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Bret Stephens: ‘I Was Wrong About Trump Voters’
Thursday, there was a remarkable sight on the New York Times Opinion Page. Eight different columnists remark on how they were wrong about different issues. Paul Krugman admits that he was wrong about inflation. Thomas Friedman admits that he was wrong about the extent of Chinese censorship. Gail Collins admits that she was wrong about Mitt Romney. And Brett Stephens admits that he was wrong about Trump voters. It is a great column and can be found here. While the New York Times columns are behind a paywall, I think that you can read ten columns a month for free. This should be one of them.
Bret Stephens was a great columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Reportedly he left the Journal after concluding that they were being too easy on Trump, and he joined the New York Times. I ended my subscription to the Wall Street Journal about the same time, for about the same reason. So, Stephens and I have a long history of antipathy towards Trump. However, he admits that he has been wrong about Trump voters, and I generally think that I have been too. Stephen’s column begins, “The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit — yes, I know, it’s a crowded field — was the first line I ever wrote about the man who would become the 45th president: ‘If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.’”
I agree. What a way to make and influence people. Stephens continues,
This opening salvo, from August 2015, was the first in what would become dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself. I regret almost nothing of what I said about the man and his close minions. But the broad swipe at his voters caricatured them and blinkered me.
It also probably did more to help than hinder Trump’s candidacy. Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds.
I agree with Stephens. This is so well stated. Stephens then states,
… Though I had spent the years of Barack Obama’s presidency denouncing his policies, my objections were more abstract than personal. I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called ‘the protected.’ My family lived in a safe and pleasant neighborhood. Our kids went to an excellent public school. I was well paid, fully insured, insulated against life’s harsh edges.
Trump’s appeal, according to Noonan, was largely to people she called ‘the unprotected.’ Their neighborhoods weren’t so safe and pleasant. Their schools weren’t so excellent. Their livelihoods weren’t so secure. Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways.
Ouch. I am part of the ‘protected class.’ I live in my beautiful mountain and university town with a population of only 100,000 with all of the amenities of a city five times as large. I live in a nice neighborhood with nonexistent crime, surrounded by a golf course. I have Medicare for health insurance. I am my own boss and run my office as I see fit. My judges know and like me. Life is pretty good for me.
Stephens continues,
It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists —clinging, in Obama’s notorious 2008 phrase, to ‘guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.’
I remember having lunch with a major Democrat figure who told me that he was convinced that opposition to Obama was primarily racist. Grrrr.
Then Stephens says,
Trump voters had a powerful case to make that they had been thrice betrayed by the nation’s elites. First, after 9/11, when they had borne much of the brunt of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see Washington fumble and then abandon the efforts. Second, after the financial crisis of 2008, when so many were being laid off, even as the financial class was being bailed out. Third, in the post-crisis recovery, in which years of ultralow interest rates were a bonanza for those with investable assets and brutal for those without.
Oh, and then came the great American cultural revolution of the 2010s, in which traditional practices and beliefs — regarding same-sex marriage, sex-segregated bathrooms, personal pronouns, meritocratic ideals, race-blind rules, reverence for patriotic symbols, the rules of romance, the presumption of innocence and the distinction between equality of opportunity and outcome — became, more and more, not just passé, but taboo.
It’s one thing for social mores to evolve over time, aided by respect for differences of opinion. It’s another for them to be abruptly imposed by one side on another, with little democratic input but a great deal of moral bullying.
I share this anger about the above things. But again, I am protected. For better or worse, lawyers are pretty protected. The best book about the evils of the transgenderism, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, was written by a lawyer with strong First Amendment protections. If a Psychologist or Counselor were to have written this book, they would be facing an ethics charge by their licensing board. But the State Bar would laugh at such an ethics charge.
Stephens then states,
For every in-your-face MAGA warrior there were plenty of ambivalent Trump supporters, doubtful of his ability and dismayed by his manner, who were willing to take their chances on him because he had the nerve to defy deeply flawed conventional pieties.
I have faced my share of MAGA warriors. But far more Trump voters are ambivalent, doubtful, and dismayed by Trump than I give them credit.
Then Stephens hits home with this paragraph:
Nor were they impressed by Trump critics who had their own penchant for hypocrisy and outright slander. To this day, precious few anti-Trumpers have been honest with themselves about the elaborate hoax — there’s just no other word for it — that was the Steele dossier and all the bogus allegations, credulously parroted in the mainstream media, that flowed from it.
