So Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States of America. In 2016 when he became the 45th President I think few of us believed he’d become the 47th. But he has - and with a bigger majority than first time round.
How? Why?
For those on the left it’s tempting to reach for the ‘they just don’t get it’ card, referring to the undereducated rednecks who, with just a little bit more instruction (from us) would see the light and vote properly next time. It’s been a while since I went down that route myself, believing instead that the votes for Trump (or Orbán or whoever) signify something more and other than simple stupidity.
So the title of Rafael Behr’s article in the Guardian’s 6th November issue caught my attention: ‘Left, right, Harris, Trump: all prisoners of political nostalgia in an era few understand’. The title suggests that it’s not only the right that’s got it all wrong, but the left too. Promising. So what is it that we’ve got wrong?
The usual answer is that we don’t take Trump voters seriously enough, but Behr is on a different tack. He argues that the problem is nostalgia - nostalgia for an analogue age when politics was about ‘real-life interactions, deliberations, clunky old institutions, meandering conversations, small talk … the stuff of people mingling in assemblies and town halls, breaking bread together.’
That’s all gone he says, and we must get used to a world in which ‘politics [is] played in digital mode’. And that means getting used to the ramifications of digital politics: where there is more polarisation and where ‘differences of opinion are accelerated into irreconcilable enmities.’
Behr is of course aware that correlation doesn’t mean causation, and that profound disagreement existed well before social media came on the scene. But it’s also plausible to say that ‘a very online culture, marked by short attention spans, narcissism and impatient consumer appetites, has a more natural affinity with shallow demagoguery than with representative democracy.’
Behr claims that his article ‘isn’t an elegy for some pre-internet golden age of enlightened public discourse’, but it’s hard to read it as anything other than that. And why not? Where’s the shame in yearning for enlightened public discourse in place of ‘elections as a cry of rage or exultant self-actualisation’?
But is this possible in an age of digital politics, an era in which deliberation seems to have given way to demagoguery?
Well a couple of days ago Stan Collymore, ex-footballer, ran an experiment in this vein. On his X account he posted his political principles as a ‘traditional Labour voter’ and then invited those who disagree with him to explain why. His tone of voice is itself unusual - and welcome:
‘in the spirit of amistad rather than name calling (we've all done it, politics is important and tribal after all), why do you vote Republican or MAGA, Reform or Conservative and what am I fundamentally missing in my world view that (certainly in the case of right of centre parties globally on the rise) I should consider?’
Collymore’s analogue-style invitation was well received: ‘The sort of post we need to see more of, Stan’, ‘Stan, this is a very reasonable post and request’, ‘Smart of you to look outside your knowledge base’, ‘I’m glad to see you take the approach of listening’, ‘Lovely post’, ‘Brilliant question. And well put’. And so on and so on. This is anecdotal evidence for a wish to debate and deliberate, of course, but evidence nonetheless.
One response in particular, from ‘Cromwell’s Ghost’, got me thinking about how far this analogue invitation might fare in a digital environment. It’s a lengthy and thoughtful response which amounts to a punchy endorsement of a broadly Reform programme. Part of the reply reads as follows:
‘We don’t give a damn about net zero and climate change. The climate has been changing since before the dinosaurs to cause the ice age and changing since then to melt it and reheat the planet. Only megalomaniacs think we should be trying to control temperature.
We don’t care about carbon emissions. CO2 is essential for plant life and an essential building block for things like coral. The more the merrier.’
One bit of this response is demonstrably false. CO2 is not a building block for coral. It’s true that the oceans absorb CO2 but that only makes them more acidic. As a result less calcification occurs which, according to the US National Science Foundation, makes it harder for skeletons - and therefore coral - to grow. In other words the exact opposite of what Cromwell’s Ghost says.
I used teach a theory of democracy called ‘deliberative democracy’, the nub of which is that decisions are made according to the ‘force of the better argument’. For it to work people need to be prepared to cede the point if they’ve been shown to be wrong. In matters of value this is obviously difficult to work through because there are often no standards by which to judge right and wrong.
In matters of fact, though, things should be easier. And a case in point is the mistake made by Cromwell’s Ghost regarding CO2 and coral. Would he be prepared to accept the correction? Would he be any less prepared to accept it in the digital world than in the analogue world? If he accepted it might it shift his attitude to climate change? Or has the idea of ‘alternative facts’ so taken root that what the US National Science Foundation says about CO2 and coral has as much weight as Net Zero Watch (the rebranded Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s best-known climate change denying agency)?
(I’ve written to Cromwell’s Ghost to ask if he’s prepared to accept the coral correction. If I hear from him I’ll report back. Update on 25 November 2024: two weeks later and I've not heard a word).
Why is this important, on the threshold of another four years of Donald Trump? Because - yes - I’m nostalgic. Nostalgic for a time when truth and falsity mattered, when disagreement invited dialogue rather than demagoguery.
So rather than avoid nostalgia we should embrace it, recognising the value of what we are nostalgic for - the regulative ideal of a ‘pre-internet golden age of enlightened public discourse’ - while acknowledging how incredibly difficult it will be to recover that ideal in a world where the old-fashioned idea of rival interpretations subject to debate has given way to tub-thumping cris de coeur that brook no argument. (I've discussed elsewhere the need for, and challenges associated with, putting social media at the service of a dialogic politics of listening rather than sucking the lifeblood from it).
It’s hard not to agree with this paean to the capacity to change one’s mind in the light of new evidence:
‘One of the most important skills I see in successful (and good) people is to constantly reevaluate assumptions. They make predictions based on various inputs, some of them unknown, and reevaluate based on what they got right and wrong. They trust people not because they're always right - no one is - but because if you're constantly seeking the truth it's easy to identify those who are doing the same.’
So who is this enlightened soul? Immanuel Kant? No, it’s JD Vance, the next vice-president of the United States, explaining how he decided that Donald Trump is not ‘cultural heroin’ after all, but the man best qualified to further the interests of the American people.
Deliberation doesn’t mean you always get what you want. And that’s actually part of the point.