thomas leverett weblog

Open letter to Biden supporters

We have one thing in common right away: we have some sense of the disaster Trump was and is, to our country and to our democracy. We are glad to know the end is in sight.

But I find it absolutely incredible that so many millions of people voted for him, and are willing to believe, without question, that the election was rigged. What are they, blind? What's going on here?

I will take a stab at it and say they are not blind. They are decent, hard-working folk, all in for Trump and everything he stood for, most notably anti-immigration, anti-"political correctness" culture, and anti-abortion. They are so heavily invested in him that they stopped watching any mainstream media long ago, stopped answering polls, and simply stopped believing many of the things the rest of us can agree upon as facts: that there is climate change, that he was a grifter and a fraud, etc.

Many have chosen to carry this belief out as far as they can, and to now turn on Fox News and others who are basically calling it as it is: the election is over, he lost, it's time for him to move along. Yet half of the Republican Party believe him. And he's just as likely to divide them as he was to divide us in the first place. He doesn't care what kind of damage he does, to America or to democracy, or even to them. He has bills to pay. He's afraid of the law. Truth is around every corner for him, and it's not pretty.

I'm not worried about what happens to him; I think criminals should be punished, but I recognize clearly that this may take years in the case of an ex-president, so I'm not holding my breath. But I'm worried about his followers, that half of the Republican Party that is so blind and angry that they would believe virtually anything.

What worries me about them is this: These are the working people. These working people used to vote Democrat. They used to see the Democratic Party as watching out for their interests. What happened? Was it that Clinton opened the door and let the jobs all go to Mexico? Was it that Hillary or Obama insulted them? Trump seems to represent the mortally emotionally wounded, the people who can't forget that some demonstrator spit on a returning soldier back in the Vietnam War (did that ever really happen?). They feel like American society has become more computer-oriented and has left them behind.

And they're so angry about it, they'll believe anything.

My point is this: We need them. Not the outer fringe, but the ordinary working person. We don't need them to vote Democratic - what happens there is what happens. But we need them to be invested in the system and to care about the truth. We need them to trust their neighbors who counted the ballots. We need them to get behind any president who needs national unity. We need to get out of this divided nightmare. Soon enough, it will only include Trump if we want it to. But it's a national problem now, something we as a nation have to address. He wouldn't have divided us so badly, if we hadn't let him.

posted by tom @ 6:42 PM