In Doppelganger, published in 2023, Naomi Klein wrote about what she calls the mirror world. She began to research doppelgängers after people, during the early days of the pandemic, began to confuse her with Naomi Wolf, who was then in the process of metamorphizing—or, “transitioning”—from being a left-wing feminist to a right-wing media star. On social media, the two began to orbit around each other because they had the same first name (this is roughly akin to assuming that Taylor Swift is Taylor Sheridan’s daughter) and they sort of look alike (this is roughly akin to thinking that all white, Jewish feminists with brown hair look alike). Oddly, this is a testament to how identity in the world of social media is built on senseless associations. Klein, not surprisingly, wanted to understand why she was being criticized for what Wolf said and did.
As part of her research into doppelgänger literature, the psychological theory of doubling, and her real-life doppelgänger, Klein went deep into the mirror world of right-wing media, including Steve Bannon’s podcast. This is how she describes that world: “Rather than being defined by consistently applied principles—about the right to a democratically controlled public square, say, and to trustworthy information and privacy—we have two waring political camps defining themselves in opposition to whatever the other is saying and doing at any given time.” The world of Trump, Bannon, and now Wolf, mimics the world of liberals, what we might smugly call “reality,” by adopting its language and issues while simultaneously transforming them. Think back to simpler times when George H.W. Bush spoke about “compassionate conservatism.” That was fairly benign and, if compared to what is happening now, unambitious. Those who listen to Trump’s speeches and Bannon’s podcasts live in a complete world that, to them, resembles a home, a virtual place that is safe enough within while being threatened from forces beyond its boundaries. With current media, it is a home they rarely need to leave.
As Klein shows, the Trump mirror world is created as a reflection of the Liberal World, and this process is about the adoption and transformation of terms. Even before Trump began his campaign in 2015, he was appealing to that mirror world and helping to create it, especially as he questioned Obama’s citizenship.
How do we deal with the multiplication of worlds? We are not citizens of Athens in the fifth century BCE arguing with other citizens. A strict reading Aristotle’s Rhetoric, thus, does not offer much guidance. It is as if we are barbarians trying to persuade Athenians, a rhetorical situation that Aristotle never even considered. (Lloyd Bitzer defined a rhetorical situation as “a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence.” He was, in short, asking us to look not just at the text but also at the context.) The rhetorical situation is, I believe, even more complex than what Klein describes, and she describes a staggeringly complex rhetorical situation.
Even if we accept that there is a real world with a clear history and clear facts, we should acknowledge that the way we view that world is still largely constructed. We should acknowledge that how we view even our own world needs to be questioned and critiqued. This includes stepping outside of our own personal narratives—the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how we fit into a community. If we revised our own personal narratives, move from simple stories that buttress a fragile self to more complex and unfinished narratives, we can tell stories that are more authentic, that build empathy, and that form communities.
In historical periods when we are less divided, stories bring us together. When we are more divided, when we cease to share stories and practice political discourse, the world becomes worlds. I have my world, I imagine your world, largely as a negation of my own world, and you do the same. The result in a series of refracting or colliding worlds. The material world, socially constructed worlds, imagined worlds, reactions to imagined world, and so on. It is more complex than Athenians trying to persuade Athenians, or even barbarians trying to persuade Athenians. We are trying to communicate within multiplying worlds that morph more quickly than we can learn their language and customs. It is like two mirrors that face each other and create an endless repetition of images that move progressively further and further from the source. But even this metaphor does not account for how the image is distorted as it is replicated and how the media that sustains these distorted images are, at the same time, becoming something unfamiliar. Our discourse is becoming post-human. What we see is controlled by algorithms, AI crafts messages microtargeted to individual voters, and bots are more familiar than our closest friends.
We are facing a rhetorical situation that is more complex than at any other point in history, largely because of changes in the technology of media and the cultures these media have spawned. A traditional rhetoric, an Athenian rhetoric, will fail us, but we can develop new means of persuasion. This means finding not just a new rhetoric but also a new way of thinking about our rapidly changing world.
