The Atlantic’s Peter Wehner had an excellent piece yesterday on the willful ignorance of the average Trump voter. He refers to a term known as motivated ignorance, which is when people ignore facts, data, and outright reality if it does not suit their beliefs and motivations. Wehner writes:

“Motivated ignorance is a widespread phenomenon; most people, to one degree or another, employ it. What matters is the degree to which one embraces it, and the consequences of doing so.”

A bit more on that “most people” part in a second, but first, let’s dig into how it applies to Trump voters. During Trump’s first term, I heard and saw a lot of people describe Trump voters as “fooled” by the nonsense.

That may have been something to believe then but now? At some point, you have to take responsibility for your beliefs. Wehner writes about non-Trump historical examples, including two prominent 1950s anti-segregationist ministers Albert Garner and Carey Daniel:

Now ask yourself this: Did the fierce advocacy on behalf of segregation, and the dehumanization of Black Americans, reflect in any meaningful way on the character of those who advanced such views, even if, say, they volunteered once a month at a homeless shelter and wrote a popular commentary on the Book of Romans?

 

Readers can decide whether MAGA supporters are better or worse than Albert Garner and Carey Daniel. My point is that all of us believe there’s some place on the continuum in which the political choices we make reflect on our character. Some movements are overt and malignant enough that to willingly be a part of them becomes ethically problematic.

At first, Trumpism was written off as a reaction to economic anxiety. Anyone who dared say it had to do with racism would get quite a response from a too-significant number of non-Trump supporters.

I remember being told I was being very divisive and that the real problem was polarization, that people on the left were as bad as Trump supporters, that it “wasn’t in my DNA” to think that fellow Americans could ever be bad, and so on. Others who were seeing what I was seeing had similar experiences. These were, of course, opinions that required a leap of faith that was not supported by the reality at the time, and more importantly, a heaping slice of motivated ignorance. This also can be quite upsetting, especially if you heard people who you love or at least like tell you that criticizing people with horrifying views made you their equal, and/or that your own views (healthcare for all, clean energy, fighting hate aimed at LGBTQ/race/gender/etc) were somehow moral equivalents.

Wehner struggles some, like I do, with assessing the morality of people who seem decent yet celebrate Trump’s lies and treat his cruelty and disdain for the rule of law as not just something to celebrate but to aspire to.  Political opinions are one thing, but it’s different “if the falsehood you’re embracing and promoting is venomous, harming others, and eroding cherished principles, promoting violence, and subverting American democracy,” as Wehner states.

That the sweet lady in your church, or the neighbor who smiles and waves at you while you jog past their house, or the coworker who helped you change a flat tire hold beliefs that lead to terror and death are difficult for many Americans to wrestle with. Many want to deny it’s real. But history tells us about people who seemingly are Good Humans who end up being cogs in machines of genocide or fascism. The film The Zone of Interest tells the story of a Nazi commander’s happy family life at their home just outside of Auschwitz, where his wife gardened while the smoke of crematoriums wafted over their house. Hannah Arent’s concept of the Banality of Evil explored how regular people and bland bureaucrats carried out Nazi atrocities as part of their job.

The thing is, just like the people who posed smiling for photos (sometimes with their children) during early-mid 20th Century lynchings of Black Americans, these people didn’t spring up out of the ground. The January 6 rioters came from all walks of life. They all have neighbors, family, friends, etc.

We desperately as a society want to believe that “all people are at their default good” and to be honest, that is a very dangerous and wrong concept to hold about our fellow human beings. It leads to things like people referring to anyone from a child molester to a serial drunk driver as “a lovely person” and saying this as if it is a defense that makes all the bad things go away. Or treating the people who are saying “hey this is wrong and we should do something about it” as somehow as bad as the person committing the wrong deed (or the deed itself). It can lead to justifying inhumane behavior, and in our current time, lead people to practice motivated ignorance.

Right at this moment, we are facing a time when a presidential election is not simply about whether our economy will be more business-friendly, or about tax brackets, or even the silly stuff of our political past, like flag-burning controversies. The cliche of “what you are doing right now is what you would be doing during the big threats to our nation in the past” is hard to dispute. I feel like a lot of people right now are engaged, perhaps more than what the polls tell us, but there are still those people who want to ignore the demon in front of them.

Whether or not the hard-core Trumpers will admit to their role in trying to manifest the darkness that Trump wants to bring to America in a second term is something I lean strongly towards “not.” They are fully, and willingly, in a cult that speaks strongly to their deep hatred and cruelty, so they revel in it. But for the rest of us, I think back to the story expert on fascism David Neiwert told about his professor’s assignment to gather information for the Nuremberg trials. The professor spoke with people who lived near one of the concentration camps:

The villagers, he said, knew about the camp, and watched daily as thousands of prisoners would arrive by rail car, herded like cattle into the camp. Even though the camp never could have held the vast numbers of prisoners who were brought in, the villagers knew that no one ever left. They also knew that the smokestack of the camp’s crematorium belched a near-steady stream of smoke and ash. Yet the villagers chose to remain ignorant about what went on inside the camp. No one inquired, because no one wanted to know.

 

“But every day,” he said, “these people, in their neat Germanic way, would get out their feather dusters and go outside. And, never thinking about what it meant, they would sweep off the layer of ash that would settle on their windowsills overnight. Then they would return to their neat, clean lives and pretend not to notice what was happening next door.”

 

“When the camps were liberated and their contents were revealed, they all expressed surprise and horror at what had gone on inside,” he said. “But they all had ash in their feather dusters.”

In closing, two things. First, no one has ever become wiser by purposely ignoring information, so it is incumbent that people understand what is really happening, no matter how hard it is to accept. Second, I do not buy the idea that Trump 2 is inevitable, there is a lot of evidence that is not true. But the election right now is very close, and if people who think of themselves as good either stay home or vote for Trump because of gas prices or whatever, then they too will have on their feather duster.

The last word goes to David Byrne: