We love statistics. We—well, most of us—actually rely on them to show us what’s going on in situations that are otherwise way too large and complex to follow accurately. And, most of us know that, in reality, they are merely snapshots in time and also prone to errors. But there are statistics that we need to know—how many lies Trump’s told, how many people will suffer if the ACA is repealed, how many days will General Kelly last as Chief of Staff based on past events—stuff like that. But, today, there’s a statistics that’s being waved in our faces, repeatedly, that we need to either understand better of ignore completely. And yes, you probably guessed it, it has to do with Trumpsky the Clown. It’s his “approval rating.” Though it’s falling, it gets way too much press time.
It’s simply amazing how much time and sweat has been used to try to figure out how to deal with what seems (according to some “statistics”) to be a sizable chunk of the American electorate. And without any reasonable perspective, folks might be right in worrying about it, since it would seem that a whole bunch of people have actually bought into Trump’s sociopathy. This post is being written to add some perspective and maybe help you sleep at night.
Let me begin with a personal aspect to reflect upon. I’m an Episcopal priest, of all things. (And among other things, too.) And right after seminary I did a stint as one of the very few professional chaplains in our county jail system. A huge learning experience, but there’s one thing a chaplain learns early on if he/she is going to be able to do any good at all. It was offered up to me first as a simple, if also very approximate, statistic. Go somewhere crowded, like a sports event or a big rock concert. Look around you. Then understand that somewhere between 10% and 25% of all of those people have had some kind of “interaction with law enforcement” that has given them some kind of criminal record. It might be something petty (DUI, drugs, whatever) or something that locked them away for years in prison. But those people are always around us, and life goes on for us all. Okay, so let me point out the real underlying message here. We—we chaplains, that is—also think of the county jails as “monuments to people’s bad decisions.” Crimes small and large are, among other things, the results of bad—sometimes horrifically bad—decisions for what one does spontaneously or even for a long term life choice. And if you include the offsets in these statistics that come from the disproportionate minority population in our jails it only makes the overall numbers potentially worse. If you think about it, for everyone “caught” by law enforcement there are many others making equally bad decisions and life choices and not caught…so, well, you get the idea. It’s just a way of pointing out that there’s what seems to be an unavoidable fraction of the American population—and electorate—that will routinely make decisions that deny rationality, reason, common sense, or even a good dose of self-interest. And virtually all attempts to change that behavior have failed to some degree or another. “The Recidivism of Bad Choices” is a fact both for the incarcerated and for the many others with whom we share our daily lives.
But, really, how does this affect how we need to look at Trump’s “approval rating?” Well, there are two important things to consider. First is the size of the larger group that “hopes” Trump will turn out better than he probably will, because they don’t want to believe otherwise. Among them are the lifelong Republicans, who’d rather not vote at all if there isn’t a Republican on the ballot. Okay, in total that number, including all Trump “supporters”, hovers somewhere between 30% and 40%, depending on the poll. But we did learn something from the abortive ACA repeal fiasco that is of vital importance here. It is the size of the actual Trump base: somewhere between 15% and maybe 18%. That’s the fraction of the voting population that are so wed to bad decisions that they will follow—unconditionally—anything Trump and his chief warlocks put forward, despite how it may harm them personally, despite ration and common sense. Oddly enough, that percentage isn’t much different than the portion of our population that has spent time behind bars. So let me point out something else one learns from hearing countless narratives of how one lands behind bars. Those bad decisions are typically laced with what one call “shortcuts and simplifications” to solving whatever problem faces a person at a given moment. Need money? Steal it. Deal drugs. Extort. Angry? Well, why not use your gang or some other form of violence? And what the GOP and Trump have been selling are just those sorts of “shortcuts and simplifications” for complex and vitally important issues. That doesn’t make supporters of Trump or the GOP criminals…they just respond positively to the same bad choices that draw in anyone looking for “shortcuts and simplifications"... What’s disturbing is that we just don’t want to think of that many people making decision so bad that they affect the lives of the rest of us so horribly. But face it: it really is a fact, and we can’t realistically change it.
Let me point out another little tidbit that one learns by working in the jails. It is that the very people who tend to make the really bad decisions tend also to be most susceptible to the influence of others, like criminals, who sell these ideas as though they’ll work. Like Trump and the GOP. That’s just another way of saying that the 15%-18% of Americans that unconditionally love Trump and all he does would themselves be capable of acting similarly under similar circumstances. And if that’s not unsettling enough, another frightening thought: that also defines a chain of command that goes, very naturally, all the way back to one of the world’s “ultimate thugs:” Vladimir Putin.
These are things the Resistance needs to know.
Pass it on.