Trump is like a Rorschach test.
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Those who love him see see one thing—an outsider and a disruptor, a champion of the common man—while those who hate him see another thing altogether—a bully and a coward, a con man with a fourth grade vocabulary. And when these two groups talk, it’s as if they’re talking about different people.
Though it may sometimes look like this is a debate between conservatives and liberals—the sides do roughly, though not precisely, line up—I don’t think that quite explains it. If it were that clean a dichotomy, I would expect that it would be much easier to find common ground for discussion. Jonathan Haidt’s schema in The Righteous Mind would give at least a possible way forward.
Haidt argues that the major differences among political positions can be explained by different emphases on a handful of shared moral foundations. To superimpose my own metaphor onto Haidt’s idea, think of a guitar amp with dials representing different moral foundations—care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity, liberty. Progressives might have care and fairness set at an 8 or 9, with authority dialed at a much lower 2 or 3; libertarians might also have authority dialed in pretty low, but liberty cranked up to 11.
There are other issues at play in Haidt’s book—there are elephants, for example—but in his schema, there are at least moral grounds for each other’s perspectives, as well as the possibility of a shared vocabulary. Most important, there is room for mutual respect, even when we passionately hold different positions.
Haidt’s argument fits my own life experience, to a reasonable extent. I grew up seriously Christian, which means, as is often the case, that I grew up relatively conservative; as I moved away from my faith, I also moved away from that conservatism (correlation, not causation, I think). The metaphor of turning knobs on a moral guitar amp captures the political effects of my transition from belief to unbelief pretty well. I didn’t become a different person overnight; gradually, over time, I attenuated purity and authority and boosted fairness and (perhaps ironically) care.
That said, there is a point at which that metaphor breaks down (as all metaphors must). There is a sense in which I now live in a different world than I used to. Things that I once found obviously trueabout how the world works I now find incoherent, partly (perhaps mainly) because what used to count as evidence for me has changed. And things that are now perfectly clear to me are incoherent to, for example, those in my family who still live in that Christian world.
This concept—call it the different worlds theory—has become central to my attempts to make sense of our country’s (un)civil discourse, and to my attempts to understand how we can look at the same president and say such radically different things about him.
One partial explanation involves the sheer amount of data we have to process about Trump, much of it contradictory, and from a number of sources (The Donald himself, those around him, pundits, armchair politicians, friends): tough talk and grievances, tariffs and trade agreements, promises and retractions, hirings and firings, resignations and rumored resignations, tweetstorms (and the denial thereof) and press conferences, porn stars and pee tapes, conspiracy theories and fake news, dog-whistles and “plain speech”… the list goes on (and on), with positions and personalities shifting daily, sometimes hourly.
Normally, when we talk about a person, we have a sense that we are referring to a coherent entity. This is a fiction, of course—everyone is a bundle of competing drives, secrets, hypocrisies—but it’s a useful fiction. We build narratives about people, even those we know next to nothing about (e.g., public figures), which then congeal into the “person” we talk about. The more we know a person, the more information we have with which to build that narrative. And the amount of information about Trump means that there are a lot more things for people to choose from when assembling the narrative that becomes their “Trump.”
But that still doesn’t explain which data points will congeal into the various “Trumps” that we talk about—the “breath of fresh air,” or the “threat to Western democracy.” Enter the different worlds theory: the data points that we see depend on the world we inhabit.
Note that this is not about how we interpret data points; it’s about which data points we see as being data points in the first place. We say such different things because, based on the evidence we accept as valid, we understand different things to be true. In my world, Fox is faux, PolitiFact does important work that enables us to evaluate claims, and the New York Times, despite occasional missteps, is still the paper of record. In other worlds, however, Fox is trustworthy, PolitiFact is biased against Republicans, and the (failing) New York Times is just one among many fake news sites.
And this doesn’t even account for liars, or for political or religious leaders who abandon their principles merely for political advantage.
I am not saying that all worlds are equally valid, though I would say there is no neutral ground from which to adjudicate that question. There are just standards of evidence I might share with relatively like-minded people, who inhabit worlds similar to my own.
But in those situations where our worlds seem to be drifting farther and farther apart, how should I talk about Trump? After all, if our worlds really are so distant, I’m not going to change minds with my brilliant reasoning; in such situations, my evidence would be invalid, and my arguments would be seen as simply nonsense. (This is especially true on Facebook; as a friend has said, no one ever changed anyone’s mind on Facebook…)
My best answer, at this point, is to respond with curiosity: to ask questions that seek clarity, that seek genuinely to understand the assumptions or fears or needs behind the person’s claim. I don’t see any other response with the potential, however slight, to find some area where our worlds might touch, where we might actually talk about the same thing for a time.
Two quick notes, in closing:
First, curiosity is not easy to generate when someone says something that I find angering or offensive. I’ve been known to respond to such things with sarcasm or, worse, scorn. I’ve also been known simply to end the conversation, to metaphorically (or literally) just walk away. That’s to be expected, and it’s probably okay: speaking pragmatically, there is little difference in effect of blowing up or walking away, on the one hand, and engaging curiously, on the other. All conversations will eventually end, in most cases with people holding the same positions they started the conversation with. But if there is any chance for me to contribute to a change in our discourse, curiosity seems the best bet.
Second, I am not saying that everyone should do what I’m describing (though, if you do try it, or have already tried it, I’d be interested to hear any stories about how it went—you can write in the comments below, or send me a note). Sometimes people need to protect themselves from toxic people; for them, the best answer is to withdraw. And sometimes people need to fight, either for their own position (world), or in support of others; for them, the best answer is to resist. I would like our discourse to be more civil, but it doesn’t all have to be civil.