(Normal commenting rules apply).

A while back, a friend asked me to explain why Donald Trump was still popular, despite everything that has happened in the last few years, and why society is in such a mess. Why do so many people still support him? This is a somewhat expanded version of my answer.

I’m going to start with a silly analogy, and then work on from there.

Imagine you are part of the Harry Potter fan fiction community, back when it was great. The first four books are out and you are waiting eagerly for book 5. The first movie has come out, but the movies have not yet started to cast a long shadow over the community. It was a crazy time. There were thousands upon thousands of fan-written works set after book four, many suggesting different paths the series could take after Voldemort’s return, or exploring aspects of the universe that would be thoroughly jossed by the remaining three books, or crossing over with other books and universes. There were essays and character studies and literally millions of takes on the universe, veering from excellent pieces of work to ones that should probably remain unmentioned.

And, of course, there was the shipping. Who will Harry marry? Ginny? Hermione? Cho? Professor Snape’s daughter? Draco? Mary Sue? The pairings were endless, ranging from vanilla to the frankly very dubious. Each and every one of these pairings had people arguing that their pairing was the One True Pairing, even the ones that were more than a little dubious. They were so invested in their pairings that there were endless fans wars over which pairing would be the final pairing. Like I said, it was a crazy time.

And you are part of this. You promote your own pairings and argue against others that you don’t believe to be plausible. You see yourself as engaging in intellectual debate, with people who may disagree with you but are not actually bad. Just because someone is in the wrong doesn’t mean they are a bad person. Unfortunately, you are wrong. Some people are very bad people indeed. And they’re just waiting for their next target.

You put forward an argument that goes like this: “Harry/Draco and Hermione/Draco are unlikely to work because Draco is a bigoted prat and, even if he changes his mind, Harry and Hermione are still unlikely to want to date him because he is a bigoted prat.” You think this argument is entirely reasonable. Bigots do not want to date the people they are bigoted against, and those people do not want to date people who are bigoted against them. Your argument causes an interesting debate, with some people arguing that Draco can and will grow out of his bigotry, and others agreeing that Draco is a ‘bad boy’ but that is part of his attraction. The debate goes back-and-forth for quite some time, and you are enjoying yourself enormously …

… And that is when That Guy arrives.

You will come to think of this person as Stupid Lying Gobs**** (Gobby for short). Gobby is a troll … no, he’s a cyber-bully, a harasser, a monster, the kind of person who takes delight in tearing down people who have accomplished more in a month than he will in his entire life. Gobby has no principles, no sacred cause; he has a certain diabolical cunning that allows him to cloak his actions in the guise of respectability, or at least what is respectable at the time. He – or his spiritual ancestors – were bashing people for being gay (regardless of whether they were gay) in the 1970s; now, they’re attacking people for being homophobic (ditto). They don’t care about their cause – it’s just an excuse to bully people and feel righteous while doing it.

Gobby reads your post, and insists you are a homophobe.

At first, you make the mistake of thinking that this is a honest misunderstanding. Surely, you tell yourself, you can explain yourself properly and Gobby will understand that he has made a mistake. So you try, only to have Gobby turn words against you; taking everything you said out of context, insisting that innocuous phases are dog whistles, and going on and on and on about how horrible you are. Eventually, he starts lying outright. It starts to get under your skin, particularly as your (fair-weather) friends start to inch away. You start to feel alone, under constant attack, and it makes it harder to step away.

Why do your friends abandon you? Some believe very firmly in Harry/Draco and they are happy to believe that homophobia is the only reason anyone might oppose their One True Pairing. Others hear the lies and find it impossible to believe that someone could lie so blatantly. The lies are repeated so often, as Goebbels pointed out so many years ago, that they take root and flourish, even though they are outright lies. And still others are secretly on your side, but they are too scared of Gobby to say so openly. Gobby is, at heart, a schoolyard bully … and no one wants to be friends with his victim for fear of being victimised themselves.

Gobby goes on, and on, and on, and it tears you apart. Sometimes, you are goaded into saying something that Gobby can use to insist that he was right all along about you. Sometimes, you leave the community, posting a goodbye screed that makes you look – in hindsight – absolutely ridiculous. Sometimes, you just try to ignore him and carry on, but Gobby will not rest until you have been driven out completely. You discover that part of your life that you loved has been ruined, by this monstrous troll and the pieces of bovine faecal matter he says about you.

