In any other year I’d agree with this. But decent people have nothing to learn from Trump supporters but which direction to spit in.
I say this as a libertarian with no particular affection for the Democratic Party. It’s an insult to serious thought on the right to pretend a toxic soup of racism, hero worship, and ressentiment against the educated represents some interesting body of thought worth engaging.
By all means, befriend someone with a different political philosophy. But Trumpism finally is what Lionel Trilling once claimed all conservatism was: A set of irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.
Anyone who engages with that poisonous farrago and imagines they’ve confronted a serious opposing ideology is kidding themselves.
Engaging with the best political thought you disagree with is an excellent principle. You make a mockery of it if you pretend any old trashheap of inchoate impulses with an electoral coalition behind it counts as “political thought.”
If the idea of learning from disagreement is completely detatched from whether the “other side” has anything intelligent or interesting to say, it’s as vacuous a reflex as mechanical partisanship.
Also, my god, can we finally be rid of this lame and cowardly notion that it’s somehow unseemly or narrow minded to judge people personally for their political commitments? Because of course it’s not, and nobody seriously believes that for ANY political commitment.
People just get squeamish about admitting that it might be true about a political commitment *with a lot of current adherents.* It’s fundamentally a form of cowardice and denial; pretending we’re still in the realm of normal politics where disagreements are reasonable.
People ask rhetorical questions like: “so you think millions of your fellow Americans believe something vile and evil?” And this is, again, cowardice: It is tactitly the refusal to call evil by its name if enough people believe in it. Millions have often believed evil things.
I would dearly love to be in the world of reasonable disagreement. I get the impulse to pretend that’s still our political environment. But there’s a point at which denial becomes shameful.
