Residents of Kennett, Missourri have come to regret voting for Trump now that his administration is deporting one of their favorite locals, The New York Times reports. So of course this has sparked another recurring feud in the discourse: do we get to engage in a ridicule now that Trump voters are getting what they asked for? Or did they not actually ask for this?
I have a hard time stomaching this argument. For one thing, because this insistance that Trump voters necessarily backed everything about his agenda is blatantly at odds with another line I always hear from Democrats: that voting for the Democrat does not mean you endorse his full agenda. That’s what the left hears every four years when it’s time once again to vote for the lesser evil. And since the Venn diagram of people making these two arguments is almost a perfect circle it seems obvious that these are just partisans opportunistically adopting and dropping arguments — not comrades who are interested in maintaining consistent politics.
More to the point, it seems patently absurd to me to say that Trump voters saw coming something that literally no one saw coming. Trump has trafficked in extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric his entire career, but during his first term we saw exactly what that meant: mostly a quantitative escalation of deportation practices that Obama already had in place and that Biden largely continued. Even Trump’s most extreme move — the 2017 Muslim ban — was a very different program than what we are seeing now. It is a testament to the radicalism of Trump II that our country has never seen a deporation campaign this aggressive, this far-reaching, and this eager to flout the rule of law. We gain nothing by downplaying that and spinning it as foreseeable and predictable.
I want to emphasize this point because it’s being grossly ignored in this debate. Everyone understands that there is a wide gulf between what Trump says he will do and what he will actually do. Occasionally liberals will admit this themselves: see their recurring proverb during his first term that we should “take Trump seriously, but not literally.” When Trump says that he is going to build a big, beautiful wall for example everyone knows that we are not actually going to get some American version of the Great Wall of China on our southern border. When Trump says he is going to make a deal with China and Russia that gets everyone to cut their military spending in half, we all know that this isn’t going to happen. Trump says insane hyperbolic stuff constantly, and sometimes he actually follows through and does it, but other times he does not.
This discrepancy between political rhetoric and political practice isn’t some unique aberration exclusive to Trump: it’s a primary feature of American politics. If you don’t understand it you’ve misunderstood something extremely basic about our democracy. Politicians say things that they don’t mean all the time, and that we know they don’t mean, and everyone votes for them anyway because they think they have no other choice. And that’s why we have to take the gap between rhetoric and practice seriously: it reflects the absence of democracy in our country.
In a country with a functional democracy I doubt we would be having this conversation at all: as of last year’s election only 39% of voters considered immigration one of their top three issues. Issues like this get pulled from the political margins because powerful partisan actors have an interest in hyping them up. Trump knows that he can get away with loudly pandering to a small fringe that is really passionate about immigration because most of the country is politically demobilized. That’s a sign that we have an anti-immigrant problem, but it’s an even bigger sign that we need to fix our democracy.
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