It Is a Strange Thing, to Not Understand One’s Neighbors

It is just so many votes. So many people, tens of millions, walking up to the booth and seeing that name and having in their heads some idea of who he is and deciding yes, that’s what I would prefer.

Maybe those ideas in all those heads are mistaken, about things like the economy or immigration or other issues, because the information environment has degraded so badly over the past few decades that blatantly false concepts — “The GOP is better on the economy,” say, or “immigrants are taking my job” — cannot shake free. Or maybe the ideas are solid, in terms of their relationship to actual Trump and GOP policy positions, and the people holding them simply agree — ideas like “non-white people are bad” or “women deserve to die from pregnancy complications.”

Those are, of course, the options: they think false things, or they think true things and like them. In either case, it is a profoundly difficult environment to wake up to, one where so many of your neighbors — so, so many of them! — eagerly bought the bill of goods from modernity’s most blatantly vile salesman. It is literally difficult to imagine, that walk up to the booth and that decision, and then to try and extrapolate that imagined scenario to more people in more places than either of the last two times they faced the same choice.

To survive these eight years and still hold the false ideas as true, or to pay close attention to both words and actions and agree wholeheartedly — both are baffling existences. To prefer the violence, both rhetorical and physical, is just hard to comprehend for anyone whose baseline credo is something in the neighborhood of “let’s be nice to people.” The difference feels unbearably stark this morning, like staring into some sort of mirror dimension where the rules are murky, perpendicular to reality. What does one do with such people? There are so many of them. So, so many.