How to force Donald Trump voters away from the dark side

Donald Trump voters have gotten an unusual amount of attention this election. On one level, it's to be expected, because Trump is such a bizarre candidate. But given his bigotry and incompetence, one sadly popular approach has been to treat his supporters like charity cases. For example, this recent Washington Post article called for more "empathy" for Trump voters — and it quickly created a deluge of snarking from liberals irritated at racists being treated with kid gloves.

This is a shame. Because while Trump supporters are very good at drawing media attention, journalists often miss the forest for the trees. Few have earnestly paid attention to Trump voters' needs — not what they say they want, but what they actually need. Namely, to be stripped of racist attitudes.

What do I mean?

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First, I think it's important to make a distinction between sympathy, defined as earnest fellow feeling for someone else; and empathy, defined as an attempt to understand another person in detail, regardless of their moral character.

To understand sympathy, you should read this profile of a number of working-class black Americans transfixed with horror over the election. The palpable and entirely rational fear they have of a Trump presidency is simply heartbreaking. Their motives are also extremely obvious, which probably is part of the reason they have gotten less attention from the press. Like any demographic who is being systematically disenfranchised by one party, they are naturally ironclad devotees of the other party, despite the fact that they don't have all that much in the way of positive benefits to show for it over the last 20 years.

Contrast that idea with Robert McNamara's notion of empathy. In the documentary The Fog of War, he describes how the diplomat Tommy Thompson helped defuse the Cuban missile crisis. Thompson had actually lived with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev for some time. When the Kennedy administration got two cables during the crisis, one diplomatic and one aggressive, Thompson advised Kennedy to respond to the softer message, predicting that Khrushchev would accept it — and he was right.

McNamara concludes that this sort of empathy is crucial to wise dealings with an enemy: "We must try to put ourselves inside their skin, and look at us through their eyes, just to understand the thoughts that lie behind their decisions and their actions." If you believe, as I do, that Trumpism is a dangerous development in American politics, this sort of empathy is extremely important, in a coldly tactical sense at the very least.

So what to do? Many liberals argue that racism is basically racists' primary motivator. In other words, it's not just the means with which they're conned into supporting conservative policy that undermines the fortunes of both black people and themselves, it's "a sensible, if deeply immoral, choice," to quote Ta-Nehisi Coates.

There is something to this. But I don't think it's the end of the story — because, for one, racism can cause actual physical harm to its adherents. For instance, racism-fueled politics is a big reason why the American welfare state is so weak, which is in turn a big reason why poor white life expectancy is declining.

Physical health aside, one can also argue that racist beliefs are a sort of mental disease — indeed, some even argue that it's possible to sympathize with white racists because of this. James Baldwin, in the process of wiping the floor with William F. Buckley in a debate, once articulated this perspective. Speaking of lower-class white Southerners, he said:

If racism is an immutable fact of life, there is basically nothing to be done about Trumpism besides hoping the Obama coalition continues to provide national victories. But I believe it is possible to erode racist attitudes over time, and that a major factor fueling the open bigotry of Trump is the lousy economic performance of the Obama years.

One major future task, therefore, for the Democratic coalition is forcing white racists onto a higher moral plane whether they like it or not, with the stick of federal laws and social shaming on one hand and the carrot of full employment, mass unionization, and social democracy on the other.

I believe that they — or perhaps their children — will grudgingly appreciate it in the end.