselves they actually exist as the unattainable ideal prim student of their favorite teachers' dreams.
The MAGA epistemology is incredibly easy to understand, it is narrativizing rash base impulses as being morally righteous, like a pouty child might, and every human is capable of it and does it several times a day. But the elite media class viscerally avoid empathizing with this seductive tendency because it would force them to admit to themselves they have such a tendency, which feels threatening to their own self-image of being on a more enlightened plane.
Ironically, it is far easier to effectively message against racism, misogyny, homophobia, and even lookism if the virtue signaling coastal libs first acknowledged these phenomena arise from feelings also dormant within themselves. But for the sake of vain ego soothing, their condemnation of bigotries always comes out as some form of "I don't know how anyone could ____"
Idk, Sartre's description of Nazi supporting antisemites as trolls applies pretty damn well to MAGA.
Clearly if you demand any humanity from people, if you have any standards at all, you must present as unrelenting scolds toward Fascists.
And maybe the feelings that make a man into an evil intentioned troll AREN'T present in those troll's critics. Weird of you to assume that they are. It might be easier, as you say, to message to Fascists if you act as if you're the same as them, but what if you aren't? Do you think we can FAKE being racists for their sakes?
Why is scolding the only way you can imagine showing opposition? If the fascist’s goal is to intimidate and disconcert, as Sartre says, what is stopping you from intimidating and disconcerting them in turn? They do to you what they imagine would hurt them, they show you their weakness with every attempt at demonstrating strength, libs just get too flustered to parse that out.
You absolutely share the same impulses as any fascist, for instance, by demonstrating in-group/out-group cleaving in your very comment. They nurtured their tribalistic instincts more, built more rationalizations for it, maybe even were born with temperaments predisposing them to it, but you still have the faculties necessary to develop theory of mind of the fascist, it’s just too mentally taxing and threatening to your sense of self to let your mind go there.
"what is stopping you from intimidating and disconcerting them in turn?"
Well that will get you an instant ban on Reddit and probably from all published magazines.
This is fresh in my mind because last night I went beast mode on the wonderful people who love that Trump invaded Venezuela in order to "take back our oil" and to save the lives of MILLIONS of nonexistent Americans from nonexistent Fentanyl that never went through their country to the US!
And I got permanently banned.
I did an experiment once with my first Reddit account, if you suggest that Democrats may have to prepare to resist the equivalent to a Nazi occupation by ICE or the Marines after the insurrection act is invoked, be ready to hide people, save them, have safe houses, communications, weapons etc. Or that blue state governors should prepare in case they have to resist federal forces.
How fast does posting that a few times get you banned?
Your case is not only anecdotal but shows that you are not good at disconcerting and intimidating because you are not crafty enough to evade bans. This is yet another one of those spots of liberal myopia Jeremiah should have addressed in his post, that liberals think trolling, dogwhistling, demagoguery, and populism are easy to do because they tap into baser instincts. It's like how the Academy Awards awards drama over comedy performances because comedy being more easily digestible must mean it takes less effort and ingenuity.
Intimidating and disconcerting are skills like any other that are underdeveloped in you, which is why you can only imagine attacking as going full maximalist and hysterical.
You mistook what someone would say online for Internet points as being what they would say aloud in person even with trusted parties. And you mistook the words you rashly conjure as the optimal words to say back, mistook not emotionally reacting as you becoming more inhumane rather than stronger against them.
Incredibly well-articulated description of how the progressive mind processes the conservative mind.
Notice how I've generalized your thesis even broader than you did? It's intentional: I've been on this earth enough decades now to see this not only be a media/MAGA dynamic, but honestly, simply an inability for those who see the world through a progressive lens to ever take a conservative seriously as a human being?
Why? Because conservatives do not see humans -- or life in general - the same way progressives see humans or life in general.
The differing perspectives on such fundamental things is so vast that those on the Left tend to see honest takes from the Right as either sub-human or inhumane.
And what makes DTJ and MAGA so interesting is that collectively, they're the first conservative movement in quite some time that feels energized by telling the Left exactly what they think about everything, and not sugar-coating it "just to get along."
Without the sugar-coating, progressively are literally speechless when they hear what the conservative mind *actually thinks* on a regular basis. It's truly alien to them; but alien in a very inhumane way.
I don't think it's a matter of "saying what you think without sugar coating" I think it's a matter of rejecting 100% of your humanity as you send innocent men to death and torture camps on suspicion of having a tattoo. It's having gestapo drag children out of cancer wards, its dragging grandmothers away to die in countries they've never seen before.
There ARE NO MORAL LIMITS. There is NOTHING that Trump could do which you'd reject, no matter if it's pure evil. You're not merely no longer moral actors, you're completely beyond all possible acceptability.
There is an ethnic cleansing going on, and everyone expects that democracy and law will be completely thrown out, and genocide started.
Clearly that's what the man running it all, Stephen Miller, wants.
And your "writers" - amazing moral failures like Curtis Yarvin have explicitly freaked out and called for an instant end to all legal institutions detailed in Constitution so that racist Fascists can't be held responsible for any crimes after Democrats win any future elections.
this statement assumes that All people who identify as Conservative are exactly the same, as are people who identify as Progressive, which just isn't true. I really don't think your beliefs about humans and life in general are point for point the same as Doug Wilson's, Nick Fuentes', or Peter Theil's. mine are not point for point the same as Nancy Pelosi's, Larry Flynt's, or George Soros'. The things that Maga are promoting are nothing like the Conservative values that Rush Limbaugh talked about during his first 15 years on air. I listened to his show so don't try to tell me I'm wrong. He talked endlessly about small, limited government; the unintended consequences of any law/regulation; government staying out of our lives. The only commonalities between Rush 1990s and Maga today are his constant demagoguery of 'Liberals', and conflation of Liberalism and moral decline. When I bring this up to any of my Republican friends, they just shrug and laugh. maybe you should actually talk to some progressives and ask them what their beliefs are concerning humans and life in general. Personally, I don't find my beliefs on humans and life in general to be that much different from my Republican friends and family, even though we disagree on policy.
Also I didn't say that conservatives are like liberals, I said that once you go evil troll, you never go back.
Sartre's trolling antisemites never woke up one morning and said "I was wrong, hurting innocent Jews was wrong. I can't support the Holocaust." In for a penny, in for a pound!
I listened to Rush Limbaugh's show for a week in the 90's
He was making money by selling tapes that lied that Bill Clinton was a mass murdering drug lord.
Every day he had a slogan and it was a doosey. I remember one day he argued that all pollution was a lie and "God wouldn't make a world that mankind could harm"... That's some crap that isn't from any religion in the world.
When Clinton was going to give a State of the Union address that focused on health care, he said, "just watch they will bring up people with some sob stories about being sick, but if you look into them, you'll find out that it's all a fraud. No one ever lost a house because they were sick!"
That was his slogan "No one ever lost a house because they were sick!"
Ignorant of the state of humanity, and evil.
And preying on people's stupidity to make them more evil.
I'm not defending Limbaugh. You are absolutely correct that he said stuff like this. I'm just saying that he spent a lot of time promoting things, and his listeners repeated them endlessly, that Maga has completely turned against. It really doesn't appear to me that there is a stable 'Conservative' political philosophy, though obviously a lot of Republicans are finding themselves cast out as heretics for trying to remain consistent in, say, defending the Constitution (Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney), or promoting libertarian values (Rand Paul), all of which Rush Limbaugh claimed to support.
