Don't Believe What They Say

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” - Maya Angelou

“When someone tells you who they are, doubt them every time.” - Me

I still hear talk that Trump supporters are decent people who voted for him because of economic anxiety, not racial prejudice. Ask them and that’s what they’ll say. But there’s a world of difference between what someone tells you and what they show you. Believe actions, not words.

Trump’s economic policy was all over the place during his campaign. Americans can’t compete because our wages are too high, but we should raise the minimum wage. We need to cut taxes for everyone but also decrease the deficit. Wall Street is corrupt but don’t take policy advice from poor people. Incoherence, ignorance, and incompetence. So to suggest that people supported his economic vision was to insult their intelligence: he offered no vision and his gilded words were transparently false. To think people bought his schtick is to think very little of them.

And since his administration has started it’s been worse. Tax plans that favor the wealthy and increase the burden on single, middle-class parents. A cabinet full of Goldman Sachs executives and billionaires. A healthcare plan whose only consistency is a huge tax cut for the rich. Still no details on infrastructure, no real increase in job growth, and a steady decline in growth forecasts. But his base is still with him. They’ll tell you he’s improved our economy and they are optimistic. None of that is true or rational.

What has been consistent is his bigotry. His attacking and denigrating those with dark skin and different religious beliefs. He started his political career by slandering a black President, launched his campaign by denigrating Mexicans, and received loud cheers bashing Muslims. In fact, bigotry-based actions like the Muslim Ban and increased immigration enforcement are the only areas of success his administration has had.

Does it make more sense to believe Trump supporters are stupid rubes who don’t understand much of anything about our economy and support tax breaks for the wealthy, or to believe they (being mostly white) have racial anxiety and rationally support the man who is taking concrete steps to help secure the supremacy of white Christians in this country. I don’t have to ask them to know what their reasons are - they’ve shown me plenty.

Your Friends Aren’t That Special

Let me start by stating that I have a great group of friends, both of the personal persuasion as well as my wider social network circles. They’re intelligent and caring, generally well-informed on the happenings of the world, they treat me and everyone I know with respect and empathy, and they definitely make the world a better place. I know they’d help me out if I needed it and I’d be willing to do the same for them. They’re good people. But the thing is, they aren’t that special.

I’m pretty sure that everyone out there has a group of friends that they consider to be upstanding people, better than the ordinary, and we’d all like to think it’s proof of our great taste in people, but if everyone is special then no one is. What this tells me, what my rational mind forces my ego to admit, is that people in general are pretty good. While my friends may not be a perfect representation of American demographics - they definitely tend to be white, middle-class, well-educated, outdoorsy, and liberal - they are representative of the type of people you’ll find at every strata of our society. My friends, and everyone else’s, are America.

This is important because how we treat our friends, how we think about them, the kind of reasoning we use to justify their bad behavior or explain away actions that are inconsistent with our philosophical beliefs, doesn’t get applied to everyone else. It should. If our friends aren’t special, if they are just a somewhat random cross-section of the population, even if any one group doesn’t cover the entire spectrum of diversity in America, then we should treat everyone the same way we treat our friends.

I’ve read a number of articles on the concept of in-group thinking when it comes to politics, but the usual narrative likes to break things out by demographics: working class white males, urban-rural divide, partisan parties. People don’t think that way. They think about people they know (their friends or larger social circle) and about people as a type (the ‘other’). Their friend on disability deserves it because he worked hard before bad luck befell him. Their friend who ran up credit card debt isn’t a bad guy at heart - he coaches the little league team, after all. The neighbor down the road who has three kids from three different men just has low self-esteem, but she’s fundamentally a decent person who needs food stamps to feed those lovely kids. On the other hand, welfare recipients are lazy; city dwellers are violent; politicians are liars. No slack is provided, no benefit of the doubt or a helping hand offered to those whom never physically cross their path.

This disconnect between how we treat our friends vs. the rest of society is at the heart of the how our personal beliefs play out in the political sphere. It’s the reason devout Christians can vote for policies that are an affront to everything the church teaches, the reason women vote for candidates who openly disparage women’s rights, the reason a minority member supports a party that discriminates against minorities. It’s the basis for every attempt to cut government programs that benefit people we don’t know, even if we have friends who we feel deserve those benefits.

