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This morning, the ran an op-ed by Matt Bai entitled, “I Understand Trump Voters. Do I Also Have To Empathize With Them?” Normally, I pass over op-eds from notorious leftists, as they offer nothing of substance beyond, in Bai’s own admission, the “sneering contempt” of the “educated American left.” But something about the headline caught my gullible eye.
Was this a genuine attempt to “understand the other”? Leftists do it for Islamic terrorists as part of their breakfast routine. Maybe, just maybe, a normally cutthroat political polemicist was taking a step back, engaging in some self-reflection, and trying to honestly find some common ground with the neighbor next door across town with the MAGA flag in the yard.
Nope. Should have listened to my instinct. Bai proved convincingly that he neither understands Trump voters nor has any empathy for them. I’ll save our readers time and aggravation and break down Bai’s argument:
1) In 2016, desperate rubes in flyover country could be forgiven for “embracing easy answers” and voting for Trump.
2) In 2016, these same voters passed over Hillary because they didn’t trust her.
3) In 2020, these voters may have genuinely “still believed” that Trump was protecting them against immigrants and China.
4) Trump supporters with advanced degrees don’t care about abortion or the border. They prioritize tax cuts above all else.
5) But now, after eight years of Trump’s “bigotry” and “reckless and malevolent” behavior, Trump supporters can’t hide behind ignorance. Their support of Trump is a reflection of their own moral degeneracy. It’s their “vengeful impulse” that drives them to “blow up the country” to teach “insufferable intellectuals a lesson.”
In this same article, he makes the laugh-out-loud claim that Harris voters are the ones who “keep the faith in moral leadership and the Constitution.” Oh, if I had the writing space.
But I digress. In a nutshell, Bai’s assertion seems to be this: We on the Left have always argued that Trump supporters are idiotic, selfish racists. I disagree. They’re not idiotic. They’re just selfish racists. A brave and daring concession for a leftist, to be sure, as his Inbox is no doubt filled with emails from angry readers demanding to know why he’s letting us ultra-MAGA semi-fascists off the hook so easily.
I tire of having to spell out our arguments—again and again and again—to leftists who won’t even read this article, much less with an open mind. But on the off-chance any of them accidentally pressed “click” on this article when they meant to scroll past it, here goes nothing:
1) We didn’t vote against Hillary because we didn’t trust her. We voted against her because she’s a power-hungry megalomaniac who despises us as “deplorables.
