People's Actions

 We tend to assume, at least for heuristic purposes, that in a democracy, if people vote for a particular candidate, that means they largely approve of that person's campaign promises. Thus, according to this logic, people who voted for Trump in 2024 must in some sense have "chosen" his worst and cruelest actions in office—particularly since Trump didn't exactly hide the ball on the campaign trail as to his intentions. He had "Mass Deportation Now" signs printed up and distributed to people at the official Republican National Convention. 

But, strange as it must seem, this may not be the case. A recent series of focus groups with Trump voters across the country—discussed on the latest episode of Ezra Klein's podcast—apparently revealed that, no matter how blatant it may have seemed—to our eyes—that Trump was running in 2024 on a platform of white nationalist authoritarianism, most of the people who cast a ballot for him were not doing so because they backed such a program. 

Even then, in that late year, they apparently still did not see Trump primarily as the guy who staged January 6 and carried out family separation. Instead, they still saw him above all as the reality TV "businessman" from The Apprentice, who would use his special business powers to bring down prices—at least in Sarah Longwell's telling on the podcast. 

This may seem completely baffling to the rest of us, but to understand how this particular magic trick could work, we should try to imagine how the typical college-educated retail investor would feel if they heard that Warren Buffett, say, was running for president. They'd probably think: "oh, that's a smart guy who would know how to make the right investments for the country," 

This appears to have been about how most high school–educated Americans saw Trump—except replace the word "investments" with "deals." 

Longwell's focus groups also reveal that, now that Trump has in fact gone on to make disastrous and cruel decisions as president (decisions, moreover, that he chose to personally and rhetorically own, and which he cannot pin this time on some underling or "deep state" patsy)—many of these same Apprentice-voters are pretty disgusted with him. They are mad about the war of aggression in Iran. They are mad about Trump's focus on enriching himself instead of ameliorating their daily economic plight.

Perhaps most surprising and encouraging of all—they are even mad about the cruelty of his mass detention and deportation of immigrants. 

People's statements on this topic are admittedly a bit confused; but the message from most of them was clear—Trump sending masked thugs to arrest people at school drop-offs and courthouses is not actually what they wanted. One voter talks about how she thought Trump would only come for "criminals," but now it seems like he is picking up "innocent people" as well. Another doesn't like people being "grabbed and put in camps." Still another says ICE shouldn't go after people who are just "working and minding their business." 

In other words, Trump voters' attitudes to immigration turn out to be the same as most people's—which is to say—maybe not flawlessly progressive, but nevertheless very far removed from whatever Stephen Miller and his "Office of Remigration" are talking about.  

But still—these people voted for Trump. So are they in some sense to blame for his deeds, even if they now have buyer's remorse? 

Dwight Macdonald, in his classic essay on "The Responsibility of Peoples," devotes some time to trying to figure out what makes an atrocity into a genuine "people's action" for which a society as a whole—rather than just people in authority—is to blame. He suggests that lynchings in the Deep South during Jim Crow may really have constituted such "people's actions," because seemingly every level of white society conspired carry out these atrocities and to shield their perpetrators from any legal consequences. 

By contrast, Macdonald somewhat controversially argues, the Nazi persecution of the Jews had to be inflicted largely by armed agents of the state, without the assistance of the public. While Nazi organs and the propaganda apparatus obviously tried to gin up pogroms and violence against people's Jewish neighbors, Macdonald writes, this bid was always less successful than Goebbels and his ilk seemed to hope. In the end, it was armed government-paid thugs, not ordinary citizens, who had to go in and trash people's businesses and smash the windows of families' homes. 

The German public in general, writes Macdonald, for the most part did not participate. "[T]he crowds that watched these organized atrocities were silent and withdrawn when they did not venture to express their disapproval," he writes. We might accuse them of a lack of heroism for not actively putting themselves at risk to oppose such persecution and violence—but, Macdonald argues, only the person who has shown themselves a hero under similar circumstances has the right at this point to cast the first stone. The rest of us can only hope we would do more; but we can't really know for sure. 

