Driving from Washington DC to New York in January 2017, the day after Donald J. Trump was inaugurated the first time, I heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio. He was having a chuckle about a serious advice column from PJ Media called “How to Talk Trump with Your Terrified Progressive Adult Children”.
With two months until Trump’s second inauguration, may I offer myself as counsellor to The Guardian and other such places. I’ll run classes – “How To Talk Trump with Terrified Progressive Adult Journalists”. It will include some cognitive behavioural therapy to help them address faulty or unhelpful ways of thinking about president-elect Trump so they might understand why he’s moving back into the Oval Office.
Professional help may help contain the catastrophising too. Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times decreed the next few months as “a period of mourning”. Her party lost. That’s it. No one died. The Guardian’s London office offered counselling services to staff after the US election result. None of them reported from a current war zone or even a copycat Charles Manson cult murder scene. Trump won office – in a different country.
This hyper-emoting is funny. But the serious side is we will all benefit if the left – including cheer squads in the media – lifts its game and its gaze.
First suggestion: Step outside your comfort zone. A shrink will set you back a couple of hundred bucks for exposure therapy so you can deal with irrational fears. I’ll do it for free. This type of psychotherapy gradually exposes you to your greatest fear – be it confined spaces or the dentist or Trump supporters – so you realise it’s not so scary after all.
But take it slowly. Before going the full Monte by talking to a Trump supporter, start with a progressive from Connecticut who’s clear-eyed about the challenges facing left wing parties.
Speaking to the BBC Hard Talk’s Stephen Sackur a week before the US election, Democrat Senator Chris Murphy highlighted what he called “the shortcomings of the left when it comes to being in a conversation with American men”. He said the left hasn’t bothered to have a direct conversation with men, particularly working-class men regardless of their race, about issues that affect them. His observations about the cultural dietitians on the left apply beyond America.
If you’re certain about your views, why be shy about having them tested by others? Maybe you’ll change your mind, or maybe your position will grow stronger from being prodded. Like a runner flexing their legs before hitting the path, try to spur some new brain synapses before making up your mind.
If you’re not ready for the shock treatment of tuning in to an evening of Sky News, again, go gently by checking out Ruy Teixeira. The long-time Democrat who, with John Judis, wrote The Emerging Democrat Majority in 2002, has a good idea why his prediction of a Democratic golden age didn’t happen.
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal’s Tunku Varadarajan last week, Teixeira said Democrats lost working-class people by nuzzling up to militant movements such as Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police and other radical groups. When Joe Biden described trans rights as the civil rights issue of our time and Kamala Harris followed suit, supporting taxpayer-funded sex change operations for prison inmates, Trump struck back with an ad that said “Kamala’s for they/them. I’m for you”.
Killer line, right.
Teixeira said that while there may not be large swathes of “trans one-issue voters out there” … the trans issue “symbolises the out-of-touchness that we’re talking about, the sort of cultural boutique outlook that people think is just weird”.
Democrats, he said, also need to “give up on this equity baloney and start talking about equal opportunity, and fairness, which is what people really believe in”.
“Go back to Martin Luther King,” Teixeira said. “He had the right idea. You ought to judge people by their character, not the colour of their skin.”
It’s bracing stuff. If the WSJ scares you, try some exposure treatment from The New York Times. “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face … I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” Democrat congressman Seth Moulton told the NYT – after the election.
For those Terrified Progressive Adult Journalists ready to take the plunge, speak to some Trump supporters. Like NYT journalist Shawn McCreesh did, attending dozens of Trump events. “I watched as he connected with all sorts of people in all sorts of places” he wrote. “There was often a split screen between the way the news media interpreted things Mr Trump said and how his voters heard him.”
Think … for yourself. Get really curious. On Sunday, Trump clinched Arizona, winning all seven battleground states and bringing his final electoral college tally to 312. This wasn’t a fluke. Just for fun, think about why Trump might not be the end of democracy.
For starters, check your facts. Turnout was not low, as some doomsday critics claimed. Trump isn’t the undertaker of American democracy, as one Australian media hyperventilator said. To repeat, no one died. In fact, democracy thrived. Over 63 per cent of eligible voters (that’s 154,757,700 people) cast their vote, just south of the record 66.38 per cent vote in 2020, when Covid drove up postal votes. Trump’s historic comeback is a sign that American democracy is alive and well.
Open an atlas. There are far worse places than the US to live. Places where there is no actual democracy. No elections. No dissent. Not a skerrick of freedom. Have a cry and a whinge about women and men in those places.
Park your morality judgments. You can disagree with someone without thinking they’re immoral for having different views. Simon Holmes a Court put Trump’s win down to racism, misogyny, division, grievance and so on and so on. Except that Trump won votes from women, from Hispanics, from blacks too. The red Republican arrow headed north in disparate parts from New York and New Jersey, from Texas to California.
Look in the mirror. If you’re talking down to, and about, people you disagree with, you might be the problem. In Australia, once Trump’s victory was clear, the geniuses at legal magazine Justinian tweeted a map of the US with Democrat slivers coloured blue on the east and west coasts labelled AMERICA and the rest of the country in red labelled DUMBF..KISTAN.
Trump is the unintended creation of snooty people like this. And Trump is back in the White House because the left still has so little interest in the concerns of working-class people, from black to whites and Hispanics.
Have a laugh. As Trump told Joe Rogan: “You need at least the attitude of a comedian when you’re doing this business.” That applies if you’re reporting on “this business” too. Find humour close to home. For example, those women taking themselves off dating sites, going on sex strikes, buying vibrators because of Trump’s triumph. Girls, you may not be missed.
Finally, to help Terrified Progressive Adults get through January, when Trump’s inauguration may trigger further trauma, may I suggest purchasing a small sign to hang above their desk that says “Dry your eyes, Princess.”
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