NO OTHER HAND

Recently the nation has been transfixed by the cold-blooded murder of Brian Thompson, a health care executive, in Manhattan.  The killer, a young man whose exact motive is unclear but who apparently was upset at how the insurance industry makes huge profits by denying care and exploiting people who are poor and sick, has been lionized in some quarters.  He is seen as ‘heroic’ for standing up to this flawed industry and drawing attention to America’s for-profit healthcare system.

I, like many others, agree that our healthcare system is awful.  But most of us can also agree that shooting insurance company executives is not the right response. 

Mr. Mangione is an example of something we frequently face.  How do we judge the actions of someone who has a genuine grievance or an understandable cause for anger, but who goes too far? 

This is the dilemma we face in judging Trump supporters.  Yes, there are real grievances.  But electing Trump is the political equivalent of shooting someone.  It goes too far.  

For many years now Americans have been treated to an extensive series of “on the one hands” about Trump and the MAGA movement.   Recently many of these are coming from liberals and Democrats eager to say “I told you so” or otherwise explain their defeat.  I have absorbed many, many—so many—books and articles and supposedly even-handed analyses imploring us to please, please, open our minds and hearts to understand.  Understand how angry blue collar workers are about de-industrialization.  Understand how rural Americans feel left behind.  Understand how badly high prices are hurting the American dream.  Understand how annoying it is to listen to coastal jackasses lecture endlessly about racism and colonialism and gender identity. 

Yes, there is plenty we need to understand.  But contrary to the adage, to understand all is not to forgive all.  The question is, do these supposed sins and grievances justify Trump?  Not ‘explain’ him.  Justify him. 

When a pitcher who has just been shellacked goes in the dugout and breaks his hand on the watercooler, it’s not hard to ‘understand’ why it happened.  But it’s still a childish tantrum.  When a man who has been laid off and doesn’t know how he’ll feed his family goes back the next day and guns down his boss and six co-workers, it’s not hard to ‘understand’.   He still deserves arrest and punishment.

If the American people and their various political and cultural leaders really cared about  the problems facing them, they had many options other than picking perhaps the worst human being in the country to be President.  They could have picked a different leader.  There are plenty of decent conservatives to choose from.

They could have pursued serious reforms.  They could have fought against the obscene role of money in politics.  They could have fought for changes in the electoral system to make it more responsive and fair.  They could have fought for an equitable tax system to reduce inequality and fund the public programs needed to make life bearable for today’s precariat, like childcare and infrastructure investment. 

They could have fought for universal healthcare, to cut out the insurance middlemen who profit off our illnesses and injuries, and answer to private equity rather than patients. Instead they chose a leader— a whole movement— who is against all these things.

Instead they have indulged in a multi-year tantrum.

Choosing Trump once can perhaps be ‘understood’.  It was possible to think that the Presidency would change him for the better, or that he meant to carry through on plans to create jobs and build infrastructure.  But he proved to be worse than most could imagine.

If you chose him again in 2024 you chose a man who in broad daylight tried to steal an election he lost, and has lied about it every day since.  The effort of shell-shocked liberals and centrists to try and justify the decision to vote for him, much less the decision of elected officials and public figures to support him, is insulting and condescending.  If any voter in America was unaware of Trump’s behavior on January 6, it was because they didn’t want to know.  Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice….

There are two possible ways to defend voters.  One is to say they’ve been deceived and manipulated by a horribly cynical and one-sided propaganda campaign.  Which they certainly were.  Over many years a huge system of bloviators and falsifiers, of algorithm-driven social media giants and billionaires, has grown up to fight tooth and nail against every needed reform and adjustment.  Instead their message has been to inflame opinion against existing institutions and preach the soft revolution of populism rather than the hard work of reform.  In most cases they are aligned with the billionaires and big corporations who continue to want what they have always wanted, lower taxes and fewer regulations and weaker unions.  A message that ‘the system is broken’ makes it easy to sell radical measures to shrink government and upend institutions.   

Understandable, yes. But justifiable, no. In the entire history of the human race, it has never been easier to get access to reliable information or to hear different opinions.  We can make a thousand excuses.  But I think we should have the honesty to say that here in 2024 the voters know exactly what they’re doing.  Many of them simply do not value democracy and honesty and the hard-won knowledge and expertise embodied in our institutions, over other things they hope to get from Donald Trump.  Trump is as well known as anyone in public life can be known.  If you support him you cannot claim you don’t know exactly what you’re getting. 

The second defense might be to say that all available remedies have been tried and exhausted, so Americans are justified in carrying out a kind of ‘1776’, a revolution prompted by a ‘long train of abuses’ without any reasonable way to push back.  There is some truth here as well.  Studies consistently show that the preferences of average voters are ignored in favor of the preferences of wealthy donors.  This has been enabled by conservative court decisions such as Citizen’s United and the overthrow of Chevron deference, and other policy choices—which are of course pushed by wealthy donors, in a vicious cycle that ratchets up the power of money.

Largely as a result serious reforms have been impossible, or turned into half-measures, like the Affordable Care Act, which originated with the Heritage Foundation as a fix that would be acceptable to the right.  Inability to solve problems is then held up as proof of the need for a strong man and bypassing rules and norms.

One might say that if Americans have been systematically deprived of needed reforms by the opposition of the rich and powerful, they have the right to be angry and lash out.  Even if they lash in the wrong direction.

Understandable, yes.  But justifiable, no.  The problem with this defense is that in Donald Trump, voters have endorsed, not rejected, the same legal decisions and policies that disenfranchise them.  They have voted for oligarchy, now unashamedly emplaced with the Trump 2024 cabinet of billionaires and the co-presidency with Elon Musk.  Whereas in 1776 Americans stood against oligarchy and inherited privilege, they now seem to yearn for it.  Self-rule is too hard, is the message.  Better to turn decisions over to someone who tells you “I alone can fix it.”  

A scene from “Fiddler on the Roof” has recently been playing in my mind.  You remember Tevye has three daughters who get married, one after the other, always to someone about whom Tevye has reservations.  Each time when he is asked for his blessing, he goes through an internal dialogue—“On the one hand, on the other hand”—racking up the pros and cons of the match.  For the first two he ends up going along, and each marriage is successful.  But in the third case his daughter wants to marry a Russian gentile, someone who isn’t even Jewish.  Here again Tevye starts the dialogue, but he can’t continue:  “No!  There is no other hand!”  And he walks away from his daughter.  

This too should be a case where “there is no other hand.”