One thing is even more demoralizing than President Trump’s apparent lawbreaking and kowtowing to Vladimir Putin. It’s that weeks of outrages have not significantly dented Trump’s popularity.
Trump’s favorability ratings ticked down slightly in recent days but remain higher now than when he was elected in November. So let’s acknowledge a painful truth: Now that American voters have actually seen Trump trample the Constitution, pardon violent insurrectionists and side with the Kremlin against our allies, after all this, if the election were held today, Trump might well win by an even wider margin than he did in November.
Democrats have been ineffective so far at holding Trump accountable, and he will do much more damage in the coming years unless we liberals figure out how to regain the public trust.
Maybe Trump’s overreach will catch up with him. But a Quinnipiac poll last month showed the lowest level of approval for Democrats (31 percent) since Quinnipiac began asking the question in 2008.
Part of the problem, I think, is that many educated Democrats are insulated from the pain and frustration in the working class and too often come across as out of touch. Instead of listening to frustrated workers, elites too often have lectured them, patronized them or dismissed them as bigots.
That sense of our obliviousness is amplified when Trump takes a sledgehammer to the system, and we are perceived as defenders of the status quo. This will be a challenge to navigate, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers.
But in the spirit of promoting listening rather than lecturing, I suggest a Bewildered Liberals Book Club, for readers who want to understand how it is that a plurality of Americans can support a felon working to corrode our democracy. We can’t win over people we don’t understand. Eight years ago, many turned to JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” to try to learn about Trump’s supporters, but we can do better than that. I recommend three books:
“Demon Copperhead,” by Barbara Kingsolver, is a majestic novel that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023. Kingsolver was inspired by “David Copperfield” and offers insights into a Dickensian world of working-class America that is real and enraging.
Kingsolver tells of a boy, Demon, raised by a single mom who abuses drugs and eventually overdoses. Demon is sent to foster care — a portrayal of America’s scandalous foster care system that is both wrenching and realistic — and although he has people who try to help him, circumstances overwhelm him. Demon makes bad decisions, yes, but we fail him before he fails us.
I recognize Demon in many of my school friends in rural Oregon: bright, hard-working children who were swamped by educational failures and the collapse of well-paying factory jobs. Many of these friends are now dead, and they both suffered greatly and inflicted great suffering on others.
We have utterly failed to address the national scandal of one million overdose deaths since 2000. Millions of households are shattered by interrelated pathologies of addiction, homelessness, family breakdown, chronic pain, mental illness and simple loneliness. Kingsolver brilliantly maps out this national failure and its human cost.
“The Tyranny of Merit,” by Michael Sandel, was ahead of its time in 2020 in dissecting the way educated elites are oblivious to pain among the less educated.
Sandel is an eminent Harvard philosopher yet offers a blistering critique of the way elites pat themselves on the back for rising because of advantages on the basis of supposed merit and then perpetuate systemic unfairness. His book underscores the way elite condescension prompts resentment of higher education and antagonizes many who lack a B.A. — a majority of the electorate.
He cites evidence that elites aren’t less prejudiced than other people; it’s just that they are prejudiced against different people — those with less education.
“Disdain for the less educated is the last acceptable prejudice,” Sandel has written.
“Ours Was the Shining Future,” by David Leonhardt, explores the erosion of the American dream and is blunt about ways in which liberals have failed to do enough to support labor unions and improve education outcomes. Elites also downplayed the toll of crime on communities, Leonhardt argues, even though low-income Americans were particularly victimized by it.
Leonhardt, a colleague of mine at The Times, also examines liberal failures on immigration — one of the issues that particularly explains the rise of the nationalist right in both the United States and abroad. He notes that immigration of low-wage workers clearly benefits professionals, providing gardeners and nannies, while probably hurting some low-education American workers (though not as much as conservatives claim). He says that Democrats used to favor a middle ground on immigration but that in recent years they opened the gates even as ordinary workers signaled again and again that they wanted tighter limits.
For all the failures of the left over the years, I have no doubt that liberal policies on the whole are better for the disenfranchised and for the country. Obamacare and Medicaid help families like Demon’s, yet Republicans are now poised to slash Medicaid. The economy grows faster under Democratic presidents than under Republicans. Life expectancy is longer in blue states than in red states.
Yet these realities are lost when Democrats, in the name of inclusiveness, behave in ways that many voters perceive as excluding them. Too often, we wag our fingers at working-class voters rather than embrace them.
A Times/Ipsos poll last month suggested that Americans see the Democratic Party today as an unappealing alternative to Trump. They think Republicans are grappling with issues they actually care about — immigration, the economy and taxes — while Democrats obsess about social issues that are lower priorities.
To compete, Democrats have to recover the public trust. And a starting point is to spend less time deploring Americans we disagree with and more time listening to them. These books may help.
