Dead Patriots Society

Dead Patriots Society

may our children not behave like our president

Post #3, November 17, 2024

Every day since the election, hopefully, more Harris voters conclude or at least come to suspect that most people who voted for Trump are not stupid. They just see things very differently. Indeed, it is more helpful to say that Trump voters and Harris voters literally see different things. This best explains why we talk past each other.

It is possible, and necessary, to separate the honest-to-God bad apples from the millions of Americans who voted them into power.

Take the criminal cases against Trump. Democrats insisted that no person is above the law, and failing to prosecute him would set an awful precedent. Little did they suspect that, due to the pursuit of one of those cases, the Supreme Court would issue a ruling that appears to have weakened the rule of law when applied to presidents.

Trump supporters interpreted the criminal prosecutions of Trump to be the “weaponization of the Justice Department” (the prosecution of Hunter Biden being an anomaly of some sort). Thus, the same might regard the objections by Democrats to Matt Gaetz becoming Attorney General to be sheer hypocrisy. From their perspective, since the Democrats weaponized the Justice Department in the first place, we need someone to weed out all the culprits, and perhaps to prosecute those outside the Department who pulled the strings.

This is just one issue in which Trump voters and Harris voters seem to be worlds apart. A similar and more fitting analogy would be that they reside on different planets. I will explain.

An old friend and I are reading the Copernican Revolution, by Thomas Kuhn. It is a dense read, denser I would say than his more popular book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.

My friend is more adept than I at scientific stuff, but he tolerates my excursions into politics and how contrasting theories in the history of science can inform us about the state of political polarization in the United States.

Copernicus was not the first to postulate that what is obvious could be misleading. It is obvious that the stars, the moon, the planets, and the sun are all circling the earth, all pretty much in the same direction, excluding the peculiar meanderings of planets (the “wanderers”).

It was those odd movements of the planets, which previous astronomers had gone to great lengths to explain with additional regressive, circular movements as they “circled” the earth, that led Copernicus to postulate that the earth was moving as well. In fact, he postulated three movements of the earth, one of which is most likely untrue.

But it is this fundamental insight that Copernicus and others came to which is analogous to our current state of politics: “Viewed from a moving earth a planet that in fact moved regularly would appear to move irregularly.”

Those are Kuhn’s words, and they contain a world of meaning, so-to-speak.

To Harris supporters, the Trump voters, and the MAGA people especially, are moving in ways that are not normal. And to the Trump voters, the Democrats and the woke vigilantes are the ones moving irregularly.

But it is possible that both sides are moving, presumably in opposite directions (hence the growing polarization), and to most observers on either side it might appear that only the other folks were moving, that one’s own planet is remaining still.

As a Harris voter, I need to be asking myself and other Democrats: What are we missing? What are we doing to contribute to the impression of the MAGA people that we are condescending and elitist and leaving them behind in our thinking and the politics we champion?

The best Democratic minds were likely asking this question months before the election, but the dynamics of the election season especially overwhelmed such thinking.

Somehow the much reduced “center” has got to hold, and rebuild itself. We all should be asking ourselves what our scared cow is, and if we are willing to take it off the pedestal. Maybe it was never the real thing anyway.