I agree this is a problem, but it doesn't really point to a solution. I can understand the argument that democrats screwed up covid, immigration, "woke" stuff, and inflation. And Trump voters can sometimes understand how he also screwed up during covid, and is a buffoon and corrupt and tried to overthrow the government and only cares about himself and the wealthy. It's just a choice with what matters more to you. Somehow it's just as hard to change someone's mind about what issue is important than that they're picking the wrong side of the issue. In my experience talking to people, no amount of stupidity or corruption will ever outweigh even something as minor as trans people competing in women's sports. It's just too easy for people to pick one issue, no matter how small, and give it huge salience. And once it's a non-negotiable, nothing else matters.
It is all well and good to make the point that MAGA voters are human beings like us well-educated elites in our insular liberal bubble. But the fact remains that we are not going to change the minds of those who believe the 2020 election was stolen or that the world is 6,000 years old. For our purposes, these people are curiosities. Our concerns are moving out of our bubble enough to reach enough of the electorate to win elections and support an agenda that focuses on issues with broad public support. We have paid a significant price with the liberal hegemony in elite institutions and support for every progressive flavor of the month that came along. We need to appreciate how much resentment we have engendered and appreciate that the price we are now paying with this populist tyranny is the flip side of ridiculous slogans like “defund the police.” There is a voting majority to be had — even with all of the gerrymandering — if we use the elite education we’ve had the benefit of and concentrate on a popular agenda.
I think you are confusing a Liberal hegemony of elite institutions with a Progressive hegemony. Elite Institutions, like Harvard (where Adrian Vermeule teaches), Princeton (where Pete Hegseth graduated), Yale (where J. D. Vance graduated), and Duke (where Stephen Miller graduated), promoted a Liberal philosophy of exposing students to ideas without prejudice, and encouraging them to consider them with reason and logic. All of the Progressive policies at these Institutions were designed to train a managerial class capable of managing in a diverse workplace. Corporate America demanded these institutions to produce managers able to manage without prejudice against Women, Muslims, Hindus, Seiks, etc. They needed managers able to manage, and report to, women, move to Dubai and manage Arabs, move to India and manage Hindus, etc. The result was to force American Conservative Christians, and Racists, to either closet their beliefs entirely, or choose a less lucrative career. And almost every University in America responded to this demand the same way. That is the true source of resentment, and cynical politicians like Trump, Vance, Miller, and Hegseth are willing to exploit this resentment, and convince the resentful to support illiberal policies as ideas, and mentally innoculate them against the more popular political ideas, like state provided healthcare and education, labor protections, etc that are the bedrock of the anti- totalitarian movement you and I desire.
So this is all a bit surreal, but I do actually agree with one point in all of the above, which is that this essay is NOT about me personally! This "Kat Rosenfield" person — urbane, highly educated, comfortably entrenched in the Ivy League-to-elite media pipeline, probably does cocaine in the bathroom at parties— is a figment of the author's imagination, albeit one so much cooler than me that I’m almost tempted to let people think she exists.
But, in the interest of the truth (which we presumably all care about), I think I should probably correct the record. So: hi, I'm Kat. I'm 43 years old and was raised in a town of 3,000 people in deep red, rural upstate NY, where my dad was a physician at the local prison. My graduating class (public school) was 90 people and I went to a no-name college that gave me a scholarship, then applied for a Publishing Job in the Big City because I liked to read (yes, I was a massive rube, feel free to make fun of me). Unfortunately, this latter chapter of my life ended in 2008 when the economy crashed and was an absolutely extraordinary failure on all counts, except that I have been married for nearly two decades to a really handsome man who I met through my first job.
And yes, I've managed to build a career as a full time freelance writer since then, through a combination of hustle and sheer dumb luck— but that's because I've spent the past 17 years hammering on a keyboard in my living room in a random town in Connecticut where we moved for my husband's work, far from the giant high school cafeteria known as the Urbane Media Sphere. The elite club of "people who went to the same schools, live in the same neighborhoods, socialize with the same professional class, and consume the same cultural signals" described here is one in which I have never belonged, nor wanted to. I don't come from that world! It's not a milieu I'm comfortable in — and judging by the way its members (including the author of this piece) talk about me in public, I get the distinct sense that I wouldn't be welcome there even if I wanted to.
All of which is to say, flattered as I am to be mistaken for a member of this clique by one of its reigning Queen Bees, it is a mistake — as is his using me or my work to represent the modal clueless elitist who thinks Republicans are aliens. Half my family are Republicans! As are a number of my friends, although I couldn't necessarily tell you how any of them voted in the last election because, and I can't stress this enough, normal people don't care that much about this shit. We don't talk about politics when we get together; we talk about football, or people's kids, or where Michelle got her deviled egg recipe.
As for the post to which this piece is a purported response, as I personally explained to Jeremiah on X/Twitter yesterday, there is an obvious, substantive difference between "Trump's uniquely amoral behavior makes him a paradoxically flat character in the soap opera of American political culture," and "Trump is boring and uninteresting," which is not just an arguably illiterate interpretation of my post, but one belied by the fact that I've written hundreds of thousands of words about Trump and his place in the culture since 2016 (I'll leave a link to one of my favorites below if anyone's interested in reading it.) The fact that Jeremiah chose to ignore my clarification and write an entire article about how me and my work are a microcosm of "credentialed cosmopolitan snobbery" is, I have to say, a pretty incredible example of the phenomenon under discussion.
Anyway, to those who got to the end of this novel of a comment, thanks for reading! And if you want to read a little more, here you go:
https://www.thefp.com/p/2024-election-is-marvel-universe
Kat, I'm a longtime follower of your work and listener/erstwhile subscriber to your podcast. I say this not to claim that I understand the contents of your heart, but by way of pleading good faith.
But I also think that the critique leveled in this article is pretty spot-on. The very fact that your lens of viewing Trump is essentially literary criticism does, in fact, strike me as a particularly egregious example of shrugging rather than attempting to understand the phenomenon. His uniquely amoral behavior certainly does resist literary analysis, but it fits in reasonably well if you view it as pro wrestling-style kayfabe. And, of course, there's always the option of just not writing about it if it's out of your wheelhouse - being the President of the United States doesn't automatically make a person relevant to the broader culture that you typically cover.
I guess all this is to say that I don't think that your point is as strong as you seem to consider it to be. You do have the precise profile of a cultural elite, whether it's more accurate to call Drew a "no-name college" or a "private college in the northeast." Hell, you are even in this comment section pleading that you don't even talk about politics with people who probably disagree with you. That was kind of the point of the whole article!
The critique leveled at me, specifically, is absolute baloney and I’m extremely annoyed that I had to spend as much time as I did responding to it. As for the rest of your comment, “there's always the option of just not writing about it if it's out of your wheelhouse” is a pretty wild thing to say to me? There’s an article right there! But I am also not spending a single second more of my weekend dealing with or thinking about this, I’m already pissed at myself for replying at all, which was clearly a huge waste of time.
Okay, but you didn't respond! You took exception to the description of you, rewrote that description in a way that didn't actually address the general case, and then objected that you have Republican family members and then noted that you don't talk about politics with them. If you're going to say that you do in fact understand Republicans, noting that you have family members that are Republican - and may have even voted for Trump! - of course, you don't know because you don't talk about politics with them. This is not beating the charge.
