An Election Social Media Exchange That Inspired Me

Engaging in good-faith conversation can uplift. Let's do it more.

Shortly after the 2024 Presidential election results were announced, George Yancey, the author of Beyond Racial Division wrote a post on Facebook that inspired me.

Below, is the content of his post and a brief exchange between me and another person. Her name is Jess Ghad. I feel that both George and Jess made important points. Most importantly, I was inspired by the sincerity and the willingness to engage in a way that was fair-minded, ethical, and respectful.

I’m sharing this with Jess’s permission.

George Yancey’s Original Post

So in 2016, I was stunned that Trump's presidential run lasted more than a month As it drugged on I made it my mission to talk as many people out of supporting him as possible. It did not occur to me that he could actually win until I saw the numbers on election night. After his election, I decided not to invest the emotional energy to change the minds of the people who voted for him but I did attempt to persuade Christians to hold him accountable for his race-baiting, crudeness, sexism, xenophobia etc.

After he was defeated in 2020 I figured he was done and glad that he would be out of the body politics. I figure he would either get too old, be jailed by his political enemies or be marginalized in the Republican party. When DeSantis faded in the primary, I steadied myself of the real possibility of a second Trump presidency.

And that presidency is upon us. I still think of Trump as sexist, race-baiting, egotistical, and intellectually incurious. But I do not have TDS. As such I have reluctantly come to this conclusion.

Donald Trump will be a consequential figure in United States history.

I am not saying this because he will end democracy. He will not. I am not saying this because I have confidence in his domestic or foreign policy. I do not. I am saying this because somehow, against all expectations he has put together a coalition that not only crushed the Democrats but it is historic in nature.

When have we seen a cross-racial coalition of the working class? Not in my lifetime. I would have never thought that Trump could do that. How can such a crude man build such a coalition? What about the race-baiting and arrogance of him? That is a puzzle historians will debate for a long time.

My take is that he came at the right time. A time where the working class felt neglected, alienated and ignored. Somehow this billionaire has connected to them. Maybe it is his rudness so that he can be the personal middle finger the working class wants to send to the elite. His ego probably has helped him to weather the attacks, fair and unfair, from the Democrats may have earned respect from the working class and allowed him to portray himself as marginalized. For whatever reason Trump is at the center of a political realignment and it may have happened without him. But we will never know that for certain and that makes him consequential.

I still think of Trump as an egotistical clown. But I cannot deny the impact he is having in our society. And this realignment may not be all bad. Having the working class linked across racial lines offers tremendous opportunities for the right person to do some good. I do not see Trump as that person but perhaps a future Repubican leader might be that person.

My Brief Post Summary

A thoughtful take. A multi racial coalition of the working class could become a powerful force in the future with political leaders with wider appeal and less crudeness. It would be good for the country.

Brief Exchange Between me and Jess

JESS:

Fred Hampton didn’t shoot himself and MLK JR got shot right after addressing a crowd of blue collar white working class people because he was expanding his reach by fostering this very sort of union.

That is not what Trump is going to do or what he is trying to do. Trump merely cobbled himself together a slim majority by playing to ALL of the most fringe groups at once. This why his speeches are mostly gibberish. Because incoherence and half finished sentences with winks and nods and dog whistles allow all these disparate fringe groups to substitute their own contradictory ideologies in for what he’s saying.

Meanwhile our media landscape (the infotainment networks, podcasts, YouTube dominating content and social media algorithms recruited more and more people into a completely alternate reality via manufactured and fictional narratives) has been a slow building and incredibly effective propaganda machine for Trumpism via many of these fringe or minority groups.

He also didn’t pull much of a black vote. He got 13% of the black vote. That ain’t exactly pulling people together.

He got roughly have the Hispanic Latino vote and almost 40% of the Asian vote because both of those groups tend to be suspicious of socialism and trending toward conservative ideas.

Trump won largely due to the white vote among men and due to support among baby-boomer aged white women—because Racism and Homophobia and Internalized sexism.

This isn’t mere dismissal. This is fact.

It is a grievous mistake to see what happened as any sort of movement toward unity and it is a fatal error to look for it in the MAGA crowd.

STEVEN:

Jess Gard, what you’re saying here makes sense to me. It’s almost like people were able to project whatever they wanted onto him given his style of rhetoric.

Still, I personally know many people who voted for him, and they do not fit the profile of racists or homophobes. A good number of them are worried about what they perceive as authoritarian crackdown on freedom of speech and the willful advancement of false narratives. It’s seemingly paradoxical given all the lies that Trump tells.

Just to be clear, this post I shared isn’t from someone who is a Trump supporter. He’s generally a nuanced thinker and has published many writings on healing racial division.