If we all became a little friendlier, not in person but simply in the attitude we take towards the world at large, we’d choose differently. We’d see the good in people we don’t know, we’d respect their challenges and listen to their complaints. We’d recognize their errors as only one side of a whole person and offer second chances and new beginnings. We’d be willing to sacrifice a little bit of our own largesse in order to help the community as a whole. That’s what you do for friends, you treat them like a person and not a people.

The 100 Person Test

Policy can be abstract, and while it is best driven by data and analytics, it's often very useful to think about it in terms of real people. But you can get too real - personal stories have a lot of power for persuasion but they can also be easily dismissed as mere anecdote, lacking connection to our own everyday experiences. Somewhere in between impersonal numbers and tales of strangers lies a sweet spot. A useful exercise is to consider one hundred people, a number small enough for us to grasp yet large enough to offer a realistic distribution. What do our decisions mean for the 100.

For instance, let's consider government aid programs. When people talk about cutting programs, their argument almost always is the same: some people who benefit don't deserve it. We all know some people deserve help, but it's hard to view their gain as our own, whereas when someone undeserving gains, whether through fraud or simply exploiting loopholes, it is viewed as our loss, and people hate to lose more than they like to gain. So people are always ready to cut aid programs to prevent getting taken advantage of, and they like to think such cuts will cut off the undeserving without affecting the deserving. That's not how it works. Most government aid programs already have stringent measures to prevent the undeserving from taking advantage of them. Not that they're perfect, but perfection isn't possible. Simply cutting the funding for a program affects everyone, and often reduces the amount of effort put forward to prevent fraud and waste. If you want to help anyone, you have to accept that some help will be siphoned off to those who don't need it. So what are the tradeoffs you're willing to make?

Let's say a hundred people receive food stamps. Food stamps have strict income requirements and stern rules for what they can be used for, but it is possible to get around them. Maybe 10 of those 100 are undeserving (actual estimates are lower, but let's go with a high fraud rate at ten percent). Is it worth reducing the benefits to the 90 who need it in order to root out the dastardly ten? To let 90 people end up hungry because they can't afford enough food? Does it matter that the majority of those 90 deserving recipients are families that include children, the elderly, or disabled persons? Even if it was 50 underserving out of 100, would you be willing to make 50 people go hungry in order to stop a different 50 from getting a free ride? Or would you stop for a second and consider that only two percent of your tax dollars go to help the poor feed themselves, and be willing to let some people get over on you in order to keep children from malnourishment? What's more important, your pride or a hungry child?

On the other hand, let's look at mortgage interest deductions. It's really just another government aid program, reducing the tax burden of those fortunate enough to be able to afford a house. It also has some waste/fraud, people who cheat the system for their own benefit. But in this case, the 'deserving' people are generally those who earn more than the average American and include the very wealthiest individuals. If 10 people are unfairly taking a tax deduction, are you willing to cut the program and limit the tax deduction from the other 90 mostly well-off people who would still be fine without it? Yet, for some reason, I never hear this topic come up when people discuss government waste or people gaming the system, even though it costs five times more than food stamps and a higher fraud rate. Hmm.

The programs people always talk about cutting are largely the ones aimed at helping those most in need -  food stamps, Medicaid, Disability - when the program offering aid to the well off - tax deductions, business subsidies - often have much higher rates of improper usage. But we don't see those people. We all see the person at the grocery store buying soda with food stamps, the person with handicap plates who gets out and walks into the mall. Of course, we don't know their full story, don't know if they buy soda once a year as a special treat for their honor roll kid, or are in remission the day you spotted them walking pain-free. It's much easier to assume they are undeserving and thus there are too many undeservings out there. We don't see the tax cheat, we don't see the business use a loophole to avoid paying their fair share. We might know it happens in the abstract, but if they don't rub our faces in it we don't get angry about it. We should. We should be mad when people cheat the system. But we shouldn't let our outrage hurt the people who need help even if that means we live with a little outrage once in a while. Out of any hundred people I assume most of them deserve my help. How about you?

