“It would be great if they could just call Florida and Pennsylvania for Clinton early in the night so I can go to bed.”
-me 5:57 PM, November 8th, 2016
Like most everyone else pontificating about the election in days leading up, I thought November 8th was a forgone conclusion. Hillary Clinton had pulled together an effective fortress of states in the form of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado, and others. As a Vox article said a few days before the election, "the firewall states and the solidly Democratic states, together, would be enough to put Clinton over 270 electoral votes. So she’d win the presidency even if she loses every other contest that’s believed to be competitive — Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Nevada, Arizona, Iowa, and Maine’s second congressional district.”
This turned out to be a misconception. Put those firewall states in play and Trump had many routes to the Presidency. As opposed to threading the needle through a statistically improbable set of hail mary’s, he became a serious contender prepared to punch well above his assessed political weight. This shouldn’t be a surprise - it’s the type of odds-defying maneuvering Trump had done since entering the race, yet I still went to bed early Wednesday morning scratching my head at what the hell happened.
In search of answers
Following the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, I did what I always do when I don’t understand something. I read. A lot. Truth is always a patchwork quilt, tied together across multiple perspectives and viewpoints. Deep synthesis of complimentary and contradictory evidence is part of the process. The five pieces that stood out to me each highlighted a deep skepticism of the “others” in this country, and ultimately an unwillingness to listen.
- Vox: Smug American Liberalism
- Cracked: 6 Reasons for Trumps Rise that No One talks about
- Reddit: They Just Don’t Fucking Get it (wayback machine as the original was removed)
- Youtube: Trump's Election Will Be The Biggest "F**k You" Ever Recorded In Human History
- WSJ: Blue Feed, Red Feed
The common overture in these articles was the notion that those “others” were ruining America. In my newsfeed populated by top 25 college-educated friends and coworkers, the aftermath of Clinton’s defeat included much talk of “taking this country back,” “silencing the voices of hate,” and questioning “how could this happen.” Getting outside my curated feed, I dug into the perspectives of those who voted Trump. I didn’t find a dark well of seething vitriol that has marked the candidate’s rhetoric (though those exist), I found people who legitimately craved a new direction, feeling that they had been left behind by the liberal and global institutions ushered in through promises of prosperity in the 90’s and 2000’s.
"There's a storm coming, Mr Wayne"
As candidate Barrack Obama said in 2008: “… a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter.” Though this does not describe the 60+ million Americans who voted for Donald Trump, it does describe enough of them to cause the seismic shift in the electorate through several well-targeted states. It tells the tale of a large enough group who banded together with their votes and changed the course of human events. Regardless of your position, this must be noted.
What became immediately clear is we as a society have an empathy problem. When a group cries out in pain, today's gut reaction is to either deny its existence or belittle its significance. We downplay screams with our own troubles as though human suffering is a zero sum game. Rather than understand the deep causes, we try to invalidate the symptoms. It’s analogous to a crooked doctor throwing ice packs on a patient burning up from a fever, childish in reasoning and dangerous in execution.
I’m guilty of this. You are too. And we see this across every issue, a sense of “other-dom” taking hold the moment we hear a viewpoint outside the bounds by which we constructed our own argument. We cite sources, we point to studies, we dismiss and look for their contradictions in real-time. There is a time and a place for this, but it’s only after answering the question, “why is this person saying this? In a time in history where the opportunity cost of any human action is nearly infinite, why has this person decided to spend their time talking about this?” Effective listening requires not just hearing what is being said, but getting to the heart of why.
The irony is that many of my peers work in industries where this skill is absolutely paramount. In business, deep customer research is required to execute a successful strategy. In software, the human-centered design movement has taught us not to just take people at their word, but get to root causes of their pain points. In investment industries, looking beneath the trends, beneath the numbers, and seeing what others don’t see is the key to chasing disproportionate yields. Doctors learning bedside manner attest that listening and studying their patients' speech, their habits, and their past will yield the insights necessary to effectively treat ailments. But we check these skills at the door once we step out of our day jobs and into our roles as citizens of the republic.
Why?
Talking heads and hardened hearts
One is the obvious balkanization of our media sources. As the Wall Street Journal’s Blue Feed, Red Feed points out, these algorithmically curated sources are primed to serve up information that reinforces our predispositions rather than challenge them. Barry Melton on Hacker News reacted by writing, “wow… most of what I'm seeing is just ugly, ugly headlines, and in both the red and blue columns. I don't know what I did right in my life that these headlines aren't currently the kind that I'm seeing in my news and Facebook feeds, but thank heavens I did it. It's really no wonder that people are mad about things -- these headlines are basically begging them to be.” Ryan Holiday has noted for years that the virality of outrage makes it easy to pander to the most extreme sides of an argument. No one shares the reasonable, level-headed, and measured analysis of a current event when you can pass along the dumpster-fire, clickbait articles spawned in the nether of the web. In similar fashion, Bill Burr makes fun of people who get “professionally outraged” whenever a new scandal breaks out and swallows up a few celebrity casualties.
