NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE T here is a raging divide in our politics, and where you stand can be determined by just one question. This question doesn’t explain everything in our politics, but it explains a lot of the volatility at the edges. It explains why some formerly stalwart conservatives have essentially thrown in with Democrats. And it explains why some well-established leftwingers have fallen out with their liberal friends. The question is this: Are Republican voters just bad, irrational people?

The classic formulation was given by Hillary Clinton herself, at a fundraiser shortly before the 2016 election:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.

It was an update on a riff given by Obama at a fundraiser during his 2008 election:

It’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

We are often told that populists are subjected to a delusion. They have an “us vs. them” mentality. And to some degree, it’s true. Populism has always pitted what it sees as the virtuous people against the self-dealing elite. It champions producers and doers, farmers, factory workers, policemen, and soldiers — against rent-seekers, speculators, and managers, against the politicians and the “experts.”

But anti-populism has its own crude stereotypes and its own demonology. In fact, the anti-populist caricature of the middle-American threat is just a native version of the Islamophobe’s view of Muslims. “Largely poor, uneducated and easy to command,” to quote the 1993 description of the religious right by Michael Weisskopf in the Washington Post. The anti-populist views the natives as dumb, restless, volatile, and likely to be “activated” to violence by the words of a demagogue. To stave off the dire threat of (checks notes) tariffs, constitutionally appointed judges, and a withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years . . . the anti-populists imagine themselves saving democracy and norms of civilization by siding with the party that threatens to abolish the Senate and pack the Supreme Court.

But it’s the fundamental tribal attitude at work. Some are remarkably candid about this. One typical piece of the genre was by Katelyn Beaty. “I was an evangelical magazine editor, but now I can’t defend my community”:

To secular friends, I noted that today’s efforts to rescue sex trafficking victims and shelter refugees are largely led by evangelical organizations.

To mainline Protestants, I noted that the most dynamic growth in the global church is among Christians whom they would likely consider way too concerned about hell.

To myself, I said that evangelical was about theology, not politics, and at Christianity Today, we always transcended political divides to root the gospel in the local church and not a voting bloc.

In other words, I didn’t want to look disreputable to the respectable people I wanted to consider my peers. Beaty followed it up with the telling confession, “I didn’t personally know any Evangelicals who were vocally supporting Trump.” All the easier, then, to lump them together and denounce them. “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them,” someone once said.

Beaty of course followed this with all sorts of presumably genuine concern that Evangelical support of Trump hurt the witness of Christians. But it was accompanied by a totally oblivious view of how a Trump-led GOP would grow its portion of non-white voters, not all of whom shared the sensitivities projected onto them by white NPR listeners and mainliners.

Leftwingers who don’t think Trump voters are merely irrational beasts have been asking why their party can’t come up with an economic appeal to downwardly mobile white men in the 2020s. Democrats used to win those voters in the Bill Clinton years. Why not now?

Well over 90 percent of the people who voted for Donald Trump to be president voted for Mitt Romney, and for the same reason: They concluded he was the best candidate to serve their interests in that election.

Even now, most of the Republicans supporting Donald Trump do so for completely legible, normal political reasons. Some like his policies more than those they see in other Republicans — whether that’s the trade protectionism, or the promise not to touch entitlements. Some see him as outside of the system of normal politics and see that as a feature. They think he’s electable and disbelieve the polls — probably because the polls didn’t tell them to expect his victory in 2016. They are aware that his statements don’t add up — but see in his contradictory statements a willfulness that they fantasize can be put to work for their interests against the entrenched powers that be.

Rather than deploring this fact and portraying his supporters as the spawn of Satan on earth, it would do the anti-populists well to study the things that worked for Trump. Unlike most politicians, he could express views with humor. Sometimes he did so with welcome passion, as when he offered to “gladly accept the mantle of anger” at the incompetence of our leadership class, or when he discussed late-term abortion in one debate while demonstrating his physical disgust with the act. Then he had the guts to set the stage for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, an accomplishment he embraced in his recent CNN town hall, even as most elected Republicans run away from talking about the issue.

America’s electorate is made up of citizens who genuinely try to vote for what’s in their interests and what they believe is best for the country. If only the people trying to save democracy could show a little faith in the demos.