Your hatred for Gobby is beyond words. It screws with your mind, destroying all moral clarity. You pray for a chance to meet him in a back alley, with a baseball bat in your hand and no inconvenient witnesses … not that any jury in the world, you feel, would convict you even if there were a dozen eyewitness accounts and a CCTV recording. You pray for him to suffer a terrible accident. You tell yourself that blowing up an entire country of 68 million people is a small price to pay, as long as it means getting rid of Gobby. It goes on and on until you eventually calm down, and try to rebuild your life, only to discover that Gobby is still there and every time you show your face he pops up to remind everyone of the Ron The Death Eater version of you, the version that does not exist outside his fevered mind yet far too many people believe because the lies have been repeated time and time again. No matter how hard you try, you will never rebuild what you have lost. Gobby will make sure of it.

(Image from TV Tropes)

You carry on, sadder and wiser. You never forget, and you never forgive.

And then, a new player arrives.

This person’s username is ‘IHateHomos.’ They write detailed articles with titles like ‘Dumbledore cannot possibly be gay because Dumbledore is the big good and all gay people are evil” or “Dumbledore being gay is proof that he is eviler than Voldemort and Umbridge put together.” Whenever IHateHomos is challenged on his bigotry, he responds by calling his opponents homophobic slurs and generally mocking them.

Just in case there is any doubt, IHateHomos is a 100% homophobe and a complete w***** to boot.

Gobby is over the moon. For the first time in never, he has finally discovered a real homophobe. (Actually, given the number of people he accuses of homophobia, he is bound to be right sooner or later.) He starts his usual spiel: IHateHomos is a homophobe and everyone should unite against him.

And you look at the evidence and you decide that Gobby might be a complete so-and-so, but he’s right and so you work with him to chase IHateHomos out of the community …

Right?

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

No.

This is Gobby we are talking about, the person you know – beyond a shadow of a doubt – is a liar, a bully, an abuser, and a lot of other horrible things. If Gobby told you it was going to be sunny tomorrow, you would make sure to carry an umbrella with you. Nothing Gobby says can be trusted, as far as you are concerned, and you have all the evidence you need to convince yourself that this is true. And so, when Gobby starts going on about IHateHomos being a homophobe, you don’t bother to look at the evidence; you just think Gobby is up to his old tricks again. Your whole response boils down to:

Silence impression>

“STUPID LYING GOBS****. THE LYING LIAR WHO LIES AND LIES AGAIN. LIE ONE MORE TIME, AND KNOW THAT NO ONE BELIEVES A WORD YOU SAY.”

And this is an entirely reasonable response. Gobby has zero credibility – no, negative credibility – as far as you’re concerned, and you don’t want to waste a single nanosecond of your time on his nonsense. Why should you?

But perhaps you look a little closer. And you see the articles IHateHomos wrote, and it all looks very disconcerting and perhaps Gobby actually has a point …

… And then you remember how he creatively edited your statements, or took things you said out of context, or blatantly lied about things you didn’t say, or beliefs you didn’t hold, or just threw random crap at you to see what would stick. You have excellent reason to believe that Gobby is up to his old tricks again, and that IHateHomos is just another target for his lies. For all you know, his real username is ILoveHomosexuals and Gobby creatively edited his username just to make him look bad.

And again, this is entirely reasonable.

But perhaps you look closer still, and it dawns on you that Gobby is entirely correct and that IHateHomos really is a homophobe. You look closely enough that you cannot deny that you are looking at a real-life homophobe. So you let bygones be bygones, and work with Gobby to toss out the monstrous interloper …?

Of course not. IHateHomos might be a homophobe, but Gobby is a deeply personal enemy (in contrast to someone whose unpleasantness is somewhat abstract). You could not trust him to work with you, and you could not expect him to drop his grudge against you when the campaign against IHateHomos is concluded. You have no interest in exposing your back to him again; you certainly don’t trust him enough to grant him any power over you.

And deep inside, there’s a part of you that enjoys watching Gobby being driven into a frenzy of helpless ranting by this person, no matter how unpleasant, who refuses to allow Gobby to bully him. Gobby’s hysteria is hilarious, his discovery that no one believes him when he points to a real homophobe is just what he deserves. You take spiteful pleasure in watching Gobby get ignored, in watching IHateHomos climb higher and higher even though you don’t like him and you think it is just a matter of time until he falls too. You may even realise that his existence within the community will be used to smear the entire community, but you don’t care.

The truth is, Gobby called so many people homophobes, rather than engaging with them in a legitimate manner, that by the time a real homophobe turned up he had already spent all his cred and everyone just rolled their eyes and ignored him.