Aristotelian rhetoric views issues as binaries—that the city should go to war or negotiate peace (deliberative rhetoric), that the defendant on trial is guilty or innocent (forensic rhetoric), that a public figure should be praised or blamed (ceremonial or epideictic rhetoric). As our societies have become more complex, issues are less binary and more multifaceted. While an issue like whether or not to halt logging to save the spotted owl might seem binary, it impacts a wide range of groups who come to the issue with multiple motives, perspectives, and goals, much of which is economically based: logging companies, loggers, small business owners, environmentalists, educators, economists, and politicians. (As these positions proliferate, voters express increasing frustration when forced to choose between two options at the polling booth, neither of which significantly reflects their views.) Rhetoricians must consider each of these groups an audience, and each group demands its own rhetorical strategies, maybe even its own rhetoric. Even if we focus on a single group, say, environmentalists, we should realize that this audience is diverse within itself. Some of this group might be willing to compromise; others will take a hard line. Some may engage in peaceful demonstrations; others will resort to ecoterrorism.
It is appropriate to try to make sense of groups, but we also need to be cautious about how we characterize any group. It is easy, we should keep reminding ourselves, to make sense about a group that we rarely encounter. If “we” think we have figured out “them,” then we are probably mystified. Any group is complex, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, MAGAs or Wokers.
When analyzing groups, Aristotle considered broad categories, like young men versus old men. Only men. And only free men. Aristotle only considered one medium—speaking. We still need to analyze audiences in broad categories, like Republicans and Democrats, MAGAs and Wokers, and be cautious about how well this analysis reflects reality, but we also need to recognize that Big Data and AI, which can swing elections, are not so subtle, at least, in their current state. For example, I am a hopelessly heterosexual male, not that there’s anything wrong with that. I am sure, however, that in Big Data and the Cloud, I am pretty Gay. Why? Because I often “like” posts that support LBGTQ+ rights. No heterosexual male, Big Data seems to assume, would support the Gays. At the same time, we should all recognize that there is about 500 data points about us collected somewhere in cyberspace that will be used to send us personalized messages.
At the same time, Big Data and AI have already moved political campaigns into a new rhetorical era, and we are only in the nanoseconds-after-the-Big-Bang of this era. The Trump campaign of 2016, largely under the direction of Jared Kushner and Brad Parscale, was quite sophisticated about identifying key voters and micro-targeting messages for audiences of one—a unique message to a single persuadable voter in an important voting district. The Hilary Clinton campaign was not. Can American democracy survive when presidential campaigns focus on about 80,000 voters in three states? At some point, we need to have a national debate on how technology is undermining democracy. Until then, we need to preserve democracy, short term, before we can discuss how to preserve it, long term.
If employing a more traditional rhetoric, real people analyzing real people, audience analysis inevitably deals with motives. We should assume, as Kenneth Burke has argued, that people have multiple and conflicting motives for any single act. We should start with this: Not everyone who voted for Trump is a hardline MAGA. Some are already willing to elect Trump as President for Live; others see him as the lesser of two evils. In The Insurrectionist Next Door, a 2022 documentary, Alexandria Pelosi interviewed a range of people who participated in the assault on the capitol on January 6th. Some of them are members of the Alt-Right, but some voted for Obama in 2008. Pelosi interviewed a brother and sister, neither of whom is particularly political. The sister, who had never engaged in a political protest, was curious about what would happen in DC on January 6th. Her brother, who seemed to have no opinion about Trump or any other politician, went with her to make sure that she would be safe. Once they were part of the crowd, they were sucked up into the events, and now both face jail. A man that Pelosi interviewed, apparently a good husband and father, has “Proud Boys” tattooed across his forehead, yet he seems confused about why he became involved in the insurrection. Despite the tattoo, he even seems ambivalent about being a Proud Boy. One of the scenes in the documentary shows him beginning his jail sentence. When we move away from those who participated in the riot on January 6th and those who attend Trump rallies, we find even more diverse motives. When we, similarly, move from those who attend Trump rallies to those who voted for him, maybe without much enthusiasm, we find even more diversity. Should someone who voted for Trump to support low taxes be considered a racist or anti-Semite or fascist? Or, is that person stupid? Because the audience is diverse, no single argument or strategy will stop what Liz Cheney calls “our slow slide toward totalitarianism.”
We can see the failure of strict Aristotelian rhetoric—how most of us were taught to argue in school—on hundreds of YouTube videos. Jordan Klepper, correspondent for The Daily Show, has interviewed many MAGAs outside of Trump rallies. He focuses on pointing out their contradictions or logical flaws. This is Klepper’s exchange with a MAGA woman:
JK: It’s “Make America Great Again.” So, when was America great?
