Ignorance, and different kinds of Trump voters

Waking up to Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, I shared to social media the comment:

Most of Trump’s voters weren’t asking for what’s coming.

But they will embrace it when it arrives.

A wise friend challenged me for acting as an apologist for Trump voters. But this is an indictment of them.

My wise friend mistook me as suggesting that Trump voters are not really mean-spirited bigots. I recognize that Americans — not just Trump voters — broadly are mean-spirited bigots. I recognize that bigotry is integral to support for Trump.

But. Anyone reading this is likely to have a hard time understanding how bogglingly ignorant & misinformed most ordinary Americans are about politics.

As I learned from Chris Hayes before he was famous:

The undecideds I spoke to didn’t seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief — not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.

I have done a little bit of political attitudes research for my day job. I can report from the field that it is not just “undecideds” who are that confused. Many people with strong party affiliation are in the dark. Left and right. College-educated and not.

I have had people ask who the Presidential candidates were. I have had people attributing Biden policies to Trump and vice versa. I have heard Democrats who hated Trump say that his first term proved that if he won it would not be that bad. They. Don’t. Know.

That ignorance is not a blessing. It does not make Trump voters less culpable. It does not protect us from what I see ahead. The same tendencies which produced that ignorance will make them rationalize every horror that comes. I have heard people say things that make my blood run cold.

It helps to break down Trump voters into three types, including two kinds of MAGAs.

Though with precious few exceptions MAGAs refuse to recognize themselves as fascists, that is what both types are. Fascists are driven by bigotry, drawn to the absurdities of fascist rhetoric which free them not just from moral responsibility but from having to think rationally at all.

Hard MAGAs have bloodlust. They do in fact dream of gunning down millions of people they hate et cetera. They know Haitian immigrants are not eating pet cats, but since Those People are inhuman monsters, they love the lie for getting at the “essential truth” that the suffering & death of Those People is a positive good in itself.

Soft MAGAs have doublethink. Horseshit to rationalize horrors — as good, as necessary, or as not actually horrible — works better the more preposterous it is because it distracts from facing the centrality of their bigotry. They “believe” that Haitian immigrants eating pet cats must be “true”: it “makes sense”, it justifies the fantasy they have of Getting Rid Of Those People. They don’t think about what that will require, and when the bloodshed does appear before them, these kinds of “beliefs” will justify their schadenfreude at the suffering & death.

Non-MAGA Trump voters do not think like fascists. They are bigots but it is not their central motivation in the same way. They prefer to look away from their own bigotry; the shame they feel about it compels them to deny they have it rather than to correct it as they should. They dislike the absurdities of MAGA, but see aligning with MAGA as “necessary” in the face of the Greater Evil of the nightmarish “radical left” Democratic Party. They have selected an information bubble which protects them from hearing the story about Haitian immigrants eating cats; Trump’s nonsense is irrelevant, they just have a thirdhand impression that he cares about the Important Problems facing Real Americans. If MAGA fascism guns down millions of people, they will deny that they knew and it will be half-true because they go out of their way to not know.

Both the bigotry and the support for horrors is equally monstrous in all three cases. Practically everyone in all three categories will help fascism build murder factories. I respect refusing to care about the machinery of their thinking and the degree to which they actively want what they will build, because the bottom line is the same.

But. If one wants to understand them — and there are instrumental reasons why one would — one has to see how only the hard MAGAs want murder factories as a positive good, while the dynamics are different for the others. My hand-wave-y guess is that about half of Trump voters are soft MAGAs, with non-MAGAs outnumbering hard MAGAs by a small margin.

From Milton Meyer’s book with the brilliant title They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45:

Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?

[⋯]

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

You have gone almost all the way yourself.

A taxonomy of fascist supporters

I fell into a rant on Bluesky related to this post. This is a slightly-refined capture of the thread. Time permitting, I may sharpen it up.

A word of justification

The first thing is that one’s moral responsibility for supporting fascism is the same regardless of what drives that support, because the impact is catastrophic.