I read the article you linked. It was good! It contributed just fine to the discourse! Which is why it's silly to post on X about how Trump isn't an interesting literary character and then get mad when people point out that's an asinine thing for a commentator to say.
I think the issue is that her comments about Trump *himself* being a weird anomaly were interpreted as *his voters* being a weird anomaly. I'd be pissed off too if I was mischaracterised, and you did come across as patronising, probably unintentional.
"Amoral is telling, but not in the way you thought.
This is because you on the hard Left have a different moral compass, and the moral compass of anyone to the right of Mao Zedong looks like Hitler to you. I'm not exaggerating; this is what you really think. That rarest of birds, replicable social science, has proved this.
Haidt finds that conservatives use all of them but Leftists use about half of them, and of that half mostly just one. There's no conservative moral foundation that is not also a Left one, but half of the conservative foundations are external to, and inaccessible by, Left cognition.
Haidt has an quick TED talk (the good kind)
on where differences from liberals and conservatives originate from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs41JrnGaxc
There are five values:
1. Harm/care – as a species care a lot about others
2. Fairness/reciprocity
3. In group/out group – only among humans are there large groups that are united together for common purposes, and as a species we self-consciously produce or reinforce tribes (for wars, sports team loyalty, etc.)
4. Authority/respect – often based out of love
5. Purity/sanctity (either with regard to things like sex, or the foods we put in our body)
Many on the hard Left are unaware that they are complicit in acts of evildoing because adherence to their moral foundations provides them with justifications and excuses for their actions. "It's for the greater good."
"Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion," Harvey Weinstein said. "We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for the victims of 9/11. We were there for the victims of Katrina and any world catastrophe."
Note that this was before he was exposed as a rapist in #metoo and before #metoo was cancelled due to widespread, well-founded accusations of antisemitism.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/harvey-weinstein-in-2009-hollywood-has-the-best-moral-compass/article/2637066
As an otherwise lurker who has enjoyed a lot of your writing I wanted to say thank you for coming and commenting here Kat, I don't think replying was a waste of time, there are plenty of people who read your reply and it adjusted their perceptions, but who didn't comment, so you wouldn't know.
You're elite in that the "elite" that Republicans attack doesn't mean powerful, rich or even necessarily elitely educated.
They mean "capable of reading, writing and reasoning at an adult level."
You know, something Trump will never be.
"Having empathy" also counts.
Or "having integrity."
If you look at what they violently insist that a policeman or soldier should be, NOT someone who does their duty at the risk of their life, NOT someone who protects the innocent, NOT someone who will disobey an immoral or illegal order - then maybe having any discernable virtues makes you unacceptably elite in their eyes.
As someone who also grew up rural and moved away this long screed does not excuse the journalistic malpractice of not giving them agency because they're boring to write about
She said *Trump* is boring to write about, not his voters.
There are many examples he could of found of journalists doing what he's complaining about, but this is a misreading.
You didn’t address the subject of the article, which was about how you choose to frame the Trump phenomenon rhetorically rather than about your personal biography. If you disagree with “Jeremiah Johnson” you should actually make a counterargument to his main point, as he used your twitter text thread as an example of a phenomenon, not a specific focus of “criticism.” It isn’t apparent that you read his post any more closely than you accuse him of misreading your thread.
Your evaluation of the Trump political phenomenon here (and possibly other politically inflected topics) is that it can be “interesting” or “not interesting” from a literary point of view, not that it is “good” or “bad” in a social sense or a moral sense. You don’t really defend the premise that this is an appropriate framing in general or do much to contextualize a very narrow frame in which ONLY literary merit is a subject of discussion. There are multiple problems with this:
1. Anything can be a good literary subject. You’re bounded only by your imagination and your own peculiar sensibilities as a writer. Good criticism should focus on the artfulness of the work first, and its connection to various cultural contexts second. By not discussing the specifics of a particular work in this thread, the implication is that any context where Trump is interrogated as a human being cannot be handled artfully. Trump is a *character* if nothing else, and it would be a better observation that his ubiquity has made this character culturally trite. But you didn’t say he was trite; you said he was uninteresting. My counterargument to you is that this is categorically untrue.
2. The actual social effects of Trump and the MAGA movement are cultural, but they primarily change our physical, economic and political culture, not aesthetic or literary output. If you’re not *writing literature* (or doing focused literary analysis), the main social reality of Trump’s behavior on the country should be the topical focus of non-fiction articles and books. What you’re implying here, pragmatically, is that you don’t care deeply about Trump’s degradation of the American social fabric. It’s not a stretch to guess that you feel insulated personally from this degradation, not just in this moment but on ongoing basis; which, regardless of your historiography of yourself, means that either you’re historically obtuse, or very privileged.
3. Many of us see Trump’s ascendance as a moral crisis. It isn’t apparent in your work that you agree with this sentiment. If you do think Trump represents a moral crisis, you should talk like it and act like it consistently. If not, feel free to defend that premise, but you will continue to get pushback and if we ever get over this as a country, your cultural contributions will not be remembered fondly. My sense, without being able to ask you direct socratic questions, is that your writing expresses an annoyance at having to pick sides morally, rather than principled and highly developed aesthetic ideas about cultural production. As someone who cares deeply about literature, I think that such a position is spiritually vacuous.
What you have written is so true. Every year we are bombarded by articles telling us how to struggle through politics at family gatherings. I feel sorry for people who let politics ruin their holidays. I attended five gatherings this season and politics never came up. This is typical. What I do remember talking about is music, travel, boats, history, and whatever was going on in the lives of those we hadn’t seen since last year.
Most people realize that bringing up politics is rude, self-centered, and passive aggressive. It is the hijacking of someone else’s event for entirely personal purposes. People work hard putting these things together. Normal people recognize this and act accordingly.
People literally alienated their entire families permanently in 2004 because they voted for George Bush.
This happened again to other cohorts of people in 2016 and 2024.
It's because The Other lives in their heads, rent-free, 24/7. It eats at them and they've got to get it out, like one vomits out e.coli contaminated curry made in a kitchen with no hot running water.
The political Left, especially the hard Left, are high in trait Neuroticism, which means they feel negative feelings very intensely.
I almost felt sorry for them when I understood this and got that they weren't faking it, they really were living through Hell.
Then I remembered they put gay men in lingerie in contact with kindergarteners, shot up schools full of white Christians and specifically cited DEI ideology in their manifestos, and then tried to stop these manifestos from being released.
Harvey Milk, hard Left hero, lived with an underage minor runaway boy while he was in his 30s and nobody batted an eye. They elected him mayor of San Francisco. His pederasty was so morally acceptable to not just the hard Left but mainstream liberals that Obama named a Navy ship after him.
Citation: _The Mayor of Castro Street_
This biography of Milk written by a gay journalist won awards for openly admitting with no shame Milk's depraved (to normal Americans) morals. Large portions used to be available on freely on Google Books but the book has since been withdrawn because it's too damaging.
John Stuart Mill famously wrote:
"He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion."
Thanks for writing this, I felt like the post was just phoning it in.
thanks so much for engaging and sharing your story. I am now more informed. I think we are all very frustrated with the way the media is treating Trump with kit gloves, but it doesnt seem fair for this either to use you as a shibboleth. I also very much identify with you on having many Republican family members and friends, and having lots of conversations that are pretty much could of politics because I just don't want to argue with these people and isolate myself unless I'm drawn into something that they say, and they seem to be happy to avoid talking about politics as well for the same reason. This is really something that people on the left who do not know any Republicans don't understand. It's really hard for the average person to have substantive discussions with people without causing conflict that is uncomfortable to all involved, but I so much wish I could do it. Anyway, you can take heart that even Hannah Arendt had this experience where people criticized a 'Hannah Arendt' that didn't actually exist which said things that she didn't actually say. Another reason to read Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship 🙂.