MAGA: It’s always been great.
JK: So, if it’s always been great, what are we going back to?
MAGA: We’re not going back. We’re going forward.
When he asked another MAGA woman if a woman could be president (this was when Trump was running against Hilary), she answered: “No. A woman has more hormones. She could start a war in ten seconds. If she has hot flashes, boom!” Klepper asks, predictably, if a woman leader had ever started a war. The woman’s brain seems to shut down.
Jason Selvig, one of the founders of The Good Liars channel on YouTube, uses Bible verses to satire Trumpers. The following exchange is with a man and a woman outside a Trump rally:
JS: Do you think the Bible should be taught in schools?
MAGA Woman: Yes. Most definitely. Because children have gotten away from that. You know, because they have. And it needs to be put back into the schools, Catholic schools and public schools.
JS: So the Bible should go back in. Do you think that there are books that should be banned from schools?
MAGA Man: Um. Yes, of course.
JS: There is a book that has a story about two daughters getting their father drunk and having sex with him. Would you want that in the schools?
MAGA Woman: No, no.
MAGA Man: No, of course not.
MAGA Woman: That’s the Devil’s work. We don’t want the Devil’s work in schools.
The story about the two daughters—yes, you saw this coming—is from Genesis 19:30-37. These videos are entertaining. So are the monologs on late night talk shows, which are almost universally anti-Trump, and the sketches on Saturday Night Live, which Trump hates. Anti-Trump satire might sustain anti-Trump voters, but I don’t think it has persuaded anyone. In some ways, it feeds into the rhetorical situation of the typical Trump rally, where Trump rails against the elite left—in other words, intellectuals. These videos act out Trump’s stereotype of liberals—the anti-Trumpers are smug, aloof, arrogant know-it-alls. For the left, the videos create and sustain a stereotypical view of Trump’s supporters—they are the white, hyper-religious, close-minded, racists.
We need to question these stereotypes and find other ways to engage each other. I am not even sure that the MAGA that we argue against actually exists—at least, outside of a Trump rally or a fringe Internet group. There are, I believe, something we might call a MAGA that exists within the rarified atmosphere of a MAGA rally. I also believe that fairly normal people become MAGAs within a MAGA rally and want to carry that identity into the world, beyond the porous boundaries of the home group. They exhaust themselves trying to protect this fragile identity that is at odds with truth and the most basic of human relations. We tend to think of MAGAs (I hate using the term, but I haven’t figured out a way around it yet) as dogmatic and incapable of change, but I believe they are quite brittle and easily broken. The purpose of their dogma, we should realize, is to protect a fragile world view that is at odds with a rapidly changing reality. (Later in these essays, I want to write about how time has been speeding up for well over a century.) This is why they act rather predictably when their world is disrupted with facts, history, or contradictions.
In these videos, the targeted MAGA fails to understand the irony, shuts down in confusion, or stalks away. Many directly say some version of this statement: “I know what I know. I don’t want to hear anything about facts, or studies, or science.” As yet another precursor of a move toward totalitarianism, groups of MAGAs have started to act like Brown Shirts, the street thugs in Nazi Germany, by showing up at comedy clubs to heckle comedians who tell jokes about Trump. The far right is moving toward violence and the left is responding with satire.
While satire is important to democratic discourse, it is more effective when it attacks ideas or leaders as a means of cutting through double-speak and propaganda. This is what George Orwell did. It is also part of electing a president as opposed to serving an absolute monarch. The Lincoln Project has been developing a series of advertisem*nts to undermine the adoration of Trump. I suspect this will be effective with only a small number of marginal voters. Maybe that will be enough, but I doubt it. George Conway has suggested that the Biden campaign should direct advertisem*nts to an “audience of one”—that is, Trump—for the sole purpose of provoking him to react badly. Conway has gone as far as taking out a billboard to poke Trump in the eye. Maybe these strategies will have positive effects. But, making the typical MAGA look stupid also feeds our smugness and stokes their anger. Our smugness is exactly why MAGAs resent “elites.” Instead of playing a role in the rhetorical situation of Trump rallies, feeding the beast, we should explore other options.
