Stop Maligning Trump Voters
Stop Generalizing about Trump Voters
In 2020, it has become regrettably common to make generalizations about Trump voters — they are racists, cruel, lazy, and whatever other adjectives the writer or speaker chooses to employ. Such persons are treating Trump voters in ways that would never treat voters for other candidates.
Bill Clinton has been credibly accused of rape, yet it is not common to accuse male Clinton supporters of misogyny and complicity in sexual assault. George W. Bush won reelection in 2004 after it had become painfully clear that the Iraq war had been based on lies and was being bungled horribly. Yet, I have never heard anyone accuse Bush voters as a group of being war mongers. Hillary Clinton supported both the Iraq war and the disastrous Libya intervention, yet no one generalizes about her voters on the basis of these decisions. Both Clinton and Biden supported the 1994 crime bill which imprisoned many persons of color for cruelly long periods of time and did so using “super predator” rhetoric which had a racist ring to it. Yet no one accuses Clinton and Biden supporters of being racists.
Rather, we avoid assuming that their supporters agreed with these positions and conclude that voters chose candidates on the basis of self-interest.
Why are Trump voters not given the same benefit of the doubt? After all, Trump has taken serious positions on foreign policy — against no-end foreign wars and — on trade — his voters may be wrong that NAFTA is the cause of their economic woes but being wrong is not racist. Others vote for him because they are conservative Christians and pro-life.
They believe that issues of war and peace, jobs, and their Christian faith matter more to them than racism. The demand, then, is not that voters not be racist but that they elevate anti-racism to the level of the most important issue there is. If you had lost a child in the Iraq war, what would you think is the most important issue?
An analysis of Trump’s rally crowds and how they respond to him supports this point. In the days leading up to the 2020 election, he decried wars that waste American blood and treasure, words that were greeted with sustained applause by his audiences.
Research by Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen shows that low and working class Americans are more likely to be injured in combat than soldiers from wealthier famzilies. Other research by the same men shows that those Obama-to-Trump states were those with high levels of casualties in the Iraq war.
Why should people who experience the hardships of war more than others vote for inept war hawks like Clinton and Biden? Why shouldn’t they vote for Trump, who is practically a lefty peacenik compared to the Democratic candidates who ran against him?
Incidentally, voting against war helps members of minority groups who are disproportionately likely to be low-income and thus more prone to combat injuries. In this case, an antiwar stance and an anti-racism stance dovetail admirably.
This disdain for Trump voters carries an unbearable stench of superiority both because such critics have probably not made the sacrifices and experienced the hardships that many Trump voters have and because such criticism fails to take into account the equally great failings of the other candidates.
