So, I know I’m not the first one to have this thought, but I want to flesh it out in words in order to think through it – and I thought y’all might like to reflect on it too.
I think a lot of the way that Trump rose to popularity – and how he will maintain it even as he violates every promise, explicit and implicit, he made to voters – comes from the fact that his supporters view politics as a game rather than as a unique avenue with a logic unto itself.
Before getting into the meat, I want to make something clear: this is not some “hurr durr, Trump supporters are dumb!” spiel. I’m from Kansas, I love many Trump supporters dearly, and I don’t want anyone to take this as some universal refusal to listen to what they say – in fact, that’s the opposite of the point I’m trying to make. What I hope to convey is that the politics-as-game theory explains a VAST majority of the Trump phenomenon.
To get started, I’ll establish some definitions:
Politics is the means of mediating inevitable disagreement over an infinite number of issues between diverse communities via contingent and revisable procedures. Said another way, politics is just a name for the ways we – members of heterogeneous societies – create procedures to address an uncountable number of problems without requiring unanimity, under the assumption that those procedures are not permanent; disagreement over politics itself is a structural feature of politics.
Games employ fixed rules aimed at producing competitive equity for participants – individuals or teams – to motivate creative solutions to fixed goals. In other words, a game is defined by unchanging rules designed to guarantee the participants relatively equal starting points in order to compare their skills in completing some specific objective; the competitiveness only endures for the duration of the game.
Note that the difference is not the level of importance: some politics is a joke and some games are deadly serious. The only difference, if we exclude the mandatory/inevitable aspect of politics, is that games have rules while politics has procedures. In politics, neither the process nor the product is fixed; disagreement over the nature of politics is what makes politics, politics. In games, on the other hand, only the outcome is contingent; participants are not required to consider other participants’ equity on any level deeper than skill since – by definition – games are designed to be repeatable, with the same starting conditions.
In short, I think Trump voters err when they mistake the latter for the former in the realm of politics. Knowing these folks, lots of them are well-meaning people who reason validly from unsound premises. So often, we on the left talk about them as though they’re stupid. They’re not dumb – they just believe incorrect things, which is different. And that difference should matter to us on the left at both a strategic and personal level, since disentangling those two is likely to be the basis of coalition-building over the next four years.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Trump voters view politics as a sport – specifically, I think the implication goes, a team sport like football. And that’s certainly not wrong; consider the “You lost, get over it” rhetoric or the number of people (including ones I know personally) who said “I hate Trump, but I’ve voted R all my life.” And I could easily make the case that, too often, who is on the “team” is defined racially via dog whistles that even their users might not believe are racialized – but that’s for a different post.
It is certainly the case that, in the rural and industrial Midwest, implicit unanimity is a core social convention. I mean, think of how many times we’ve all heard “It’s time to unify this country under Trump” or “If you don’t like it, get out!” since the election. Since they live in areas where the social consensus is very heavily Trump-leaning, to them that statement means “It’s time I no longer have to think about politics because I’ll know how everyone I interact with feels about the situation implicitly”.
Which gets me to my major point: the problem isn’t that Trump supporters have a disagreeable model of politics. The problem is that – lacking a complex, nuanced understanding of precisely what politics entails – they have grafted onto it the (ad-hoc) trappings of games.
Sure, sometimes they use team-based rhetoric, but in my opinion, they’re really expressing a disdain for having to discuss the procedural aspects of government because they feel excluded when discussing those technical details. Think of how many talk about "liberal elites" who have "forgotten" about midwestern blue collar workers. Their lives are just filled with things – complicated, important things to them – that are more worthy of their study and attention than politics. Which is fine. Like, politics is my thing but it doesn’t have to be everyone’s thing.
However, there is a slight problem from a political standpoint: our votes count equally (or roughly equally – you know, Electoral College). So my 70% of attention paid to politics counts just as much as their 5%. Again – not necessarily a bad thing, since a political system left only to the hyper-interested would be much more filled with graft and logrolling than the one we have now.