If we are to avoid Bonhoeffer’s Dilemma, the choice between continuing normal modes of persuasion and resorting to violence to fight radical evil, we—anyone who wants to counter Trump and save democracy—need to find ways to engage in dialogue, even with those who hold views we could never support. This will demand new ways of thinking about rhetoric. Since Aristotle’s Rhetoric, we have thought of political rhetoric as arguing for a particular value, set of facts, or policy. The underlying assumption of most rhetorical theory is that our audience is rational, willing to listen, and capable of change. (In later essays in this series, I will investigate Trump’s audience in more detail.) Much of this theory precedes modern psychology and the study of narcissism and sociopathy. It precedes sociology and the study of cults. It precedes communication theory and the study of public relations and propaganda. It precedes media studies and research on social networking. Rhetorical theory has adapted, although not as quickly or as completely as we might hope. We still, as Aristotle would advise, need to analyze our audience. But we also need to think beyond Aristotle. We may never be able to convince Trump or hardcore MAGAs, some of whom are our friends and relatives, that our policies and values are correct—that we are right, damn it. If, however, we continue a dialogue, especially when we focus more on core American values, we might convince those on the other side that we are, at least, human beings, flawed maybe, but worthy of respect.
Hannah Arendt believed that totalitarianism, both Naziism and Stalinism, initiated a break in Western history and thought. It developed, although she did not say it in these words, a new rhetoric. In a biography of Arendt, Samantha Rose Hill wrote that Arendt’s “form of persuasion is a way of remaining open to language and the radical possibility of otherness.” Arendt wanted to shift persuasion from the goal of trying to convince others that they should adopt a particular policy to a broader question: How do we find a way to live together that makes life worth living? Finding a new rhetoric is part of moving toward this goal. That rhetoric, as I will explain throughout this series, is about a shift (1) from thinking about audience as individuals or a group of individuals to thinking about it as an entire organism that grows, that consumes the world around it into its world, like a swarm of Zombies, and (2) that needs to be disrupted in multiple ways, repeatedly. When I was talking about this approach to rhetoric with my son, he said, “It’s like death by five-hundred cuts.” Yes, but it can also be like “persuasion by five-hundred nudges.” Even saying, “I don’t agree with that,” is a disruption, one that is more like a nudge than a cut.
One goal of this new rhetoric, even with the most extreme MAGAs, might be to shift from “a woman has a right to choose” to “violence is not justified.” I am not saying that we shouldn’t argue policy; I am saying, instead, that we need to begin with thinking about our own ethos. We need to recognize that calling the opposition “a basket of deplorables” is undemocratic. It is not the equivalent of saying those who oppose us are “communists and vermin” and need to be “eradicated,” but it still fails to promote dialogue. It presents our group as “beyond virtue” and their group and “beyond vice”—the extremes that Arendt denounced. Instead, we need to think about this: How can I present myself to people who are drifting toward totalitarianism as an individual, not a stereotype; as a human being, not an idea; as a fellow citizen, not a threat; as someone who listens, not as an elite. If we find the thinking of a MAGA foreign, then dialogue with them is even more important.
Part of this dialogue should include uncomfortable questions. When dealing with depressed patients, therapists typically ask, “Are you considering suicide?” If the patient answers, “No,” that is a promise. This question has saved lives. When discussing politics, we may need to ask, “Are you considering violence?” Even when talking to family and friends, we need to ask, “Should someone like me, who has my beliefs, be murdered or eradicated?” We need to engage fantasies of violence and show where they might lead, not to the adoration of a hero but to the destruction of lives, the murder of innocents, and the destruction of our democracy. If we don’t make fundamental shifts in how we think about political discourse, we will mirror the anger of those we have trouble understanding. If we cease to listen, if we are afraid to ask difficult questions, we might soon reach Bonhoeffer’s Dilemma.
Part of the process should include looking to history and understanding how we read and use history. I am sure that Hamilton, Madison, and Jay knew that their reading of history would have flaws; in other words, they knew that they were also flawed humans. Reading history, trying to imagine how the Founders read history, should make us less certain about the survival of democracy and our values. While saying that our truths were self-evident in 1776 gave birth to a new way of thinking about human rights, we should not assume, in 2024, after the Holocaust, that those rights are still self-evident, even when speaking to fellow Americans. Democratic discourse should include discussions about the values of democracy—terms like equality, justice, rights, and freedom—and how they might make America and other democracies exceptional. In these essays, I will write about how history is seldom present in Trump’s rhetoric. The distant past is five minutes ago. The future is reduced to a vague dystopia. The present is what has always been.