It's a good article but I agree he's using you as something of a prop.
I agree. The author didn't account for the fact that Kat Rosenfeld is just an idiot rather than some urbane elite snob
this tracks with what Hannah Arendt wrote in Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship. You have to maintain that people have agency, and can choose alternatives, in order to be able to logically judge them for their choices. Another idea by Arendt was that Totalitarian governments need for people to view their acts as inescapable Fait Accompli, a.k.a. forces of nature. We most resist this and respectfully engage Trump supporters as humans with agency if we have any hope of turning our society away from Totalitarianism.
Great link to Arendt here, now I'm wishing I had included it.
I agree with a lot of the article. Seems a little overly loaded on Kat specifically though… if you go back to the original brouhaha, the point she was making (implicitly, vaguely, in a media brained way, admittedly) is that expecting these Kennedy Center boycotts to have a material effect is foolhardy and likely counterproductive, making it not worth the political costs. From my reading, she’s saying this exact same thing: it’s incumbent on us to engage with people as humans, not as big-O Others to be shamed and avoided, as if they are somehow going to magically respond positively to elite snobbery and cultural exclusion.
I’m trying to figure out how we got from there to here… you both have valid points but this all feels a little Too Online.
How does respectful engagement of Trump supporters work at this point? If I am to treat them as people with agency, then the only kind of people they can be is bad people. They had every opportunity to inform themselves of the nature of their cult leader and turn around, to have failed to do so at this point proves an unacceptable failing in at least one essential capacity as a human being. Presumably I'm supposed to tell them something other than "Calling you a basket of deplorables was only a mistake in that it was too kind"?
Something that’s helped me maintain full and loving relationships regardless of political differences (and this is an intentional change over the past 5 years) is remembering that no one opinion held, regardless of how terrible (IMO!), defines the totality of your character.
And while certain opinions may be correlated with certain behavioral characteristics, it is definitely not 1:1.
It’s cliche, but people actually do contain multitudes. It turns out that when you really listen to someone whose opinion you abhor, and then SINCERELY (and this is the key I believe) let them know “I DEEPLY disagree with you, but I love you anyway”, they will feel heard and they will be more inclined to hear your opinions that they may abhor themselves.
I’ve realized that my own basket of opinions (many of which have flipped 180 degrees multiple times over the course of my life) doesn’t make me a “good” person as if I were the keeper of whatever that means.
Letting go of that concept has been probably my greatest source of growth and happiness over the past 5 years.
Ah yes, dehumanization, Step 4 on the Ten Stages of Genocide. Human beings are equated with animals, vermin or diseases.
You know how Israelis called Gazans "rats"?
They have made it all the way to Step 10, Denial.
https://www.endgenocidenow.org/stages-of-genocide
in Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship, Arendt was responding to people criticizing the criminal prosecution of Adolph Eichmann by saying essentially that he did not have agency, he was afraid for his life, and who are we to judge if we would do the same thing in the same circumstances. Her point was that we cannot hold them accountable at all if we don't believe they have agency. This will, undoubtedly, be the argument made to undermine any future prosecutions, should we be lucky enough to get to prosecute Trump, and his highest associates. Your anger and frustration are real. I agree it can seem futile to discuss things with his supporters. But we have a responsibility to do so, unfortunately. Using words like 'Deplorables' isn't useful, in my humble opinion. And really be careful with words like 'proves an unacceptable failing in at least one essential capacity as a human being.' De-humanization is wrong, and can lead to inhumane treatment of people.
Thank you for your response. I'm sorry if I came off as hostile, I just genuinely don't know what kind of conversation I am supposed to have with them. You're right that insults are unproductive and also that we need to say without compromise that MAGAs have committed indefensible wrongs in supporting their movement.
And I am well and truly done with anyone on either side making excuses for MAGAs. For all the noise about the harm done by misinformation, it's trivially easy to avoid by prioritizing mainstream sources of news. If they had read even a single headline news article per month they would have had enough information to understand that voting for Trump was the wrong choice. That they voted for him anyway proves that either they understood the harms and didn't care or they didn't put in the bare minimum of effort necessary to act as an informed citizen. Either one is deserving of harsh condemnation.
And yet we need to win at least some of these people back and shouting that from the rooftops is hardly likely to increase Democrat poll numbers. What I've read on the science of persuasion tells me that one of the best ways to get someone to change their mind is to leave them an out so they don't have to admit any personal fault, but that runs directly counter to Arendt's point. So what are responsible persuaders supposed to do?
I'll let you know when I figure it out 😂 it likely is different depending on which Trump supporter you are talking to. The person who voted for Trump to lower prices may be easier to persuade than the person who voted for Trump to cause the stock market to rise. As a Christian myself, it saddens me to say that Conservative Christians may be the hardest to persuade due to the constant stream of propaganda they receive from their preachers, and news feeds. I am hoping Trump will divide Christians along sectarian lines himself but being completely ignorant about existing fault lines between the different denominations and traditions. I am waiting to see how my fellow Catholics are doing to respond to him bombing a mostly Catholic nation last night, fingers crossed on that one.
The Catholics are about the only group I have hope will course-correct given they have an external source of wisdom in the Pope and because they really do emphasize moral obligations beyond just banning abortion and birth control. I have my issues with the Catholic Church, but they really do fund a massive global network of charitable interventions. The evangelicals have sold out hard enough it's difficult to imagine a path back for them.
This article seems like the kind of thing that might reach a devout Catholic: https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/guest-voices/will-musk-and-trump-go-hell-defunding-corporal-works-mercy
thanks! I like ncr, I had not read that one.
The entire point of this article was to point out that condemning fellow Americans as The Other is wrongheaded, and here you are doing exactly that.
(Yoda voice)
"That is why you fail"
A kindly reminder that Harvard University created napalm. "It sticks to kids!"
https://harvardmagazine.com/2013/05/like-garlic-or-burning-matches
Everyone in the Ivy League deserves to be chained together and forced to push a giant wheel that serves no purpose.
The irony in this comment is you are guilty of exactly what this essay suggests. You’re the one who sees the subtle decline into totalitarianism that Trump supporters are causing, and you need to save them.
Many see Trump as fighting for democracy. For example, do you blindly support the undemocratically elected NGO-plex? Completely unaccountable to the American people in many cases? Cause democrats do. USAID had a big role in that. The day care centers in Minnesota. Epsteins companies. Many Trump voters view Trump as restoring democracy from a two-tiered justice system that targeted him and others (like Jan 6ers) unnecessarily. The deep state is a very believable concept and the Epstein files are evidence of that.