Thanks for weighing in. I didn’t follow the election very closely this time around so I’m not fully confident in my own takes.

JESS:

Steven J. Lawrence, I’ve been arguing with people on the left about the free speech issue from the get-go. It is my foremost biggest problem with the left and the false narratives are part and parcel of that.

I realize the guy whose post you shared isn’t a Trumper. My problem is that his approach to viewing Trump as a possible blue-collar unifier is wrong headed.

There’s this peacemaker impulse on the left that while admirable is also our biggest weakness.

It’s similar to the free-speech issue in its effects.

In order to secure its place on the ideological high- horse, the left has identified almost every fighting instinct as wrong and has collectively sublimated our more assertive impulses into some seriously puritanical behavior.

But, they aren’t the only ones sublimating. You say that you know Trump voters that aren’t racist or sexist or homophobic. Except that they sublimated those problems. Sure they aren’t those things because they think it is wrong and they don’t want to be those things.

But they also don’t mind voting against the interests of those groups because they’re more concerned about the left erasing language? Or is because they really feel that strongly about hitting the EPA and getting all the free oil even though the US is at an all time high for fossil fuel production and it’s really what we’re doing with it (selling it to other countries) that’s a problem? Or is that they believe this strange dogma that trade tariffs will work even while we have no US manufacturing infrastructure to take up the gulf in demand for goods that would balance that side of the equation?

Because, frankly, Steve those aren’t the arguments that the Trump voters I know are making.

The Trump voters I know are freaking out about criminal immigrants, are calling me a baby killer for a joke, are saying George Floyd was a drug addict and criminal. They wouldn’t call themselves racist… they’re just calling it like they see it.

I have a family member who was voting blue. Until the Karen Read trial. Because of the State Trooper who got suspended. Because “men talk like that”. This guy was so worried about not being allowed to say awful stuff about random women to other men in private that he switched parties. The argument that a state trooper has a duty to protect certain information and maintain neutral objectivity as part of the massive responsibility of his job had zero bearing on my male relative’s desire to badmouth women who have Crohn’s Disease should he so choose.

That is sublimated misogyny.

Trump doubled his black vote to 13% this election. It edged him over. But, it was black men. Not black women. And it was younger black men. And there’s a significant amount of misogynist content coming over the social media for young men of all races right now.

The only women Trump won a slim majority over was white women and it was mostly baby boomer white women. And that’s because of a thing call complicity.

Also, the transphobia thing has been wild. In the past five years I’ve become more aware of this dormant transphobic impulse than I ever was. I’ve been pretty steeped in LGBTQIA awareness my entire life. I just had an awful lot of people around me who were gay or lesbian and many who seemed to be engaging with transitioning or flirting with it. And I had to take a step back recently to think about the way I other transwomen in my philosophies. I would never do it explicitly because I wasn’t consciously transphobic but, man, some of my guiding philosophies certainly were. That was tough work and while I was working on it, my take on the entire dialogue around transwomen in sports shifted completely.

Trump ran a campaign designed to recruit splinter groups and he used the language of division to do it. This wasn’t working class unification. It’s not working class unification when you’re going after the job security of public school teachers and women’s rights. It’s not working class solidarity to support union busting.

Trump’s solidarity is nothing of the sort. It was pandering to the most divisive aspects of our culture right now and taking advantage of the culture wars.

We are having a culture war backlash because the left pulled out their own incisors out in an effort to “do better” and then refused to see themselves in the mirror. We started gaining ground and then immediately move toward policies of oppression in order to force cultural change—which cannot be done.

JESS [Continued]:

There is no bright side to Trump winning. It’s a call to action and that action is going to necessitate some serious housekeeping on the left.

We oughta sharpen our tongues and our wits and start earnestly engaging in a dialogue that we’ve been collectively sublimating for over 20 years now and stop yelling at people about educating themselves and start wise-cracking and letting out motor mouths do what they do best. Which is truth tell.

STEVEN:

Jess Gard, I can only say that it is rare for me to be engaged with from a self-identified person on the left with the level of thoughtfulness in your comments.

I honestly don’t have much to add because I find myself not only in agreement with your analysis but look forward to exploring further some of insights you’ve shared.

I’ve felt for a long time that interpersonal correction, bullying, and unnecessary reputation destruction has seeped into the culture of leftist activism…. To such an extent that many of us who lean in that direction find ourselves more at home with center right people.

At least they talk with us and reason things out in the way that you are doing.

Would you be willing to allow me to publish your comments as a guest Substack post?

JESS

I would be honored.

SUMMARY

When people take the time to work with me and help me to see other perspectives, I am always grateful—especially when I detect sincerity and open-hearted immediacy in the person I am having an exchange with.

These are the kinds of exchanges that are needed if we truly hope to see the world become a better place.