Kristof: My most unpopular idea is to be nice to Trump voters

When I write about people struggling with addictions or homelessness, liberals exude sympathy while conservatives respond with snarling hostility to losers who make "bad choices."

When I write about voters who supported President Donald Trump, it's the reverse: Now it's liberals who respond with venom, hoping that Trump voters suffer for their bad choice.

"I absolutely despise these people," one woman tweeted at me after I interviewed Trump voters. "Truly the worst of humanity. To hell with every one of them."

Maybe we all need a little more empathy?

I wrote a column from Oklahoma, highlighting voters who had supported Trump and now find that he wants to cut programs that had helped them. One woman had recovered from a rape with the help of a women's center that stands to lose funding, another said that she would sit home and die without a job program facing cutbacks, and so on. Yet every one of them was still behind Trump — and that infuriated my readers.

"I'm just going to say it," tweeted Bridgette. "I hate these people. They are stupid and selfish. Screw them. Lose your jobs, sit home and die."

Another: "ALL Trump voters are racist and deplorable. They'll never vote Democratic. We should never pander to the Trumpites. We're not a party for racists."

The torrent of venom was, to me, as misplaced as the support for Trump from struggling Oklahomans. I'm afraid that Trump's craziness is proving infectious, making Democrats crazy with rage that actually impedes a progressive agenda.

One problem with the Democratic anger is that it stereotypes a vast and contradictory group of 63 million people. Sure, there were racists and misogynists in their ranks, but that doesn't mean that every Trump voter was a white supremacist. While it wasn't apparent from reading the column, one of the Trump voters I quoted was black, and another was Latino. Of course, millions of Trump voters were members of minorities or had previously voted for Barack Obama.

"Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and just deplorable folks," Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has emerged as a surprising defender of Trump voters, said the other day. "I don't agree."

The blunt truth is that if we care about a progressive agenda, we simply can't write off 46 percent of the electorate. If there is to be movement on mass incarceration, on electoral reform, on women's health, on child care, on inequality, on access to good education, on climate change, then progressives need to win more congressional and legislative seats around the country. To win over Trump voters isn't normalizing extremism, but a strategy to combat it.

Right now, 68 percent of partisan legislative chambers in the states are held by Republicans, including Florida. About 7 percent of America's land mass is in Democratic landslide counties, and 59 percent is in Republican landslide counties.

I asked the people I interviewed in Oklahoma why they were sticking with Trump. There are many reasons working-class conservatives vote against their economic interests — abortion and gun issues count heavily for some — but another is the mockery of Democrats who deride them as ignorant bumpkins. The vilification of these voters is a gift to Trump.

Nothing I've written since the election has engendered more anger from people who usually agree with me than my periodic assertions that Trump voters are human, too. But I grew up in Trump country, in rural Oregon, and many of my childhood friends supported Trump. They're not the hateful caricatures that some liberals expect, any more than New York liberals are the effete paper cutouts that my old friends assume.

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Maybe we need more junior year "abroad" programs that send liberals to Kansas and conservatives to Massachusetts.

Hatred for Trump voters also leaves the Democratic Party more removed from working-class pain. For people in their 50s, mortality rates for poorly educated whites have soared since 2000 and are now higher than for blacks at all education levels. Professors Angus Deaton and Anne Case of Princeton University say the reason is "deaths of despair" arising from suicide, drugs and alcohol.

Democrats didn't do enough do address this suffering, so Trump won working-class voters — because he at least faked empathy for struggling workers. He sold these voters a clunker, and now he's already beginning to betray them. His assault on Obamacare would devastate many working-class families by reducing availability of treatment for substance abuse. As I see it, Trump rode to the White House on a distress that his policies will magnify.

So by all means stand up to Trump, point out that he's a charlatan and resist his initiatives. But remember that social progress means winning over voters in flyover country, and that it's difficult to recruit voters whom you're simultaneously castigating as despicable, bigoted imbeciles.

© 2017 New York Times