Also the bigger thing is the erosion of common morals. Transiting children, abortion up to birth, antifa and rent-a-riots, etc. The irony of the working class supporting republicans (all the tradies and most of the middle class) even though democrats claim they represent the working class. If you want to understand republicans you have to find ones that are coherent and know what they’re talking about, but the elitism of your comment is why so many people hate the media.
you are accusing me of things that I did not say without knowing anything about me. Most of my friends are Republicans. They are good people. I do actually understand why they voted for Trump, though I dont agree with them. What astonishes me is how malleable the Republican party has caused them to be. 10 years ago the party platform was against big government, talked about the unintended consequences of laws and regulations, and denounced any attempt by government to bully companies into correct behavior. Now they celebrate a President that does exactly that, and they now support the idea that Conservatives should use all the power of the Government to coerce people into behaving how they think they should behave when they get elected to office. We once had a choice between Big Government Democrats and Small Government Republicans. Now the choice is between Democrat Big Government and Republican Big Government. You talk about 'The Media' as if it's a monolith, but it is not, as evidenced by your list of public events that are currently big news on the media that you consume. We are both consuming media right here on substack. I don't think that Trump voters cause Totalitarianism. That responsibility falls squarely on the heads of Trump, the conservative Supreme Court Justices, Congress, and the elites that organize and direct his government policy. As for the Democratic party, I do think they have a lot of problems. Yet another thing that Arendt discussed in The Rise of Totalitarianism is the collapse of the Two Party system in Germany that helped Hitler rise to power. Chuck Schumer is the face of that decline today. The New Maga Right's ability to push us towards Totalitarianism is enabled by the feckless, technocratic, neo liberalism of the modern Democratic party. I really don't understand how you can talk about moral decline while turning a blind eye at the sheer immorality of Trump, and all of the people he has elevated into his government. Is Elon Musk a paragon of morality with his harem of women to raise his kids without marrying him? How about Gay Peter Theil talking endlessly about antichrist because he thinks he can manipulate Christians to vote Republican so he doesn't have to pay taxes or have the government looking over his surveillance company Palintir. Isn't it odd that Republicans only talk about Trans people now, while quietly dropping meeting of the rest of the LGBTQ+ Agenda? Don't get me wrong. I don't think it's up to the government to force gay people not to be gay or trans people not to be trans. Throughout history, poeple have thought society was in moral decline. It's no different today than it was 2000 years ago when Christ was traveling around healing the sick and railing against the fake piety of the leaders of his day. I think you should broaden your media diet, and read Arendt.
Maybe I did come across heavy handed. Sorry. But then you go on to assert the Trump is causing totalitarianism, as if dems don’t dominate all the schools, tech companies, and media. I guess I don’t see a substantive difference between Trump supporters causing it and Trump cause they voted for him.
I can’t say I necessarily agree that Trump is for big government. I wouldn’t say I turn a blind eye to Trump. It’s just that *in principle* I see democrats as being immoral with their sexual ethics and abortion policies. Elon mask is one person along with thiel. But I don’t support thiel and agree with you. If you look at opinion polls though I would argue that republicans are more moral imo than democrats (like abortion up to birth, sexual ethics, transitioning kids).
And personally I do find it interesting that somehow we got the gay tech bros. I think it’s cause of trumps position on gay marriage. And as of recent our society has gotten a lot worse. I hope you’re not saying society has always been in decline to just justify voting dem because they have lost their minds.
I don't want to convince you to vote Democratic. I want you to have better Republicans to vote for. We have to have policy discussions knowing full well that the majority of politicians running as an R or D are corrupt. The reason they are corrupt has to do with the outsized influence that a few hundred people, especially 4-5 single individuals, have on our political system. You and I cannot buy thousands of copies of a book like Hillbilly Elegy to get it on the NYT best seller list, but Peter Theil can. You are correct that most of those 5 were Democrats as late as 2014 or so. But it's pretty clear that their support was out of self interest. As Marc Andreesen stated in his interview with Ross Douthat, Al Gore really did have a big influence in the promotion of policies that handed billions of our tax dollars to tech companies like PayPal, Google, Netscape, etc. Once Democrats started to get worried about the potential impact of AI, and pushing regulation, they all switched to voting Republican. I don't believe Dems dominate the schools either. Have you heard of the Chicago School of Economics? How about Andrian Vermeule, out of Harvard? which school did Stephen Miller attend? Which school was Jay Bhattacharya President of? Pete Hegseth graduated from Princeton. J. D. Vance and Scott Bessent attended Yale. I will try to convince you that Trump is a morally repugnant, self dealing conman who has thoroughly corrupted the Republican party. Can you share a policy paper explaining the noble reason that Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras to convince me that it wasn't a bribe that led to that decision? Can you really convince me that Stephen Miller isn't actively courting white nationalists with theatrical cruelty towards Hispanic people based on his own personal hatred of the Hispanics in his high school? I actually thought Roe vs. Wade was a pretty good compromise between the extremes of Abortion up to Birth, and forcing women to die of sepsis because a Dr will not remove an already dead fetus from their body. it wouldn't have prevented the Georgia government from keeping a dead woman on life support, at tremendous expense for her family, the hospital, and Georgia taxpayers, to deliver a baby that will be taken care of by the state. I'm not Pro Choice or Pro Life. I don't think women have a right to kill an unborn child, but I also don't think a government that sanctions the killing of humans for political and economic expediency, such as putting people to Death, or blowing up already capsized boats with people clinging for their life, or killing Venezuelans and Cubans to steal Oil, has any legitimacy in forcing women not to make that same decision, even for economic expediency. Finally, Dems are not forcing kids to become gender dysphoric. I don't know why it happens, but it is happening, and those kids and their parents are doing what anyone else in our Democratic system would do to get help for them, fighting for the right to make their own medical decisions with their doctors without a nanny state government getting in the way. Isn't that what Peter Theil wants? Government keeping out of his life and his affairs? Why is it that a bunch of poor and middle class families are immoral for wanting that, but not Peter Theil? And you will forgive me if I find it hard to believe that Donald Trump is going to allow a bunch of moralists to take over his government and force him to stop throwing parties with scantily clad women swimming in giant martini glasses. I really don't know what Republicans are supposed to do. It sucks to be given such poor choices. Trust me, I know. I had to hold my nose and vote for George Bush because Bill Clinton was so corrupt. At least Bush was a decent person, though I didn't agree with much of what he did in office. I hope you can figure it out though.
Responding to this now lol
If you just look up the share of professors that are liberal vs conservative you will be astounded. They are always liberal and very liberal everywhere:
https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/public_affairs/2020/02/05/partisan_registration_and_contributions_of_faculty_in_flagship_colleges_483652.html
https://buckleyinstitute.com/faculty-political-diversity-report-2024/
https://www.thecollegefix.com/zero-republican-professors/
Honduras thing and Stephen Miller don't invalidate the entire administration. If we're gonna play that game then I could just throw a bunch of anecdotes at you too about Biden and Dems. I don't think Trump is the most ethical, so trying to convince me would be strange. I voted for him because the other party was worse. I'm convinced Biden's policies (the open border in particular and his weak foreign policy) have gotten tons of people killed and ruined our democracy by convincing libs that somehow it's okay to just let illegals vote (now all of a sudden liberals are like "TRUMP IS SENDING ICE TO WATCH POLLING PLACES," which shouldnt be a problem to them????).
Killing narco terrorists brining in drugs that will kill hundreds (fentanyl is the number one cause of death for those under 50) is not remotely the same as aborting your own innocent child. My goodness. Also an envoy from China was in Venezuela the night before Maduro was kidnapped because they want Venezuelan oil. No women, except for in the case of literal rape, is forced to "have" a child, and they can give them up for adoption. Giving birth is safer than abortion. These moral comparisons are just not the same. But yeah trump is not the most moral and not even a super prolife candidate. It seems to be an establishment position to groom kids and take them away from their parents. GAC is a human rights catastrophe, and it castrates kids. Not the same as what Peter Thiel wants (and I dont agree with him or surrogacy). No sane person should support that. That's the law in California (you dont have to tell parents if you are trans and the school will help transition you). Also school board meetings are full of angry parents showing p**nographic books that their kids were being taught because it's lgtbq (yay diversity?). The sexual perversion has to stop. But yeah Trump is not moral and kind of perverted but compared to dems he's not as much to me.
also it is factually untrue that giving birth is safer than having an abortion. Many many more women die from complications due to pregnancy than die after abortions.