But. There are distinctions which are analytically & strategically useful if we are careful and sophisticated. I do not consider it useful to ask who is “a fascist”, much less a “real” fascist. I do think it is useful to break down different forms of support for fascist movements.

Social justice advocacy culture has valuable technology for distinguishing the levels here.

When people get called out for doing something racist, sexist, et cetera, they often defend themselves by saying that it was “not my intention”. Social justice praxis wisely calls on us to focus on the impact, not the intent, because the popular understanding of homophobia, able-ism, et cetera as nothing other than personal bigotry —

• obscures how inequities are enacted by big social processes
• absolves individuals supporting those processes if they believe bigotry did not motivate them

So we must not excuse harmful actions by closely parsing the actor’s intent, but frankly I find it sloppy when social justice advocates try to correct for that by saying things like “intent doesn’t matter”. Understanding intentions can be valuable in identifying remedies.

So let’s break down different motivating intentions for fascist support.

Types

Open fascists

Some people are fascist ideologues who know that their ideology is fascism, and are forthright about it. These are easy to spot.

Their swastikas et cetera are a deliberate threat. Respond accordingly.

Crypto-fascists

Some people are fascist ideologues who know that their ideology is fascism, but conceal it. Richard Spencer is probably the most famous example.

Publicly expose them, so that people can respond accordingly.

Unaware fascists

Some people have a coherent fascist ideology but sincerely do not recognize that it is fascist. Fascism is bad, they are good, so what they want cannot be fascist! Most of the folks I call hard MAGAs above and most Christian nationalists fall into this category.

Publicly explain how their ideology is fascist, so that people can respond accordingly.

Confused fascist supporters

The soft MAGAs I describe above exemplify the many people who do not really have a coherent ideology, but enthusiastically support fascist movements because of a mix of legitimate frustrations, reasonable aspirations, bigotry, and ignorance.

These are tough to handle. They are every bit as dangerous as the types above. Even prior to attaching to a fascist movement, they wanted very bad things. They are threatening.

And: One need not care that one can bring some of them back from the brink through exacting, effortful pressure or persuasion, but it is worth knowing that brave, dedicated people can. Sometimes.

Misaligned fascist supporters

The non-MAGA Trump voters I named above are not really ideologically inclined to fascism, but they shrug and support a fascist movements as acceptable, and close enough to what they want. Again, one should not discount the danger of these people; they will cheerfully ignore or rationalize every possible fascist horror.

They can be peeled away with the same kind of determined effort as the confused ones, if one cares to try. Or, if we break the power of fascist movements, they will turn back into regular conservatives, which is bad enough but not as bad as fascism. That will be a long road in the US, alas.

Edgelords

Edgelords are driven by a general contrarianism which curdles into sadism. They are too nihilistic to have many commitments to substantive ideas, good or bad. They are drawn to fascism because it upsets people they don’t like, and they do not take the implications seriously. Edgelords have a toxic exaggeration of adolescents’ characteristic callousness, stubbornness, contrarianism, and playful experimentation with alternatives to the culture they were raised in, seeking out anything which inspires one to say, “ugh, that is f•cked up!” For them, the protean incoherence of fascist ideas is a feature, not a bug: they take sadistic joy in people sputtering in frustration “but you are not making sense!”

I suspect that a short season embracing a bit of the edgelord sensibility probably serves a healthy adolescent developmental purpose. But fascists see that as an opening for recruitment. Spaces like 4Chan have created a society-wide vulnerability. To be an edgelord as an adult, one needs to be pretty screwed up in the head. Alas, such people abound in American society.

Because edgelords are not really driven by ideas, they can be turned by making it No Fun Any More:

• emotional maturation
• dismissive disdain for their shenanigans
• consequences

Implications

I have to underline that taking on any of these patterns of support for fascism requires deep-seated bigotry. Without bigotry, fascism makes no sense, and one bounces off. Alas, that too abounds in American society.

Again: one’s moral responsibility for supporting fascism is the same regardless of what drives that support, because the impact is catastrophic.