As we read history, we should also reflect on our political rhetoric. If we want to understand Trump and the movement that made him, we need to understand his rhetoric and its historical context. We need to understand the limitations of our own rhetoric. Why did Cicero, one of the most effective speakers in Rome, fail to counter Caesar’s consolidation of power? Why were artists, writers, and philosophers unable to stop the rise of Hitler? How is it that we failed to see the arrival of Trumpism and warn others about its dangers? Part of this examination, this reflection on our own rhetoric and its limits, that is often neglected, is how Trump’s opposition—for lack of a better term, the intelligentsia—has also failed to learn from history. I have been as guilty of this as anyone. They—we—have reacted, as humans do, instinctively, as a form of mimesis, countering hostility with hostility. This has the effect of escalating tension instead of finding common ground.
Another lesson we could learn from history is that, when history does repeat itself (basically, not exactly), it is revealing human nature. More precisely, a pattern of history reveals an aspect of human nature, not its totality, but as some limited truth that should demand our attention. One of these limited truths is that, in dark times, our fear makes strong leaders more appealing, even when they want to throw out the constitution, even when they announce that they want to be a dictator.
Most importantly, reading history should be a way of understanding our own flaws and finding our own personal checks and balances. One way of understanding an evil that is beyond understanding, the radical evil of Hitler or Stalin, is that they began with a set of assumptions and then moved in a linear path to create a system that is as rational and self-contained as systems constructed by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, and most philosophers through Hegel. With a few crucial differences. Hilter and Stalin never questioned their assumptions, they never considered the counter-factual, they never reflected on their process, they never attempted to image opposing views. The kind of thought that complements democracy is constantly undermining its own system or entirely rejecting systems. It is provisional and open to the voices of others. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian critic and philosopher, called this kind of political discussion dialogic. It is a discourse of many voices, each of which is allowed to speak.
Part of this process is trying to imagine a different history, which might help us to imagine multiple futures. As David Graeber and David Wengrow demonstrated in The Dawn of Everything, humans have found many ways to live together. Sometimes, a society might shift its entire structure with the seasons. We need to learn about the rich diversity in human history. We need to imagine multiple futures.
How various groups view history and the future is part of their rhetoric. In Humanism and Terror, a commentary on Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote: “There is a sort of maleficence in history: it solicits men, tempts them so much that they believe they are moving in its direction, and then suddenly it unmasks and events change and prove that there was another possibility.” In a later essay, as I attempt to analyze the MAGA world, I will say that MAGAs, as they exist in the MAGA world, fear change. This is understandable. Our the technosphere of our world is changing at an increasingly rapid rate. Maybe, we should all acknowledge our justifiable fears about the future.
Our view of history, unspoken and unexamined, may be in the background, but it is there. History deals not just with the past but also the present and future. If we are fixated on a limited view of the future, we may feel that violence is our only option. Those outside of Trump’s orbit see an America, to use Liz Cheney’s recent phrase, that is “sleepwalking toward totalitarianism.” Does this view of history justify violence against MAGAs? Trump and many of his followers see an America that is dragging them toward a dystopia where they will become the marginalized. Does this view of history justify violence against anyone who opposes Trump? While most Americans reflexively align with one group or the other, how many have considered other views of the future and options other than violence? If history needs to be unmasked, at Merleau-Ponty believes, the Civil Disobedience of Thoreau, Gandhi, and King should be one of our options. There is more to Civil Disobedience than non-violent action. It has its own rhetoric. Its foundation is not a fragmented view of history. Rather, it is an inclusive view of humanity. In “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau wrote: “The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is progress toward a true respect for the individual.”
It is difficult to hold onto human dignity as a foundation, especially in times like ours. In Doppelganger, Klein explores a wide range of doubling—brands, avatars, stereotypes, etc.—and how it fragments our society. In Jung’s model of the self, the Shadow, the dark side of our personalities that erupts not as isolated ideas or actions but as fully constellated personalities, is part of this dynamic. The Shadow is the “other person in us,” often a parent or adult who harms us, a person we repress because we say to ourselves, “I will not allow myself to be like that person.” The more we try to separate our conscious identity from this other person, the more that Other lives in us and affects our behavior. Stories with doubles or doppelgängers, as Klein shows in detail, narrate how the Other attacks a character’s conscious identity. The way to release the hold of the Shadow or doppelgänger is to explore our connection to it, as Klein explores her connection to the other Naomi. We need to find ways to engage Trump supporters rather than mock or avoid them. It might help to think of the ultimate enemy as loneliness. In the end, we are all battling loneliness in a world that is becoming more and more unfamiliar. No matter what your taste in music, you probably know a song about trying to find our way home. Being homeless is part of our modern reality.