I think the disconnect is that Trump and MAGA is (maybe?) the only political movement in American history that is explicitly anti-Democratic and unconcerned with upholding the norms of American constitutionalism. The educated elite bubble thought that at least we were all on the same page about peaceful transfers of power, not prosecuting political opponents, and not politicizing law enforcement, among the many many many illiberal actions of this administration. And all of this to the cheering and hooting of the MAGA masses. We don't share the same reality much less the same civilizational framework, and no one has really figured out a way to bridge that gap. How do you do objective reporting on a political figure that is not responsive to Democratic frameworks?
To put it another way, how do you go about understanding people who at best refuse to agree on the meaning of words and at worst, just lie?
Interesting perspective, although it was definitely the Democrats who broke the seal on prosecuting political opponents (albeit perhaps for more legitimate charges *on average* than Trump's flimsy prosecutions of his enemies)
I don't know how you can count the legitimate prosecutions of Trump's very real crimes against the Country in the same league as the sham prosecutions of Comey or Letitia James. Thankfully the judicial system isn't completely cowed yet, but the message was sent, which is the problem. But then again maybe I'm not a super smart Substack heterodox thinker so I'm not both-sidesing this.
utter bullshit.
Not just wrong, but a deliberate stance of unreality in order to support an absolute attack on our values.
This is why Trumpies are treated as aliens, they reject all normal morality and reciprocity.
Yeah, this is a terrible take. Being a "political opponent" does not give one carte blanche to be a wanton criminal. Given the nature of the two-party system and how the pendulum swings in the US, if the opposition doesn't allow bad actors to be prosecuted, it will never happen at all.
There is an enormous difference between someone being prosecuted for legitimate crimes who happens to be a Republican and someone overtly stating that they intend to prosecute someone because they are a political enemy.
The reason MAGA seems so alien is the way the movement snaps in line whenever Trump wants it to. We saw this with the murder of Rob Reiner. For about 12 hours MAGA influencers patted themselves on the back for being compassionate, unlike the evil leftists who celebrated Charlie Kirk's murder. Then Trump weighed in with his awful rant about Reiner having TDS, and all of a sudden these same influencers pivoted to "Reiner promoted the Russiagate hoax, he was not a good guy!"
The Epstein files is degrading that somewhat. But remember that Charlie Kirk -- who was all in on the Epstein stuff when it was a useful political weapon -- tried to end the discussion by saying he was done talking about it because he trusted his friends in the White House.
This is not true. This is acting like MAGA is a hive mind rather than independent individuals choosing to subsume themselves for their own respective reasons. You can gauge from internet metrics whether they are collectively on board with something or if there is faction splintering. They will never say outright they are against say Trump attacking Rob Reiner once their top influencers defend the action, but they will engage with and offer voluntary, full throated defences of that action far less and try to bury it in history, because harping on it more may spur defections.
“All of these people are conscious, feeling actors who respond to incentives, pressure, social status, and persuasion just like anyone else.”
One of these things—persuasion—is not like the others. And I don’t have much reason to think that MAGA Republicans who believe the 2020 election was stolen, that mass shootings are faked by gun control groups, and that the US government was behind 9/11 are persuadable at all. They did not reason their way into those positions, and they won’t reason their way out. I’ve tried too hard for too long with too many of them to believe that.
They are not just like me. They form their political beliefs differently than my tribe does. It may be that we are more alien and they are more human - see my blog's title! - but either way, recognizing the cognitive differences is a sign you DO understand these people, not a sign that you don't.
This is not a reason to give up or strip them of agency or responsibility, I agree with you on that. But we should have a different strategy for how to engage with these people that is lighter on the rational argument and heavier on emotional resonance. They may be “flattered, threatened, nudged, or embarrassed into changing course,” but they won’t be reasoned into changing course, because that’s not how their minds work.
You believe persuasion is a logical game, it is actually--even for you--a game of emotion and rhetoric. You yourself could never be fact-checked out of believing something you tie your own identity to, so how could you expect them to be? If you read a report stating that all Infinite Scroll subscribers are lower IQ than the general populace you would be the first to rabidly seek out counter narratives that convincingly argue for the report not being true, and cling to those counter narratives and avoid reading any more counter-counter narratives for as long as you possibly can.
You persuade MAGAs by providing a substitute for the emotional closure and feelings of normalcy that believing in election lies gives them. You learn own to do this by using your right brain rather than your left.
My point is that the extent to which persuasion is a game of logic vs. a game of emotion and rhetoric varies from person to person. In America today, it also varies from tribe to tribe.
I myself absolutely could be, and absolutely have been fact-checked into changing my fundamental beliefs - about animals, about abortion, about immigration, about the merits of two political labels I formerly identified with. I may be an outlier in that regard, but I belong to a tribe of political elites who pride themselves on that ability and are frustrated that so many people try much less hard than we do.
This is exactly what I mean, when you cordon yourself off as being on a higher plane than others, that is a vanity-based declaration that also precludes you from recognizing your faculties that overlap with those of fascists.
The fact is your own political conversion likely came from a combination of willful self-education and happenstance, and when you narrativize it as a conversion brought on entirely of your own logical agency for self flattery you suppress the memories of the mental and somatic journey you actually underwent, and render yourself incapable of developing theory of mind of the people Jeremiah is talking about. You make both them and your past self uncanny figures rather than acknowledge you once reveled in the same primitive mental state they are in.
> And I don’t have much reason to think that MAGA Republicans who believe the 2020 election was stolen, that mass shootings are faked by gun control groups, and that the US government was behind 9/11 are persuadable at all.
Do you really think they all reasoned themselves into those positions independently without influence?
Of course they're persuadable. Someone is very clearly persuading them all the time on a daily basis.
We're using different meanings of "persuade." Mine is "to cause someone to do or believe something *through reasoning or argument.*" It's not just outside influence that matters, but influence through appeal to careful reasoning.
I think people who believe those things latched onto a story that someone else created because they liked how it made them feel. They want to feel as if they understand the world, and they gravitate towards explanations that frame them as the good guys and minimize cognitive dissonance. We should not confuse those cognitive processes with reasoning.
There are plenty on the left who make similar stories, but they are more likely to be reasoned out of them.
This isn't just a problem with MAGA folks, either. Lots of reliable Democratic voters are not college-educated or white collar. For many people who work in journalism, the closest they ever came to blue-collar work is waiting tables in college for beer money.
This happens around having kids, too, kind of sneakily! I listen to a lot of Ringer podcasts, and the hosts definitely fall into the categories you were describing...Sean and Amanda on The Big Pic, I love them to death, but they are both a little older than 40 and their kids are under 5, meanwhile the median age is 27ish. Yglesias' kid is a little bit older than that, but Ezra Klein's pretty young, too. I never see any discourse on "why are us college-educated whites having kids when we're so damn old?" it's just kind of the water they swim in.
