O, Democracy

No one asked, but I still have to think it through.

In case you missed it, there was an election in the US on Tuesday. It surprised a lot of people. Myself included.

I made my prediction public as the polls were settling down, and I was wrong on two states: Michigan and Wisconsin. Ultimately, I predicted Trump would win, but my confidence in that prediction was nowhere near as decisive as the electoral map ended up being.

I am married to a liberal, so I’ve heard firsthand a lot of the sentiment being offered online today. The main lamentation is “I don’t understand how anyone could vote for him.”

Notice that this isn’t a question. This is a statement. Shouting “I don’t understand” into the void is not a meaningful pursuit of knowledge. It lacks any sense of curiosity, and certainly does not seek to understand that which is clearly an unknown phenomenon. Millions of people are looking at the election results online and are completely and utterly baffled at how this happened.

For over a decade I have lived largely in a community of family and friends - of whom I most interact with - that are all vehemently opposed to Trump. Some are capable of discussing politics in a level-headed fashion, some aren’t.

I didn’t vote in this election. I’m a resident of a firmly partisan state, and the only contested election on my entire ballot that didn’t already have a foregone conclusion was a county position I didn’t care much to weigh in on. That being said, if I lived 50 miles north (in a swing state), I would have very likely held my nose and voted for Trump - a man I’ve had very mixed feelings about over the past two decades.

I do hope that an election this decisive will show people who were blindsided that perhaps they’re missing something that others are seeing. I hope it will cause people to re-evaluate their sources of news, to engage in some serious self-reflection about their worldview, and to ultimately engage in more charity and civility in their political discourse. In response I hope conservatives can keep the insufferable gloating to a minimum and offering an “off-ramp” for those ready to be done supporting our political opponents.

What we saw from legacy media appears to be more of the same, but there are glimmers of hope. While The View gave us the response we all deserve from them, there was a brief moment of self-evaluation on Morning Joe of all places.

So here’s what I expected from the media. Note the immediate imposition of identity before ideology.

For two days in a row, Joe Scarborough has made salient points that the left would do well to listen to. I can’t believe I’m saying it, but credit where credit is due.

The morning after the election, Morning Joe had an interesting panel discussion where they talked about how strange this election was. From how they couldn’t have predicted it, to how the polls (except Trump’s) were wrong, and how democrats simply did not run a successful campaign. There were glimmers of self-reflection as some of the panelists asked the questions I hoped they would; a few did ask “how could this happen?”, “what led to this?”, etc.

This morning (as of writing), he’s back with a second day of post-election clarity:

I do hope we see more of this Scarborough in the future, and I’m sure time will tell if that’s what we’ll get.

However, I understand that a reason a lot of liberals have resorted to screaming into the void is that nearly all interactions they’ve had with anyone who has expressed approval of Trump has been a raging terminally-online pizza cutter (all edge, no point) with a pepe pfp and ‘Deplorable’ in his handle. These individuals are about as capable of rational discourse as the blue-haired, pink-hat-wearing genderfluid furry who still has blue wave emojis next to the Ukraine and Palestine flags in they/their social media profile.

So perhaps you may be someone less extreme than the above two examples. I’d like to think I am as well, so perhaps you can listen to me explain a few things in a way that treats you like a human being, and we can both express just a tiny bit of charity towards one another.

So what are the reasons someone who is not a racist, a fascist, or a Nazi may have for choosing Trump over Harris?

Economy

Easily the biggest reason people are voting for Trump is the economy. Anyone who has listened to any media on the right in the last 6 months has heard this proposition ad nauseum: “You have 4 years of Trump to compare with 4 years of Kamala. Which were better for you?”

For anyone who has had financial responsibility, especially for a family (like me), the last four years have been extremely harrowing. I work in the IT industry, and there simply are no jobs available. A lot of people are blaming AI, but the jobs trends we’re seeing are more in line with the post-covid world not having the same record growth as the covid boom (at least in the tech industry). Regardless, many job listings are fake, only put online so that companies can create the appearance of growth for shareholders. Numerous recruiters have told people throughout the industry that they’re waiting for election results to even post new jobs. If you were anywhere right of center politically in the last 2-4 years, you have likely seen this in your personal experience. I know multiple people who have been looking for work and can’t find it, or are stuck in a job not giving them enough hours for economic reasons.

Personally, under the Trump economy I was able to finally get my house in order. I ended up advancing in my career, my company gave me extra bonuses (mostly because they had to maintain enough expenses to not pay taxes), and there were an abundance of jobs that allowed me to leapfrog my previous salary and get a 75% raise. When I was hired at my current job, they hired me at a rate that is roughly $20,000 / year higher than they’re paying for the same position now, 5 years later.

