Collusion? It Could Be Worse

Some Trump supporters justify collusion on the grounds that it has kept Democrats from political power

July’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll revealed that President Trump’s approval rating rose to 45 percent — up a point from June’s survey — at the very moment the president was meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.

That mark matched Trump’s highest approval rating ever.

In the current wall-to-wall media environment, July 16 was a long time ago, so let’s review what happened. At the summit, Trump sided with Moscow rather than our own intelligence community on the question of interference in the 2016 election, offered to allow the Russians to question former Ambassador Michael McFaul and other Americans, and then genially suggested a follow-up meeting. He blamed the worsening relationship between the U.S. and Russia on the Americans, specifically citing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, calling it a “witch hunt” in the process.

On Russian interference in the election, Trump said, “President Putin says its not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Perhaps most amazingly, a day after the summit, Trump walked back this “would” and suggested it should have been a “wouldn’t.” As Matt Flegenheimer described the scene for the New York Times:

It was really just a mix-up, [the president] insisted. Like confusing “affect” and “effect,” but for unprecedented global cyberaggression. …

“The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,’” Mr. Trump said. “Sort of a double negative.”

Certainly, those who cried “treason!” might do well to reread their high school civics textbook. (The bar, they might note, isn’t low!) But that doesn’t make Trump’s behavior any less troubling — or the uptick in Trump’s approval rating any less ominous. It gives credence to the Public Policy Polling survey last year which found that 79 percent of Trump voters would continue to support the President even if it were proved that he colluded with Russia to win the election.

Would these Trumpistas support him even if Mueller uncovered bona fide treasonous actions performed by Trump himself? The above polls suggest that, in fact, they would.

Allow me to outline the implications of this situation in the clearest language available to me. These polls don’t mean that 45 percent of Americans are so pleased with Trump as a president that they would follow him and let the country go to hell, and the polls don’t mean that Trump supporters need a better media narrative to see the truth about their hero. CNN reports about Trump almost never change hearts and minds on the right.

(Credit: Jeremy Pelzer)

The truth is even worse. These polls indicate that those who support Trump would rather (1) undermine the electoral process of our democracy, (2) disrupt our relationship with our allies and the international order, and, perhaps, even (3) imperil the future of the United States itself than allow the Democratic Party control of the country. It means that Trump supporters trust those who were our most bitter enemies more than their own fellow citizens.

How has this mistrust been sown? Why are the tectonic plates undergirding our society under such extraordinary pressure? Is it because people increasingly spend time only with those of their political tribe? Could social media and the decreasing social capital of many in this country play a role?

But if we stop here, we won’t have explained the content of this mistrust; that is, we won’t have explained why the #MAGA crowd believes the Democratic plan for America is so incomparably terrible.

One finds a partial explanation in Jonathan Haidt’s 2013 book The Righteous Mind. Here Haidt, a social psychologist, applied what his field calls moral foundations to American politics. For Haidt, there are six foundations: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. (Other social psychologists only use the first five.) Yet Haidt found that liberals typically answer moral questions by appealing to only two of them, care/harm and liberty/oppression. Conservatives, by contrast, appeal to all six.

This insight helped Haidt, himself a liberal, account for the results of a study where he asked liberals, moderates, and conservatives about one another’s answers to a range of political and moral questions. In that study, conservatives and moderates could predict the liberals’ answers fairly accurately. But the further left the liberal, the worse he or she was at predicting conservatives’ positions. Specifically, liberals assumed that conservatives didn’t care about those who were harmed by bad social policies, political events, or oppression — and were consistently wrong on that count.

If Haidt is right that conservatives are often misunderstood by liberals, we should note that their misunderstanding is specifically about morality. What is the content of this misunderstanding about morality?

According to Haidt, it is twofold. First, the data indicate that liberals think conservatives care less than they actually do about others (though they are right about libertarians). Second, conservatives think that liberals ignore or purposely flout loyalty, sanctity, and authority — and the data says they’re right.

So, we might infer, from a conservative perspective, liberals are prone to protecting people and groups from conservative callousness who many not really need to be protected, punishing conservatives for harming people who weren’t actually harmed (at least, by conservative politics), and destroying the moral underpinnings of the social order. This, in turn, leads to mistrust — enough mistrust to have warmer feelings for Vladimir Putin than for Hillary Clinton.

Like Haidt, I find myself on the left on the vast majority of issues. I want single-payer, NHS-style health care and speak often about the destructive nature of capitalism. I support Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Above all, I want immediate action on behalf of the undocumented. I think conservatives are wrong on these issues for a whole host of reasons.

Yet after reading Haidt, I think I understand why conservatives have come to fear the left so much. First of all, the left shapes the culture, and we do, after all, have a culture war on our hands. Repeated studies have shown that Republicans are an endangered species in both academia and the media. And evangelical Christians, the bedrock constituency of the Republican Party, are nowhere to be found in culture-shaping fields. In a subculture already rife with narratives about persecution, it’s a very short step for many evangelicals to begin to suspect that all this isn’t, shall we say, accidental.

Further apparent evidence that their marginalization within these culture-defining spheres isn’t accidental arises when the media seems to intentionally target these excluded groups. Two examples will demonstrate the pattern.

Exhibit A: In the wake of the Orlando Pulse night club shooting — the massacre in which Omar Mateen murdered 49 people and pledged allegiance to ISIS? — the conservative outlet National Review ran an article listing major media sources, including CNN’s Anderson Cooper and the New York Times’editorial board, who had not-so-subtly blamed orthodox Christians for the attack. Incredibly, other liberal alt-media explicitly blamed Christians for the attack. Talk about alternative facts!

Exhibit B: Chick-fil-A. Remember in 2012 when Chicago and Boston (followed by several universities) tried to bar Chick-fil-A from expanding or opening new stores in their cities? Toronto, the mayor of San Francisco, and a would-be mass shooter targeting the Family Research Council also got involved. (His goal was to “kill as many people” as possible, then “smear a Chick-fil-A sandwich on their face.”)

Most of these actions should either be categorized as First Amendment violations or attempted murder. But only conservatives seem to remember that all this was precipitated by comments Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy made as a private individual. Chick-fil-A has never discriminated in hiring or otherwise against LGBT people. The uproar was caused solely by Cathy’s private opinion, which he had the gall to voice in public.

Obviously conservatives, and particularly evangelicals, have some soul-searching to do, especially after more than 80 percent of evangelicals who voted — and voter turnout was high — pulled the lever for Trump.

Many orthodox Christians have defended the (theologically) indefensible, and others have failed to call out vigorously enough racist and homophobic attitudes. They most certainly cannot hold themselves guiltless.

But neither should liberals. At some point those on the left in this country crossed the Rubicon to grasp absolute cultural power and in doing so changed the cultural make-up of America, perhaps forever. They ceased to encourage their fellow Americans to leave behind racist attitudes, misogyny, and homophobia and began weaponizing those words, attributing such attitudes to everyone who disagrees with them. Their strategy of cultural Realpolitik has come to involve the aggressive social marginalization of certain groups, particularly evangelicals and conservative Catholics.

Something’s got to give. Cultural seismographs everywhere indicate an earthquake is coming. Already the primary enemy for many conservatives is not an ideology or foreign power, even if that power has tampered with our elections and bribed or blackmailed our president. Today, for many on the right, the primary enemy is their own countrymen, who they believe wish them harm.

If there’s anything more dangerous for America than our president colluding with a foreign power, this is it.