The problem, as I said above, comes from their belief that politics has rules rather than procedures – which entails a denial of the complex historical reasons motivating certain political norms (like releasing a candidates' taxes, for example). To them, the same input should produce the same output, since rules never change. “I put in my R vote and I get a fiscal conservative who believes in small government”; “I vote for this incumbent Senator and he keep those gays/minorities/women from getting too uppity”.
Like most things in their life, politics to these folks is just another inconvenient regularity. Just like football season. Just like the harvest. Just like taxes.
And then Barack Obama got elected. And some of them even voted for him, under the assumptions that (1) he was one of the “good” black people who “worked hard” to “earn” getting where he is (which he did, but they mean something specific by this, detailed below), and (2) that they wouldn’t have to think about all of this “racism” stuff anymore, since a black man in the highest office means ‘post-racial’ to them.
And then, in the intervening 8 years, their jobs were cut by corporations who aggressively outsourced and downsized. But they had ‘done everything right’! They had worked hard their whole lives in the same company! To them, the difference wasn’t the advancement of automation technology or the capitalist alienation of wage-labor or the greed of their employers or the eastward trend of economics in general – it was the black man in the White House and all of his hokey-dokey talk about “Black Lives Matter”. Oh! And these two decade-old trade deals, too!
In short, they looked at the product and assumed the process based on what they were told about a process that they only care to discuss once every four years.
And, if you believe the things they believe, you would too. They reasoned logically from their premises – everything was fine in my neck of the woods until approximately 8 years ago – to the conclusion that the person in power for the last 8 years must be responsible for all of it. And since, in line with the team sports theory, they listened to the explanations their ‘teammates’ offered as to why they ‘lost’, their inferences were backed up every day by every person they talked to.
In my mind, what changed for these folks in the last 8 years was the process, which changed the product. The process of manufacturing reached a tipping point where their jobs were too costly to sustain. The process of politics evolved to encompass issues of sexuality and structural racism and misogyny and so forth.
They lost their hegemonic position in processes they never knew were going on. They never knew that their American-based manufacturing jobs were conveniences afforded to them by corporations who would outsource the second it became profitable – to them, something changed such that the company they had ‘been loyal to their whole life’ suddenly pink-slipped them. They never knew racism was a problem – but they sure know lots of cops – so Black Lives Matter and policing reform bills were jarring confrontations with a reality they have never experienced.
Consider this: Trump voters, on average, make more than Clinton voters (though the distribution is somewhat bimodal, since Trump’s two contingents were “working class whites” and “rich white assholes”) but have a lower level of degreed education. To me, that means these are people to whom success was simply a product of doing the quote-unquote “right” things – they graduated high school, went to work at the mill/factory/farm/whatever, and got promoted to some management position at a time where it was possible to hold management positions at large(r) companies without a college degree.
In other words, they never had to focus on procedure – their life was crafted for them by the social conventions in their communities, like in my town where “everyone” either farms after high school or gets a job with one of the big manufacturing companies in the neighboring town. All they’ve ever had to do was focus on product; to them, “hard work” means “do the right (manual labor-y) things when I’m told to in order to produce the correct result”. Discussing process for any non-product-based reason is useless: things that work just work, things that don’t work just don’t work.
So here’s the gist: we are about to undergo a period of American history where the processes of America’s republican system of government will be challenged in ways not seen since the 19th century. Our job should be convincing Trump supporters that good governance not only matters to them, but that learning about the specific details of government process is the only way to ensure good governance – the kind that benefits them just as much as minorities, women, LGBT folks. And we have to do it in ways that emphasize their subtle misunderstandings without assuming they are stupid or demeaning to them. We have to treat them like intelligent, competent adults who unfortunately happen to believe a few untrue things.
In short, we have to talk about the ways in which our fates are inextricably linked by mutual responsibility for political compassion.
ここには何もないようです