Ouch. Oh, all the hours I wasted watching MSNBC’s evening shows! All of the energy that I wasted hoping that Trump would be caught! I was not until I read Bill Barr’s book One Damn Thing After Another that I realized that I had been wrong and wrote about it here.
The book is very well done. And it changed my mind. After the Mueller Report came out, I posted both the Introduction and Executive Summary on Collusion and Obstruction. (See here.) Barr does a deep dive into the Mueller Report and how Mueller both over-read and under-read his remit. My mind had been marinated in the MSNBC and my own TDS. But now reading Barr’s account led me to the conclusion that the Mueller investigation was a search for not all that much, and was a general waste of time and money. I was stunned. But I changed my mind.
To the credit of my fellow Ricochetti, there was almost no “I told you so.” Incredible.
Stephens ends his piece,
… I would also approach these [Trump] voters in a much different spirit than I did the last time. ‘A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall,’ noted Abraham Lincoln early in his political career. ‘If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.’ Words to live by, particularly for those of us in the business of persuasion.
Words to live by when posting and commenting at Ricochet.
Published in General
Nope. Not true.
Get the impossible to forget part. None of us can forget this very unusual guy. What is to forgive? Less regulation? Justice Barret? Because he ran his mouth on Jan. 6 and Buffalo guy wondered around the capitol building? WTF?
It’s impossible to do anything about this.
This is an era where everybody needs to say something original about public policy etc.
Why are populism and socialism such an issue right now?
Wrong again, boyo. It’s absolutely true. He was the first Republican I saw a reason to vote FOR instead of being an option to allow me to vote AGAINST the Demo-rat. BTW, I didn’t bother to vote in 2016. I’ll vote for him again in 2024 if: 1) he’s the nominee, 2) I live that long.
Gary, since you have so much money to throw around, you should subscribe to the level that has transcripts. Figure out what Ronald Ragan would say about what they are saying.
https://hiddenforces.io
I suspect it was only temporary. He’s probably over it already.
But we’re not media figures etc, not “experts.”
I wouldn’t hold my breath though, because he’s posted at least one fairly similar thing in the past, and then soon after reverted back to “insurrection!” and “overthrow the government!” etc.
Maybe YOU’RE not (debatable), but THEY are.
Why bother? He already ignored Reagan’s advice/warning about Biden.
Biden seems to be doing his best to crush me economically and enslave me. The Progressives & Biden sure seem like they hate me. I am not wealthy enough that I can afford the Democrats.
All that has happened is that the same group of well-heeled grifters has moved on from Russia to January 6th.
I had no idea…
Yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast rips the Krugman and Collins apologies (or, rather, “apologies”). Geraghty and Corombus were not impressed.
Just a nit:
I am certain this is not true. I have tried the experiment: vinegar is FAR more effective at catching flies than is honey.
Why do we keep senselessly and thoughtlessly repeating things that have been empirically disproven?!
How can we hope to get the big things right when we gloss over the small stuff?
Not true for you, as a member of the aforementioned protected class.
Even that misses the big point: people aren’t flies.
A superb point!! Thank you.
That’s because the thoughts aren’t his own. If he finds a Gary Approved “Expert” arguing differently, he accepts their position uncritically. He has no convictions at all except “Trump is Very Very Bad.”
Yes! I have a jar of old wine, apple cider vinegar, and old lemonade sitting out and the only one with flies is the vinegar.
Sincere question–isn’t the aphorism that you attract more flies with honey than vinegar? The problem with the honey is that it doesn’t kill the flies (at least that’s my hypothesis). I seem to recall that at picnics, the flies were pretty well attracted to the fruit.
But rotting flesh is what really attracts flies…not sure how that fits into the conversation though.
**Edit–I’m not contesting the Lincoln quotation–just commenting on the one I regularly hear people use.
and their “luxury beliefs.”
Absolutely. One of the bases for my war on the pundit class.
Nah, he’s still going to side with the elitists in the end.
Might explain Biden’s support?
Perhaps you missed the January 6th hearings last night and beforehand. Trump set up the riot, and refused for 187 minutes to tell the rioters to go home. Once he did, the riot stopped.
Moderator Note:
Name calling doesn’t further the conversation.[redacted]
I think that that was Bret Stephens’ point. The protected class will be all right, even with the disaster of Biden.
I can’t believe that long-debunked lie is still being spread by the evil January 6th Committee.