Another factor is pure laziness in understanding the context of an opposing argument. It’s much easier and convenient to write others off as idiots and fools than to consider the complex environment in which they arrived at their position. Humans are products of the factors around us - stick any of us in a dying steel town or an underfunded, inner-city school system and our tune would change significantly. Instead of declaring the messenger faulty on arrival, we should perhaps first consider the place from which the message came. While this does not excuse bigotry, hatred, or demagoguery; we must now contend with the reality that it is dangerous to simply tune out these messages without closer inspection. Dig beneath the surface and I suspect we begin to find legitimate fears that form a shared ground for discussion, even if they begin in dubious pretenses.
Which arrives at a final point that I find most troubling - exacerbated by the above two items - a lack of mercy and forgiveness in our societal discussions. Croation theologian Miroslav Volf reflected on the ethnic cleansing and other horrors perpetrated in the Yugoslav wars in his 1996 book Exclusion and Embrace. He points out the cycle of human injustice cannot be stopped without the introduction of forgiveness; otherwise the cyclicality of rage and score-settling consumes a people. He goes on to state
"If I say, 'I forgive you,' I have implicitly said you have done something wrong to me. But what forgiveness is at its heart is both saying that justice has been violated and not letting that violation count against the offender."
We should not overlook evil. But evil is perpetuated when vengeance makes its way into the public discourse. If neither side finds the ability to acknowledge an error, forgive, and forge a common path forward, our discussions become regressive as we compare ledgers, barreling further and further into the past. This is not easy. And in its purest form it can appear insane to bridge these gaps - as one twitter user points out:
In the end I worry about what this electoral outcome spells for our country, because both the best case and worst case scenarios signal failures of our country to think long-term about the character and welfare of its people.
Our best case scenario is President Trump is a capable commander-in-chief, and succeeds in delivering a better life for the people of this country, achieving his stated mission in returning the Federal government to the forgotten. In his success, he will have taught a generation of Americans that lying, bullying, intimidating, and abdicating any sense of public decency is an effective means of achieving one’s goals. No longer will we hope that our children could grow up “to one day be president” if it requires them to become monsters in the process, inciting the worst in us to justify the ends.
Our worst case scenario is more dreadful. That the “the dispossessed” who ushered in the age of Trumpism will eventually realize they have been sold a bridge (or wall in this case) and nothing will improve. That for over the course of a decade these individuals voted for change and relief, realizing eventually that it never will come. In their deepest despair what will they do? Donald Trump was the ultimate brick they could throw into the Ivory Towers that have forgotten them - if he fails to deliver I fear where that agony may take us next.
We're in this together
The 21st century carries many perils through which we as a country must collectively navigate. We stand to lose upwards of 10 million jobs as driverless vehicles become the norm over the next few decades. The United States spends a fraction of what other OECD countries do in job retraining programs, leaving displaced workers with few options in their darkest hour. America’s mass incarceration policies disproportionately affect lower income families while draining government coffers to the tune of $80 billion per year - all with little to show in terms of societal benefit. Tackling these grave challenges will require us to empathize and understand people who are much different than us. People we as a society have shown we would prefer to never contemplate.
Trump’s election is a wakeup call for every American. There is tremendous potential for our country to realize the outsized benefits of technological innovation, smart policy-making, and participation in the international community. But these benefits can only be reaped if we also accept the reality that progress has losers, and those losers have a voice and they have a vote. For too long we have remained comfortable with writing off opposing opinions as nonsense. But people don’t scream for no reason, they don’t mobilize for recreation. We are dealing with a hurting nation that has dealt itself a tremendous blow founded in writing off the “others” as fanatics or fools. And boy, that didn’t work out too well.
Now is the time to exercise prudence in our roles as citizens. To be mindful of the color of firehose through which we drink our news, to consider not just the "what" but also the "why" of those we disagree with, and to have enough humility to forgive those who are wrong in our eyes. The wage of inaction on these fronts is Trump, and the world watches with bated breath to see where he will take us. No matter how painful, it’s high time we began listening to one another, lest we continue to erode the fabric of our democracy through the escalating volume of our own echo chambers.
