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Listening to The Daily this morning — it’s striking to me that I hear a lot of people talk about voters’ objection to the president’s “personal conduct,” but rarely if ever hear them talk about objections to his efforts to reshape culture.
If culture is fundamentally a shared set of truth claims and moral obligations (got this on the brain because of an upcoming lecture), then it is arguably the most significant outcome of the Trump years.
There is no doubt that a set of claims about what truth is, and how we ought to treat one another, is something a fair number of the suburban (women) voters who apparently swung away from Trump are concerned with, more than just his personal behavior. (They are of course linked.)
I’m not super clear on why the framing doesn’t take this shape, and possibly I am just not reading widely enough. But it’s way more helpful to me than implying people just don’t like that he is personally uncouth and disrespectful and dismissive of whoever isn’t useful to him.
It feels like another product of our fixation on explaining social and cultural ills as a product of individual behavior, while economics is all about systems? And the idea that “culture” is too soft and nebulous to talk about.
What’s going on right now with his attempts to bend reality to his will is, yes, about his personal lack of character, but it’s way more about trying to shift culture.
Related book, and the best I have read during these years. (Far better, smarter, and more revealing than Hillbilly Elegy, too.) https://bookshop.org/books/strangers-in-their-own-land-anger-and-mourning-on-the-american-right/9781620973493
(Clarification: I don’t mean to say it’s only a factor for suburban voters, obviously. But pollsters who talk about the people who are economically comfortable and voted against Trump as if they did it just because they think he’s naughty are missing something, I think.)