Put bluntly:

If you get called a racist because you believe that Picard embodies the ideals of Star Trek better than Sisko, you’ll give the benefit of the doubt to the rectum who thinks black people have no place in the franchise.If you get called a sexist because you believe the Thirteenth Doctor is the worst of the Nu-Who Doctors, you’ll turn a blind eye to the rectum who thinks all female companions should be young, blonde, and have IQs smaller than their bra sizes.If you get called a homophobe because you think the romance in Call Me By Your Name is , you’ll side with the rectum who thinks gay romance should never be depicted in the movies.

You can make a reasonable argument for any of these points, but Gobby won’t let you. He just wants to smear.

And so you hate him, and refuse to listen when he’s actually right.

***

As Scott Alexander put it, we need to have a national conversation about why we can no longer have a national conversation.

Politics is a journey, and two or more people can arrive at the same destination without travelling in tandem. If Jack (who lives in Washington) and Jill (who lives in New England) both wish to visit New York, they will take very different routes to get to their destination and never meet until they actually arrive in the city, if indeed they ever meet at all. Two voters who vote the same way – for or against Trump/BREXIT/The Voice/etc – may have very different reasoning for why. A person who voted for Donald Trump because he thought immigration keeps wages low and expected Trump to stop it, or believes Trump will convince corporations to bring back the factories that were once the heart of flyover country, is a very different case to the person who believes Hilary Clinton is a criminal who got away with it and voted for Trump because the alternative was Hilary.  Both of them are very different, in turn, from the people who cast their vote because they thought no woman could ever be President or that it was time there was a female President, regardless of her other qualifications for office.

Or, to tackle a more thorny subject, the person who wants to ban abortion might be a misogynistic rectum, but they might instead sincerely believe that abortion is murder and allowing abortion under any circumstances will rapidly and inevitably lead to abortion being permitted in all circumstances. In contrast, the person who wants to permit abortion might be a satanic baby-killer, yet they might instead sincerely believe that a woman has the absolute right to control her own body and any infringement on her rights will rapidly and inevitably lead to her losing all rights.

There is a middle ground here, and we could find it if we talked about it, but we don’t. Why not?

Gobby.

It’s all his fault.

His, and everyone who acts like him.

One of the fundamental problems of modern society is that understanding is often taken for approval. To outline why someone might do something, from the harmless to the very dangerous, is to run the risk of Gobby popping up and attacking you:

YOU: The Colonists voted for Baltar because [good reasons].

GOBBY: So, you support a fool who is an accessory to genocide – twice!

It is easier, and safer, to smear anyone on the other side – particularly if you don’t know any of them – than it is to try to understand then. It is no longer possible to emulate Spock and say “I do not approve, I understand.” Instead of engaging with the other side, and trying to put together reasonable compromises, Gobby and his pals make compromise impossible. They also make it impossible to deal with bad actors on both sides – if you’ve watched people get attacked and driven out for spurious reasons, time and time again, you won’t be comfortable doing it again, even when the person in question really does need to be driven out.

Like I said above … if you get called a [horrible thing] and you know very well you are NOT a [horrible thing], you’ll roll your eyes and ignore Gobby when he insists that someone else is a [horrible thing].

The origin of our current problem, therefore, is simple. Instead of acknowledging and addressing legitimate concerns, the political and media establishment has resorted to slander … a tactic that has seriously backfired, because their charges have lost their power long ago … and attacks on free speech, which make it impossible to discuss matters openly and hammer out reasonable compromises. Worse, because smearing and slandering implies an inability to debate openly, it actually gives strength to candidates who are the political counterparts of IHateHomos. Worst of all, because Gobby has weakened or driven out many of the decent candidates, the voters have a flat choice between someone who at least promises to pay attention to them …

… And someone who treats them as Gobby treated you.

History, as Marx pointed out, tends to repeat itself as farce. In 1815, Napoleon returned to France and reclaimed his throne, briefly, despite leading France to defeat the previous year. Why did he succeed? Well, there were a great many reasons, but one of the most important – if you ask me – was that Louis XVIII and his cronies had spent the time between their restoration of the monarchy and Napoleon’s return reminding the French precisely why they’d revolted in 1789. Reconstructing France would have been a difficult task, perhaps impossible, for a man of genius; Louis XVIII was very definitely nothing of the sort. His failure to address the underlying problems of society ensured his regime was riding for a fall. The same can easily be said of Joe Biden.

Why is Trump, despite everything, still a reasonable candidate for a return to the White House?

Because Gobby, and all of the people who emulate him, have made it impossible to address the problems Trump exploited, in his first bid for the White House. And even if Trump drops dead tomorrow, those problems will not go away …