The last 4 years, however, I have moved to a state that has a significantly lower tax burden, we were able to sell our house for nearly 150% of what we bought it for just 4 years prior, and after moving to a house that was double the size, our average monthly expenses went down by over $700. For the first time in my life, I felt rich. The last two years, however, have seen that come tumbling down. With the amount of money I make, I’m still feeling the pinch at the grocery store, so I can’t imagine what that feels like for people who legitimately have to crunch numbers on a calculator before going to the store. Most of the gains I have personally made in the last 4-6 years feel as if they’ve been almost completely undone by the economics of the last 2 years in particular.

When people with this experience witnessed Kamala Harris saying she’d solve the housing problem by giving homeowners $25,000 people like me (rightly, in my estimation) thought that was feeding demand to solve a supply problem. Yes, Harris proposed building more houses as well, but there were very few details in her economic plan other than “we’re going to build 3M homes”. That’s all well and good, but the current numbers of how many homes were build in the last 4 years was (drumroll)… about 3 million. So either we’re going to have no change, or her plan meant an increase of 3 million homes. I’d love to see that kind of increase, but without an actual plan, it’s hard to fathom how it’d happen.

Finally, the dagger to the heart of Harris’ economic plan for many was her proposal to tax unrealized gains (but only for those who make millions/year). Two problems come to mind: firstly, no tax targeted at the upper echelons of society ever stay there. Secondly, if the 1% get taxed on their unrealized gains, they’ll have to sell off stock to pay for the taxes, which will then lead into their next year’s unrealized gains. It is the Left that constantly (rightly) reminds us of the dangers of income inequality. One such danger has been that the stock market has massive portions of ownership by a small number of people. This policy in particular would create a death spiral for the class of people who own most of the stock market. Love it or hate it, the stock market is important for the US Economy, and tanking it is a bad idea which leads to dire consequences including but not limited to: women and people of color dying.

As someone who manages all the finances in my household, and as someone who has now been in the workforce through a few different Presidential administrations, I’ve seen one universal law: If a Republican is president, my 401(k) value goes up. If a Democrat is president, my 401(k) value goes down.

When we mention the economy, we tend to hear things like:

• “The economy doesn’t matter that much!”

• “You can’t put your money over someone else’s human rights!”

• “It’s greedy, selfish, and unChristian to vote based on money!”

I will put this bluntly, as it’s beyond irritating at this point: I have the right to decide what’s important to me, and you have the right to decide what’s important to you. For me, I tend to prefer taking responsibility for my own actions, forging my own path, and fighting like hell to support the people I love. I have a wife and two small children. The one thing about my life over which I have no control, and am thus am at the mercy of the government to handle on my behalf, is the economy. I can get a better job, and I have. But I can’t keep doubling my income every couple years just because Washington Bureaucrats (from both parties!) love inflationary policies.

I’m personally happy that Trump won because it very likely means that the financial stresses and burdens I’ve been feeling creeping back into my life over the past 2 years may very well subside.

The Woke Stuff

If you’re on the left and still reading, I commend and thank you. I pray your charity may continue through this section.

What many on the left will not understand is just how stifling the “woke stuff” is for someone who doesn’t agree hook, line, and sinker.

I have personally become more “socially liberal” over the past decade. I don’t care much about what adults want to do with their own time. But the sleeping giant of American parents has woken up. We saw that literally the same week as Obergefell vs Hodges made gay marriage permissible across the nation, “Call Me Caitlyn” graced the cover of Vanity Fair. After years of being called bigots for warning of a “slippery slope” of sexual progressiveness, this mask-off moment revealed that what many progressives publicly shamed as a slippery slope, was in fact just their hypothetical syllogism.

I tend to think of myself as a “typical” person. I don’t think I am overly extreme in my politics. I score dead center in just about every political compass test I take, I’ve voted for candidates of at least 4 different political parties. I can handle disagreements. I can tolerate constructive criticism and discourse. What I can’t handle, and what I won’t tolerate, and what I will never play along with is having a version of reality pushed into my face that is clearly distorted, then being told I’m a Nazi for stating the obvious.

This is no clearer than attempting to interact with someone who believes whole-heartedly in gender ideology. There’s much to criticize in the woke movement, but I think most of those disagreements tend to devolve into mud slinging. The source, however, of the entire philosophy is rooted in two concepts: Marxist theory and self-identity.

