Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
Harsh, but maybe true. I just feel sorry for people dim-witted enough to believe that nonsense.
I appreciate that you feel that way.
However, while the facts exonerated Trump with Russia, the facts are clearly to the contrary about January 6th.
But I can appreciate someone thinking, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
I found out about the Bret Stephens’ “What I got wrong” from yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch.
…or a RINO that doesn’t get it.
You continue to repeat the lies of the anti-Trump (anti-gOp) media. A willing suspension of disbelief.
It would be easier to feel sorry for them if they didn’t get to inflict their dim-ness on others through voting.
FTFY.
Never forget that REPUBLICAN MEMBERS OF CONGRESS are spreading this lie.
The voters were finally able to recognize the GOPe were as much their enemies as the Demo-rats. That’s why Trump had to be destroyed. My 2020 vote for The Orange One was a much a vote against the GOPe as it was an ordinary vote against the Demos.
and songs from the same album: KCBS reported and played yesterday an audio segment of Kinzinger(sp?) saying that more was coming in September. These sacks of used food have no other purpose that to make certain Trump can’t run for prez again.
So would you be willing to agree on DeSantis, which is Trump policies without Trump himself? Will you take that compromise?
Especially when the NeverTrump and NeverAgainTrump vote will likely be 20% of the GOP, instead of only 10% which will likely doom Trump?
DeSantis is not my first choice, Hogan is. But I am willing to compromise. Are you?
Larry Hogan has a less than zero percent chance of ever winning the Republican Primary, let alone winning a national election as a Republican.
He’d do better running as a Democrat.
Feel free to elaborate on how Hogan would improve the world.
I have said many times that I will vote for DeSantis if he runs. I’ve sent money to his re-election campaign even though I don’t vote in Florida because I want him to be visible for 2028 if he doesn’t run in 2024. I will NOT vote for a slug like Hogan.
TBH I did not expect to see Blago on this thread. What is he up to now?
I understand your point of view. Are you wiling to compromise on DeSantis?
I’ve never heard of No. 6 – wow. Maybe some editor should have decided that this was not newsworthy?
Martin O’Malley may have a different opinion :)
And I can’t believe we can’t call people out for continuing to propagate it. Should I flag him for continuing to perpetuate lies?
Just for the record, when you hear a libertarian lawyer explain it, you genuinely wonder if he did anything wrong.
Ricochet management totally believes it, too, so there’s no point.
The First Myth of Ricochet Management is that it exists.
I assume the 187 minute delay relates to Trump not taking official action to respond to the security situation on Capitol Hill.
By not reopening schools, which is his signature “achievement,” with the possible exception of rejecting a pro-life stance? Hogan has a role in blue Maryland because he’s not a whacked out liberal, but anyone who would support him for Prez is not a conservative.
Gary, do you know anybody semi-known that makes your emphasis about electorate analysis over public policy?
That’s goal post moving. The initial claim was that Trump didn’t attempt to de-escalate. That was a bald faced lie.
But I suspect that there was an actual coup and mutiny happening behind the scenes given the false flag activities going on during the speech and the fact Pence was directing things after the Capitol was breached.
It looks way more like Trump’s authority was removed from him during his rally and the staged “ insurrection” was used to cover it up.
While the event was not necessarily newsworthy, the dishonest way the media covered it WAS newsworthy
Hey mods, repeating lies after being corrected doesn’t further conversation, either. At least my comment was true.
Do we know what the Capitol Police and the DC Police were doing for these 187 minutes? Is this all about what the President didn’t say during this period? What official action can you imagine the President could have taken that would have materialized quicker than what local police could do? You think he should have sent his Secret Service Detail?