As we encounter Trump supporters, we need to avoid mimesis, that is, imitating Trump, mimicking his anger with our own elevated anger. This means fighting natural responses with something else, something that is disruptive, that breaks an escalating feedback loop. Questions might work. In Attitudes toward History, Burke says that questions help to establish communion. Questions say I want to understand you. When with family or friends who are Trump supporters, we might ask: “What are the values that bring you to support Trump?” Statements from a situated “I” are also an option, as in “I am concerned about . . . , ,” or, “I believe in . . . ,” or, “I am afraid that . . .” This kind of statement might be particularly effect on social media, where traditional arguments are either ignored or provoke hostile responses.
One of the intriguing behaviors of many Trump supporters is that they assume people in their immediate environment must think as they do. They will begin a conversation with a stranger, ranting about how Biden is ruining America, as if they already know that they and the stranger are political twins. While it might be unproductive to argue with them, we can simply respond, “I don’t agree with that.” If they keep talking, we can keep repeating the same phrase. This does not win the argument; it does not even initiate one. But it lets them know that many people—even those who look like them, maybe even fellow Republicans—do not necessarily agree with Trump or his policies. Who knows, it might even open a dialogue.
Ultimately, the 2024 election will likely be won during informal discussions at kitchen table. At the kitchen table, with family and friends, we need to begin with love, then move to basic values, then move to a reminder of what is normal and abnormal. We need to ask questions and listen. One of our questions should be about how they see the future. I imagine that, for many of them, their view of the future is quite different than Trump’s. This is how we can start.
We also need to shift our sense of the time frame of arguments from short term goals to goals on a broader historical horizon. Liberals win a battle, like Roe v. Wade, and then they take four or five decades off to celebrate. Conservatives lose a battle, like Roe v. Wade, and they start working the next day to gain control of the judiciary, jerrymander districts, win school board elections, and pass state laws. Conservatives—maybe Christian Nationalists is more appropriate here—effectively overturned Roe v. Wade long before the Supreme Court pronounced it dead. Liberals said that the 2020 election would be a turning point in history; now, they point to the 2024 election. Even if Biden wins in 2024, Trump and his supporters will still be among us. If we read history closely, they have always been with us. Democracy is and will always be a fragile experiment. There is no momentous battle for the future of equality and justice. Part of life is engaging in the struggle that does not end.
In abnormal times, we need to search for original rhetorical strategies, and we need to reset our goals. This might strike at the core of our identities. If our goal is to prove that the other person is stupid and we are smart, we will only increase divisions. To move out of this mindset, we must start with changing who we are. I need to recognize that I don’t have to be the smart one or the one who wins. I need to be open to changing my positions on key issues, maybe even open to changing some of my core values. I need to develop a democratic ethos. I will come back to this repeatedly in this series of essays. For now, I will simply say that what I am calling a democratic ethos is a project to which a number of authors have made contributions, beginning with Montaigne in his Essais, first published in 1580, long before the American Revolution and the origin of modern democracy. What we should learn from Montaigne—and other authors who have written in his tradition, including Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman—is this: An examined self-in-progress that is willing to linger with unresolved doubts is more open to forming an inclusive community—the kind of community that supports democratic thought and action.
For now, I will simply say that we don’t have to be smug and superior. To paraphrase Ted Lasso who quotes Walt Whitman, we can curious, not judgmental. We can lead with respect for others, which means asking questions and listening. If our goal is to win an argument with a Trump supporter, we will almost certainly fail. We don’t need to mimic the “we/they” dichotomy that makes us “beyond good” and them “beyond evil.” This is hard to avoid, and I have used the “we/they” dichotomy in this essay. The key is to invoke the duality and then work to undermine it, which I hope I have done. Whenever we lapse into “we/they” thinking, we need to look for common ground, even if that is agreement on the most basic of values. We can acknowledge the gray area between the extremes of the issues that divide us. If our goal is to eradicate Trump and all MAGAs, we should realize that we are doing our part to destroy democracy. If we dehumanize “them,” we dehumanize “us.”