Median age to have kids*
Amazing piece Jeremiah. I've always felt like a bit of an alien because I personally know Trump voters who I get along with just fine while being an urbane centrist myself, meanwhile my parents and many of my friends repeat "how could *anyone* vote for Trump?" as if it's some kind of religious refrain. To change minds and election outcomes you have to engage with everyone, not just people on "your side". As you describe here, most of the media class is utterly failing at this task.
You sometimes see the same thing happening in reverse - Trumpworld people utterly unable to understand the left. For instance, I saw a panicky piece about how Zohran Mamdani is an Islamist, which seemed to be mostly sincere - and misses entirely that someone from zohran's background is almost certainly not a deeply religious person, even if they identify as Muslim. Total failure to understand the other side.
But the problem is worse on the left. I've seen academic studies that show conservatives are better at parroting liberal positions than liberals are at parroting conservative positions. The left, broadly speaking, has very little idea how conservatives think or what they value.
I like the Scott Alexander article you linked to and think that's mostly the answer. People are far more interested in signalling they are part of the tribe than finding out what their opponents think.
Those studies are shit and made by the pseudo-centrist Heterodox Academy headed by that pedophile grifter Jonathan Haidt. But actual day-to-day interactions with people on the right suggest the complete opposite.
I sometimes detect a weird pride in their own ignorance of their fellow countrymen.
A quick plug for the Focus Group podcast at the Bulwark. Sarah Longwell has run hundreds of focus groups with Trump voters since 2018. If anyone understands their concerns, it's her.
Longwell is frustrating to me because she talks to all these morons and refuses to admit how much hate motivates them
Incredibly frustrating to hear the nonsense straight for the tap.
But can MAGA voters be reasoned with? If they believe that God literally created the world in under a week and that the 2020 election was stolen, what makes you think these people can accept empirical fact? For a rhetorical/Dialectical conversation to happen, both sides must be in stasis with each other. MAGA is simply incapable of reasoning their way out of positions they didn't reason their way into.
To add my own scattered thoughts (coming at this as a former republican who left the right during his first term)
1) the time to stop Trump from being normalized was a decade ago. Some people tried, but they failed. Simple fact is that Trump is here now, and even if he has a heart attack tomorrow he has left his mark on political discourse that will not simply go away.
2) this applies less to Trump (or high-level actors or pundits of any form), but if you only start treating people like they have agency when you want to judge them for something…then you have waited too long. That will just lead to your opinions being ignored.
This is sort of a weird point. Having spoken to some Republicans myself recently, I can attest that they are human, as I expected they would be. What they are not really is persuadable, at least by appeals to things like facts or morality. It becomes extremely apparent when talking with them about anything political that this not a matter of policy to them, but rather one of deep, personally felt identification with and allegiance to this one man, for whom they are willing to make endless excuses and double standards.
It is a cult. Otherwise good normal people can be cult members, although it turns them into worse people. And while the cult members are certainly mostly normal humans, I am not so sure the same can be said of the cult leader.
Even the way you describe him here, as capable of being “nudged”, “flattered”, “threatened”, sounds less like a grown man, never mind a politician, than a child or an animal. And that is weirdly how both his critics and even his supporters treat him: as some sort of wild beast, that no one has any real control over or reliable means of influencing. European leaders have been trying to make him see reason all year, only for him to change his mind out of nowhere the next day. His supporters just think he is a beast (or perhaps capricious god) that they believe is ultimately somehow on their side.
Because of this I think it is 100% reasonable to treat him like a force of nature, not really capable of being reasoned with, and I think anyone seriously approaching him already does so whether they admit it or not.
Agree on the overall point but I think you mischaracterised Rosenfield here. She wasn't talking about Trump voters, just Trump the man. And he is a force of nature in a lot of ways. Whether you like what he does or not, basically he'll do it anyway so no sense in getting worked up.
Weirdly enough she wrote an article in unherd about how people keep thinking she's a conservative, just because she will often criticise progressive groupthink in the arts.
Media libs and their audiences who ape them are actually on a subconscious level willfully misunderstanding MAGAs.
These libs publicly present themselves as being without an id and being pure superego, and when you do that enough times you start to believe the lie that you are indeed pure superego. This stems from the socialization of the highly educated, so devoted to impressing the teacher over a lifetime that they have convinced themselves they actually exist as the unattainable ideal prim student of their favorite teachers' dreams.
The MAGA epistemology is incredibly easy to understand, it is narrativizing rash base impulses as being morally righteous, like a pouty child might, and every human is capable of it and does it several times a day. But the elite media class viscerally avoid empathizing with this seductive tendency because it would force them to admit to themselves they have such a tendency, which feels threatening to their own self-image of being on a more enlightened plane.
Ironically, it is far easier to effectively message against racism, misogyny, homophobia, and even lookism if the virtue signaling coastal libs first acknowledged these phenomena arise from feelings also dormant within themselves. But for the sake of vain ego soothing, their condemnation of bigotries always comes out as some form of "I don't know how anyone could ____"
Idk, Sartre's description of Nazi supporting antisemites as trolls applies pretty damn well to MAGA.
Clearly if you demand any humanity from people, if you have any standards at all, you must present as unrelenting scolds toward Fascists.
And maybe the feelings that make a man into an evil intentioned troll AREN'T present in those troll's critics. Weird of you to assume that they are. It might be easier, as you say, to message to Fascists if you act as if you're the same as them, but what if you aren't? Do you think we can FAKE being racists for their sakes?
Why is scolding the only way you can imagine showing opposition? If the fascist’s goal is to intimidate and disconcert, as Sartre says, what is stopping you from intimidating and disconcerting them in turn? They do to you what they imagine would hurt them, they show you their weakness with every attempt at demonstrating strength, libs just get too flustered to parse that out.
You absolutely share the same impulses as any fascist, for instance, by demonstrating in-group/out-group cleaving in your very comment. They nurtured their tribalistic instincts more, built more rationalizations for it, maybe even were born with temperaments predisposing them to it, but you still have the faculties necessary to develop theory of mind of the fascist, it’s just too mentally taxing and threatening to your sense of self to let your mind go there.
"what is stopping you from intimidating and disconcerting them in turn?"
Well that will get you an instant ban on Reddit and probably from all published magazines.
This is fresh in my mind because last night I went beast mode on the wonderful people who love that Trump invaded Venezuela in order to "take back our oil" and to save the lives of MILLIONS of nonexistent Americans from nonexistent Fentanyl that never went through their country to the US!
And I got permanently banned.
I did an experiment once with my first Reddit account, if you suggest that Democrats may have to prepare to resist the equivalent to a Nazi occupation by ICE or the Marines after the insurrection act is invoked, be ready to hide people, save them, have safe houses, communications, weapons etc. Or that blue state governors should prepare in case they have to resist federal forces.
How fast does posting that a few times get you banned?
A day and a half.
Your case is not only anecdotal but shows that you are not good at disconcerting and intimidating because you are not crafty enough to evade bans. This is yet another one of those spots of liberal myopia Jeremiah should have addressed in his post, that liberals think trolling, dogwhistling, demagoguery, and populism are easy to do because they tap into baser instincts. It's like how the Academy Awards awards drama over comedy performances because comedy being more easily digestible must mean it takes less effort and ingenuity.
Intimidating and disconcerting are skills like any other that are underdeveloped in you, which is why you can only imagine attacking as going full maximalist and hysterical.
Also, I wasn't attempting to troll, dogwhistle, do demogoguery or populism.