Marx’s philosophy was grounded in the oppressed-oppressor dichotomy. This is present in every intersectionality metric as well:

• Men oppress women (feminism)

• White oppress people of color (black liberation)

• The Rich oppress the workers (communism)

This oppression analysis is overly simplistic and reductive, of course, and leads to such absurdities as “white people can’t be victims of racism.” When pushing back on such notions, we are treated to a grand wondering through the intersectionality cosmos of “historical oppression”, so that no matter what I do (as a member at the top of the oppression hierarchy), I cannot escape the indelible mark of racism that exists upon my soul. And this is not exaggeration. This is the exact kind of stuff I’m told by influential people like Ibram X Kendi and Robin DeAngelo. Again, I’ll put it bluntly: I already have a religion, and yours treats me like a dog. Hard pass.

The idea of self-identity is that one’s identity is determined not by objective, measurable characteristics, but rather by one’s subjective internal definition of feeling. As delicately as I can put it, this is the philosophy of toddlers. When we ask the question about basically anything, “what is it”, the kind of response we’re looking for is an objective description. When trying to identify something, we take measurements, record observations, etc. For humans, or even some animals, we can ask questions and gauge responses. So asking a person about their identity is fine, and people should be free to express themselves. That’s all well and good, but what the modern woke movement has done is to declare that the personal definition one has of themselves in their own mind supersedes that of objective reality. I do not condone the subversion of the objective in favor of the subjective. No thank you. A society simply cannot function if every interaction must be preceded with discovering your addressee’s personal philosophy of identity.

All of this wouldn’t even matter if it was a circle of terminally-online Redditors. If the modern woke movement had the teeth of the Flat Earth movement, no one would care. However, we have seen what wokeness leads to:

• Men in women’s spaces (bathrooms, sports, ‘woman of the year’, Olympics)

• Openly racist legislation providing benefits to one race (violating the 14th Amendment for “equity”)

• A supreme court justice who cannot define what a woman is, even in the context of hearing a case on anti-discrimination statutes.

• Terms like “chest feeding” and “birthing persons” being taken seriously.

• The idea that a man having sex with another man isn’t gay if one is trans.

• Not openly supporting every single policy of the progressive left is “transphobic”.

The woke movement appears to believe that if someone has even a minor question about the implications of adopting a new underlying philosophy of reality (which is what woke philosophy is), then they deserve to be socially and economically ostracized. While this leads to the problem of “cancel-culture” for those opposed to gender ideology, it leads to the problem of echo chambers for those in favor of it.

Echo chambers make you weak. If you’re never exposed to contrary evidence to your own worldview, you will never be able to discover it’s flaws and improve upon it. If you are not checking your own beliefs, showing skepticism towards yourself, and occasionally testing your underlying assumptions, you will grow intellectually weak. I do not say this with ire or disrespect, but I’m merely telling you my experience and the experience of millions of people on the right: those of us on the right have been fighting off accusations of misinformation, bigotry, and -isms for decades. We have had to be in order to engage. The right almost exclusively offers reactions to the left (one of my biggest problems with the American right), so by definition, the right-wing media apparatus spends more time engaging with what the other side is saying. This has it’s pros and cons. On the down side, it can lead the more reactionary into their own echo chamber out of resentment for the other side. This is what is seen online and frequently latched onto by the left. It is obviously the case that both sides of the political aisle have echo chambers, idiots (useful or otherwise), classy folks, deranged lunatics, good-faith stewards, and bad actors. On a positive note, the right tends to understand the arguments the left make - albeit usually in the least charitable light possible (another problem on the right) - and gear their responses towards them.

Finally, once the left started coming after children with this stuff, it was over. The last 4 years have shown thousands of parents rising up at school board meetings, calling out the indoctrination of their kids, pushing schools to remove pornographic materials from their libraries, and advocating for more transparency in school materials. Instead of this grassroots activism being covered in the media as well-meaning parents with deep political disagreements that may not align with the legacy media class, we were treated to them being called the typical list of Istophobias while the Attorney General of the United States publicly attacked them and labeled them “domestic terrorists".

Conservatives can put up with a lot, and aside from the annoying Boomer takes on Facebook, they do tend to be the “silent” majority. But a majority we still are, and like me, millions of people are simply tired of looking at the obvious and being told we’re not only wrong, not only immoral for being wrong, but also that we need to subject ourselves to political whims that go against our own interests in order to prove that we’re not “on the wrong side of history” to the side of the political aisle that openly demonizes our most deeply-held beliefs about reality.

I think the reason that the left is so surprised by these results is what I said above - they don’t interact with the other side’s arguments as a two-way street. Since covid, a massive echo chamber has blinded millions of people to what their fellow countrymen are thinking. I hope in the future, we can all come away from our political disagreements with a better understanding of why someone may think just a little differently than us. Maybe, just maybe, we can all disagree without accusing each other of acting in bad faith!

