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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
I’m going to listen to this again when I have finished rotating my shoe trees. That’s a higher priority to me than that bimbo is. Still, IIRC, she said the acting defense secretary stated in public that President Trump never issued the national guard order, while the secretary says that in closed testimony he stated exactly the opposite under oath. One is clearly lying, and given Cheney’s past history of lies, I believe the secretary.
That would make Cheney a special kind of liar, that is, lying about testimony given in a closed session. No different from her father, Shrub, and a dozen other GOPe fools.
I don’t think Gary or anyone has special status. Right now, fruit cakes status is small potatoes. A lot more is at stake in the coming year and elections…. Let Gary alone, and if you have a comment, ok. Spend your time on good research and post good stories. Let’s remember this forum is one of the few that allows free speech left, with minimal censorship.
Drew – I don’t agree. There’s a few that have HOM Syndrome (Hated Orange Man).- let them spew. Use your time wisely.
Miss Piggy is a delight – I don’t think Liz will win re-election – what does that tell you? Muppets have more sense?
There is always the possibility that if that nonsense is left unchallenged, some might believe it.
You have that many shoes??
I agree, which is why I never “throw” flags. However, there is a line no matter how expansive that line is, and it was exceeded by Mr. Robbins in at least one instance yesterday.
After that, I’m going to change the air in my tires. Both beat listening to Lyin’ Liz.
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EDIT: Now she’s going after Ginni Thomas. From townhall:
‘I Hope It Doesn’t Get to That’: Cheney Confirms Who the J6 Committee May Subpoena Next (townhall.com)
It’s tempting to say, “Make her pay!”, but assuming a House takeover in the fall, it’s better to let her fall into the obscurity she has earned.
True enough.
Somebody on the internet is wrong.
We don’t have to be concerned with “policing” the entire internet, to maybe have some interest in helping to “police” Ricochet.
Hoyacon, I took 10 minutes yesterday to try to find where I had said “murderous” mob to change it into “angry” mob. I couldn’t find it. I do listen you, and when you raise a serious issue, I resolve to correct it. If you can give me that comment number, I will make the correction.
So my Damascene conversion is this: render unto TPTB that which is theirs. I valiantly, stridently, brilliantly, tried to make Ricochet live up to its supposed conservatism for years. I had a lot of fun, argued with a lot of numbskulls and magnificent people, bent the rules and got away with it (coffee is for closers), pissed off the horses and frightened the Germans.
I was fighting the wrong fight.
That is most likely true in the case of a “nonsensical” post which starts out on the main feed, and is perceived–correctly or not–as the public face of Ricochet. In that case, and regardless of the topic, it’s probably wise to offer countervailing opinions.
I’m not so sure that it’s an effective technique on the member feed. It seems to me that strenuous, and sometimes nasty, argument on a post which is vanishingly unlikely to be promoted to the main feed simply feeds the beast, and levels-up the member to hitherto unimagined, and perhaps undeserved, heights of visibility and importance, both in his own mind and in ours. The experiment that’s never been tried is that of simply leaving such posts to languish and move down the page until they disappear, while trusting in the members of Ricochet to know what’s what.
This post, by this author, is an exception, as it has been upvoted by our fellow members to the main feed, probably because it does represent a departure in tone and content from most of his others. Good for him. I’m not sure it merits over 250 comments, though.
He isn’t Trump. At least that is the explanation I have gotten from every single one of my liberal colleagues.
And of course, at least in (what passes for) their minds, the reality of Biden can never be worse than their theories of Trump.