Bad People

During the 2016 campaign, I opined that anyone who would vote for an explicitly racist, bigoted misogynist who showed no understanding of important issues or the basic functioning of government was a bad person. An acquaintance took umbrage because he knew some of those people, they were his friends, and he knew they weren’t bad people, even if he didn’t agree with their choice. They were mothers and fathers, hard-workers and taxpayers, good Christians who helped their communities and treated people with respect. He had a point.

I didn’t admit to being wrong (because who does that) but further clarified my statement. No person is entirely good or bad; we are all made up of positive traits and negative ones, with a balance that shifts and a rather arbitrary line that demarks one side from the other. It is quite possible to commit a bad act and yet have enough good deeds to make up for such an error. I should have said that voting for such a horrible person, giving an ignorant buffoon such power over our lives and the world we live in, was a truly awful act, but that one act, no matter how reprehensible, did not determine the balance of a person’s soul. As my acquaintance so desperately wanted to believe: they could still be good people.

But that was before the election, before the very clear evidence of exactly what the presidency of such a petulant man-child would look like. Now we know. I’ll say once again: anyone who supports the administration, the racist policies, the dismantling of our social safety net, the disregard for the basic rule of law and principles of democracy, is a bad person.

Let me expand. Their support is bad in the good vs. evil sense of the action, but as I stated earlier a single action cannot define a person’s totality. They may very well have a lot of good in them. But bad also refers to quality, of the good vs. poor kind. If someone can look at the past six months and not realize how awful it has been, who doesn’t see the danger in our executive branch obstructing  investigations into their own criminal behavior, who can’t recognize the constant lies and misinformation, who won’t admit the hate and harm coming from the head of our government - well, that’s a bad person. They are bad at being a person. They are a failure at adulting.

Being a person, as opposed to an animal, requires thought and reasoning, a sense of our own sentience, and an understanding of the basic facts of reality in our world. If you can’t think on your own and simply believe the lies coming from the White House and its many right-wing propaganda arms, you are a disgrace to your own humanity. I know it’s a sweeping pronouncement, I know it includes a significant portion of our populace, and many of those folks do, indeed, possess positive traits and contribute to good in the world. But incompetence on this basic level, and never in my lifetime has there been a case of government evil so basic and understandable as our current situation, is simply inexcusable. Anyone exercising even a small amount of gray matter put towards understanding how we got here, what is happening, and how much harm is being done to millions and millions of people, could not fail to see the error in our electoral choice. This is bad, the people who support it are bad. But they could change.

The thing about being bad at something is it also implies the ability to improve. You can get better if you work at it. Read some history. Study some economics. All you need is the basics, simple understanding of accepted facts. Then listen to the words of your neighbors. Read mainstream (and historically accurate) sources. Stop repeating the lies and talking points. Become a better human being and join the rest of the world in repudiating the hatred and ignorance that comes from our Commander in Chief. We all can do better. We can be good people.

Analogies: Fair Play

Imagine you’re playing a basketball game, but for some arbitrary reason the refs decide your team only gets to put four players on the court against your opponent’s usual five. Clearly, that’s unfair, and you complain, but the refs won’t change their decision. What do you do? You play as hard as you can. Your work your butt off, you expect your teammates to do the same, and you give it everything you have. But the result is most likely you will be way behind by half-time. So maybe the refs then decide it wasn’t really fair. So for the second half you’ll get to play with five players. All good, right? No, not really. Even at five on five, is it really fair? After all, the refs who disadvantaged you are still calling the game. How likely are they to be fair in the second half? Especially if you look at the stats and see that they call more penalties on your team. Wouldn’t it be quite reasonable to be suspicious of their ‘fairness’?

But even if the refs were truly impartial, the game wouldn’t be fair. You’re starting the second half way behind. Maybe if they forced the other team to play with four players against your five in the second half, that would be fair? But do you think the other team will agree to that? No, so you’re still likely to lose the game. How long do you have to play at five on five before it’s fair? The next game? The rest of the season? No, that loss will still affect your chances of making the playoffs. You’d have to play a long, long time, much longer than the one half you were disadvantaged, before it would approach fair. And everyone deserves fair play, right?

We had slavery on this continent for three hundred years. We had Jim Crow laws for another hundred. We still have a lot more fouls called on African Americans and people of color than on white Americans. It isn’t fair yet.