Immigration

On the matter of immigration, I feel like less needs to be said. This is a long-standing debate. Personally, I’m fine with immigration, but people should do it legally. Our current process for doing it legally sucks, but instead of fixing the broken system, the way to get more people into the country via immigration has been to dodge the normal process and flow through the Political Asylum route. I also believe this path to citizenship is valid, but because it allows asylum seekers to be present in the country without the oversight of other immigration methods, it has become a hot bed for political debate.

I believe that it is definitely possible to be “anti-immigration” and racist.

I believe that it is definitely possible to be “anti-immigration” and not racist at all.

The problem is that most on the left do not believe in the latter of those two statements.

I have grown tired of getting side-eyed for saying things like “America’s tax dollars provided by American citizens should primarily benefit American citizens.” It’s tiring because in the realm of politics we don’t have charity anymore, and thus if you say the same thing that a racist says, you are de facto guilty of the same racism. This in my mind is the hardest part of agreeing with Trump about anything. He is definitely an incendiary character, and he frequently speaks in a manner that is bombastic, exaggerated, and - to his detriment in my eyes - grossly uncharitable and unkind. However, just because he’s an asshole doesn’t mean he’s not absolutely correct about at least some of his concerns, and yes, some of them about the border.

Vengeance

The last thing I’ll mention before wrapping up is Trump’s promise to be a revenge candidate for disaffected Republicans. I’ll state outright that I don’t want politics in this country to be a back-and-forth of administrations weaponizing the justice department against their opponents. I pray that Trump does not return in kind the treatment he has been given. If he does, I’ll openly condemn him. However, this article is for seeking to provide understanding. The reason so many on the right feel like they are disaffected, feel like they’ve been attacked, feel like their voice has been taken from them, is because in each of the three areas I’ve mentioned, those on the Right have watched as the powerful institutions of this country: the media, academia, the entertainment industry, and others, have focused almost entirely on identity, and worse yet, divided Americans among political factions, then ascribed virtue to the collective on the left, and vice to the collective on the right. We have then been gaslit for pointing this out.

In the realm of economics, we are chastised for being greedy when our true motivation is wanting our government to aid us in providing a safe future for our children before we focus on the needs of people across the world. I have much love for the people of Palestine and Ukraine, for example. I actually know people from those places. I worship with people who have lived in those places. I don’t, however, think that it’s right for my government to be more concerned with Ukraine’s border than our own. I don’t think it’s right that our government wasted over $300 Million creating an offshore pier to provide humanitarian relief (a goal that never materialized) to Gaza with one hand, while sending Niki Haley to sign bombs killing them with the other. I don’t particularly approve of the fact that our government has provided nearly $200 Billion to Ukraine while my neighbors are on social media asking if someone can help them buy groceries. This is not the fault of a single party, either.

Regarding cultural issues, so many of us are just tired of being brow-beaten. Tired of having people 15 years our junior attempt to lecture us about how the world works when they’ve never had to issue a payment to their student loan yet. We are tired of being seen as contributing the problems of society based solely upon our immutable characteristics. And quite frankly, we’re tired of self-censorship and feeling like we can’t speak our minds in the workplace or in public - not because we want to say things that are immoral, but because on occasion it’s nice to engage in a conversation without needing to trot out the litany of caveats required to speak with a modicum of common sense.

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What you may notice is a lot of references above made to one’s own experience. I think this may be the crux of the issue. Liberals are often very quick to demand we not dismiss another’s “lived experience”, but the sad irony is that only through ignoring the lived experience of roughly 70 million people can someone say something like “I don’t understand why anyone could vote for him.”

There’s much more I could say about each of these topics, and there’s a lot I could say about how the Right has made political discourse more difficult since Trump’s ascendency. That wasn’t the point of this article, and if you feel I have singled out the Left here, it’s only because I have. I know the left is genuinely flabbergasted right now, and if I can unflabber a few gasts, then I’ll have done my job. I stated before that a lot of my family and social circle are on the left. I don’t mind this fact. I think a healthy Left wing in this country can be extremely useful. As a Christian, the left can and has helped me identify “the least of these” in a lot of cases, and has helped me to exercise compassion toward those I wouldn’t normally. That’s not to say that the Right has no compassion, but of the two major parties, they are the one driven by it the least. This may sound like a criticism, but in matters of policy, empathy can lead to self-destruction if you’re not careful.

I’d like to see a society where we can get back to disagreeing on a few issues here and there while recognizing the good motivations in the hearts of our interlocutors. This is difficult because a lot of people on both the right and the left have fallen to a victimhood mentality. And if we feel like it is our neighbor who is victimizing us, we will never have a unified society. We only get away from that when we demand of ourselves to see others with charity, even when it’s not offered to us.

Please feel free to offer constructive feedback below. What both sides need more of is charity. Regardless of your political affiliation, you’ll receive it in the comments from me.