The Trump voters featured in these focus groups come across to me much more like the Germans in Macdonald's essay, rather than the lynchers. They may not be heroes putting their lives on the line like Alex Pretti and Rene Good to oppose ICE violence in their community—but they do not approve of the violence either. Before the sight of masked ICE agents hauling people away to languish in mandatory detention for months before being expelled to secret black sites in Eswatini or Equatorial Guinea, they are quietly appalled and uncomfortable—"silent and withdrawn," as Macdonald puts it. 

We could wish that they would do more than this. We could wish that they joined the resistance protesters in monitoring ICE or marching in the streets or chanting in front of detention centers. But the truth is that "few people have the imagination or moral sensitivity to get very excited about actions which they don't participate in themselves (and hence about which they feel no personal responsibility)," as Macdonald puts it. 

This accounts for the limited success that human rights campaigners—the "screamers," as Arthur Koestler calls them (and to be clear—he counted himself among them)—have always faced in getting people to care about atrocities. Most people do not feel that they were responsible in any way for these actions, and so they can always meet the "screamer" with the question: "well what do you expect me to do about it?" 

As Koestler writes, he and his fellow "screamers" have to contend with the fact that there is a "tragic plane" and a "trivial plane" of human existence, and most people most of the time simply cannot leave the "trivial" level behind. 

The people in Sarah Longwell's focus groups are plainly living on the trivial plane. 

To be sure, they are not evil people who want to arrest and mass deport their neighbors. Trump's actions in his second term therefore plainly do not meet the definition of "people's actions" that Macdonald lays out. There is no mass participation in or mass approval of ICE raids and mass expulsion—if anything, there is mass disapproval and mass discomfort—even among Trump's own erstwhile supporters. 

But neither are the people in these focus groups particularly heroic. They are not Alex Pretti or Rene Good. They are not gifted with exceptional "imagination or moral sensitivity," in Macdonald's phrase. To the contrary, they are people who live most of the time and make their political decisions on the "trivial plane" of human life that Koestler identified. They are not primarily trying to figure out which candidate is better for democracy and human rights and other grand "tragic plane" issues—but who will make groceries and gas more affordable. 

For a long time, I resisted this conclusion. Everyone seemed to be saying it—"it's all about prices"; "it's the economy, stupid," and all that—so I assumed it must be wrong. 

But Longwell urges us to remember that most people, in most of the country, have to get their kids to school and spend all day in an exhausting job. They do not have the luxury of deriving vicarious adrenaline from plugging into the news every evening and getting "very excited about actions which they don't participate in themselves," to borrow Macdonald's phrase. They meet enough "screamers" at the hospital where they work or the daycare their kids attend not to seek out more "screamers" like me and Koestler on TV, the internet, or their social media feeds. 

And for such people, the most visible way in which society at large affects them—the state, the economy, all the things they are called on to influence every few years when they cast a ballot—is in the price of daily necessities at the store. As Longwell puts it: this is the real "disconnect" between the people in the focus groups and "people whom we talk about as elites—but let’s just say you and I—we should admit this. We do not walk into the grocery store and say: I can’t buy this now because it’s $2 more expensive."

As much as I keep trying to raise politics to the empyrean of the "tragic plane," then—I have to remember that I can only do this in part because I have the luxury of not living in a daily reality in which my "trivial plane" is in a state of emergency. I have enough food on my plate and enough gas in my tank. I can get "excited about actions I do not participate in myself" because the things I participate in most directly—like acquiring groceries and gas—are within my budgetary reach on a daily basis. 

And so, maybe it is really true what the pollsters and consultants have been saying all along—that politics has to be waged at the level of the kitchen table. It's about the price of a gallon of milk these days, not about the rights of the persecuted. The electoral contest has to be entered and fought on terms of the "trivial plane," at least for the most part, rather than on the level of high-minded ideals about democracy and human rights. To quote Heinrich Heine: 

Today, you will find no aid in the tangled webs

Of worn-out, empty rhetoric. [...]

What truly finds its way into a hungry stomach

Is a logic of soup, with dumplings as its foundation—

Arguments composed of roast beef,

Accompanied by citations from Göttingen sausage. (Translation by Google.)