I was expressing my outrage at moral monsters.
You mistook what someone would say online for Internet points as being what they would say aloud in person even with trusted parties. And you mistook the words you rashly conjure as the optimal words to say back, mistook not emotionally reacting as you becoming more inhumane rather than stronger against them.
You don't know the right wing trolls very well.
It may be that their leaders manage permanent accounts, but their followers just have a new account every week or month that gets banned every time.
You are flailing here, most right wing trolls' followers don't need to do that at all
Incredibly well-articulated description of how the progressive mind processes the conservative mind.
Notice how I've generalized your thesis even broader than you did? It's intentional: I've been on this earth enough decades now to see this not only be a media/MAGA dynamic, but honestly, simply an inability for those who see the world through a progressive lens to ever take a conservative seriously as a human being?
Why? Because conservatives do not see humans -- or life in general - the same way progressives see humans or life in general.
The differing perspectives on such fundamental things is so vast that those on the Left tend to see honest takes from the Right as either sub-human or inhumane.
And what makes DTJ and MAGA so interesting is that collectively, they're the first conservative movement in quite some time that feels energized by telling the Left exactly what they think about everything, and not sugar-coating it "just to get along."
Without the sugar-coating, progressively are literally speechless when they hear what the conservative mind *actually thinks* on a regular basis. It's truly alien to them; but alien in a very inhumane way.
I don't think it's a matter of "saying what you think without sugar coating" I think it's a matter of rejecting 100% of your humanity as you send innocent men to death and torture camps on suspicion of having a tattoo. It's having gestapo drag children out of cancer wards, its dragging grandmothers away to die in countries they've never seen before.
There ARE NO MORAL LIMITS. There is NOTHING that Trump could do which you'd reject, no matter if it's pure evil. You're not merely no longer moral actors, you're completely beyond all possible acceptability.
There is an ethnic cleansing going on, and everyone expects that democracy and law will be completely thrown out, and genocide started.
Clearly that's what the man running it all, Stephen Miller, wants.
And your "writers" - amazing moral failures like Curtis Yarvin have explicitly freaked out and called for an instant end to all legal institutions detailed in Constitution so that racist Fascists can't be held responsible for any crimes after Democrats win any future elections.
this statement assumes that All people who identify as Conservative are exactly the same, as are people who identify as Progressive, which just isn't true. I really don't think your beliefs about humans and life in general are point for point the same as Doug Wilson's, Nick Fuentes', or Peter Theil's. mine are not point for point the same as Nancy Pelosi's, Larry Flynt's, or George Soros'. The things that Maga are promoting are nothing like the Conservative values that Rush Limbaugh talked about during his first 15 years on air. I listened to his show so don't try to tell me I'm wrong. He talked endlessly about small, limited government; the unintended consequences of any law/regulation; government staying out of our lives. The only commonalities between Rush 1990s and Maga today are his constant demagoguery of 'Liberals', and conflation of Liberalism and moral decline. When I bring this up to any of my Republican friends, they just shrug and laugh. maybe you should actually talk to some progressives and ask them what their beliefs are concerning humans and life in general. Personally, I don't find my beliefs on humans and life in general to be that much different from my Republican friends and family, even though we disagree on policy.
Also I didn't say that conservatives are like liberals, I said that once you go evil troll, you never go back.
Sartre's trolling antisemites never woke up one morning and said "I was wrong, hurting innocent Jews was wrong. I can't support the Holocaust." In for a penny, in for a pound!
I listened to Rush Limbaugh's show for a week in the 90's
He was making money by selling tapes that lied that Bill Clinton was a mass murdering drug lord.
Every day he had a slogan and it was a doosey. I remember one day he argued that all pollution was a lie and "God wouldn't make a world that mankind could harm"... That's some crap that isn't from any religion in the world.
When Clinton was going to give a State of the Union address that focused on health care, he said, "just watch they will bring up people with some sob stories about being sick, but if you look into them, you'll find out that it's all a fraud. No one ever lost a house because they were sick!"
That was his slogan "No one ever lost a house because they were sick!"
Ignorant of the state of humanity, and evil.
And preying on people's stupidity to make them more evil.
Sounds like Trump today.
I'm not defending Limbaugh. You are absolutely correct that he said stuff like this. I'm just saying that he spent a lot of time promoting things, and his listeners repeated them endlessly, that Maga has completely turned against. It really doesn't appear to me that there is a stable 'Conservative' political philosophy, though obviously a lot of Republicans are finding themselves cast out as heretics for trying to remain consistent in, say, defending the Constitution (Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney), or promoting libertarian values (Rand Paul), all of which Rush Limbaugh claimed to support.
Yes, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Good exhibit A for my point.
Yes, because sending hundreds of innocent people to torture and death camps in despotic states isn't unacceptable in itself.
Thank you for demonstrating exactly what I said.
No moral limits in your case.
No humanity left at all.
I agree this is a problem, but it doesn't really point to a solution. I can understand the argument that democrats screwed up covid, immigration, "woke" stuff, and inflation. And Trump voters can sometimes understand how he also screwed up during covid, and is a buffoon and corrupt and tried to overthrow the government and only cares about himself and the wealthy. It's just a choice with what matters more to you. Somehow it's just as hard to change someone's mind about what issue is important than that they're picking the wrong side of the issue. In my experience talking to people, no amount of stupidity or corruption will ever outweigh even something as minor as trans people competing in women's sports. It's just too easy for people to pick one issue, no matter how small, and give it huge salience. And once it's a non-negotiable, nothing else matters.
It is all well and good to make the point that MAGA voters are human beings like us well-educated elites in our insular liberal bubble. But the fact remains that we are not going to change the minds of those who believe the 2020 election was stolen or that the world is 6,000 years old. For our purposes, these people are curiosities. Our concerns are moving out of our bubble enough to reach enough of the electorate to win elections and support an agenda that focuses on issues with broad public support. We have paid a significant price with the liberal hegemony in elite institutions and support for every progressive flavor of the month that came along. We need to appreciate how much resentment we have engendered and appreciate that the price we are now paying with this populist tyranny is the flip side of ridiculous slogans like “defund the police.” There is a voting majority to be had — even with all of the gerrymandering — if we use the elite education we’ve had the benefit of and concentrate on a popular agenda.
I think you are confusing a Liberal hegemony of elite institutions with a Progressive hegemony. Elite Institutions, like Harvard (where Adrian Vermeule teaches), Princeton (where Pete Hegseth graduated), Yale (where J. D. Vance graduated), and Duke (where Stephen Miller graduated), promoted a Liberal philosophy of exposing students to ideas without prejudice, and encouraging them to consider them with reason and logic. All of the Progressive policies at these Institutions were designed to train a managerial class capable of managing in a diverse workplace. Corporate America demanded these institutions to produce managers able to manage without prejudice against Women, Muslims, Hindus, Seiks, etc. They needed managers able to manage, and report to, women, move to Dubai and manage Arabs, move to India and manage Hindus, etc. The result was to force American Conservative Christians, and Racists, to either closet their beliefs entirely, or choose a less lucrative career. And almost every University in America responded to this demand the same way. That is the true source of resentment, and cynical politicians like Trump, Vance, Miller, and Hegseth are willing to exploit this resentment, and convince the resentful to support illiberal policies as ideas, and mentally innoculate them against the more popular political ideas, like state provided healthcare and education, labor protections, etc that are the bedrock of the anti- totalitarian movement you and I desire.