Last month at an Our Revolution rally in Boston, Bernie Sanders said, "Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and deplorable folks. I don't agree, because I've been there.” Amongst the voluminous post-election analysis last fall, former Daily Show host Jon Stewart in an interview contributed this: “I thought Donald Trump disqualified himself at numerous points. But there is now this idea that anyone who voted for him is — has to be defined by the worst of his rhetoric … Like, there are guys in my neighborhood that I love, that I respect, that I think have incredible qualities who are not afraid of Mexicans, and not afraid of Muslims, and not afraid of blacks. They’re afraid of their insurance premiums. In the liberal community, you hate this idea of creating people as a monolith. Don’t look at Muslims as a monolith. They are the individuals and it would be ignorance. But everybody who voted for Trump is a monolith, is a racist. That hypocrisy is also real in our country.”
Now, I want to stress that I admire both of them greatly for their intelligence, passion, and ability to verbalize what so many of us feel much of the time, and, being a classic liberal, I almost always agree with them. But in the aftermath of the election, as I, like millions of us, was trying to understand how so many could vote for Trump while at the same time trying not to lose hope at this materialization of the yawning crevasse of social and political divide in our country, Stewart’s words made me shake my head in disagreement, and then again I had the same reaction at Bernie’s comments just recently.
It is so much a part of what we on the left do, this desire for inclusion and reaching out, and is one reason why I am proud to be a liberal Democrat. I don’t know if that is mostly what motivated Sanders and Stewart to make those similar remarks- surely, like all of us, Jon Stewart wants good relationships with his neighbors and friends, but I want to know, where do we draw the line? Is it enough for people to say they are not racists, homophobes, anti-Muslim, anti-women, but then vote for someone who has said and done things that are at best offensive to so many? How does anyone who disavows bigotry continue listening after hearing, "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. ... They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”, or, “Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they've ever been in before. Ever. Ever. Ever. You take a look at the inner cities. You’ve got no education. You’ve got no jobs. You get shot walking down the street."
Is it enough for someone to disagree silently, all the while casting a vote for the person who said and believes this? I understand people who are living in very depressed areas, despairing over the lack of opportunities and wanting to believe a candidate who says he will fix it, but I can't find a lot of empathy for them when they protest that they are not bigots and that they don’t always agree with how Trump has characterized specific groups of people, or even individuals. Did they really think that Trump would understand the nuance of them wanting the jobs while not wanting the hateful rhetoric?
By giving him their vote, they gave him their endorsement, one of the most powerful actions we in a democracy can take. By giving him their endorsement, they endorsed his platform, his staff, his convictions, his words, his policies. He, of all people, will not separate out his voters’ need for secure and well-paying jobs from destructive and divisive speech and policies. In the end, it does not matter if they did not agree with the scapegoating of immigrants. It does not matter if they wouldn’t want their own daughters to be within grabby-hands’ reach of him. What does matter is they did align themselves with someone who is the impulsive, spoiled, unaware, egotistical mouthpiece for people who want nothing more than to hurt millions of people while advancing their own agenda, and who now has the power to do so on a scale almost unimaginable.
Just because we personally don’t say such hurtful and sometimes dangerous things, does that make us good people? Or should we raise the bar of what defines good?
As we all should do, they might want to remember some familiar quotes: ‘the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing’, and ‘To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men’.
So while like Sanders and Stewart I have a natural repulsion to label Trump voters or anyone as racists and therefore seemingly write them off, I don’t feel like jumping in and defending them from those who do. Caveat emptor.