I met one in the airport last night. Let’s call her Nancy. She is a white upper-class woman, who told me, during the course of our conversation at the airport bar that she makes over 100k per year. When we first met, she seemed nice enough and said she was eager to hear what I had to say about the state of the country. Before I answered her question, I asked her what side she was on and she said she had voted for Donald Trump.
I asked her why, and most of what she said was not substantive. She wanted a “change”, said that “He is imploding the whole thing” which she didn’t seem to think was bad, though she admitted to being worried about his personal instability. Her main issue was not immigration, but as far as she’s concerned, she earned her money, and she shouldn’t have to pay taxes for other people’s health care. It’s morally wrong, according to her, that people are not denied service at Emergency Rooms even if they can’t pay. “They are never turned away!” She said, “it’s not right!” She rejected any reflection on what this said about her moral priorities when I asked directly, “so your money is more important than someone’s life?” She just repeated: “Health care is not a right,” insisting that the high costs of medical care for her are based on paying for other people’s care (rather than for profits of private health care providers.) “I don’t want to pay $50 for a box of tissues because other people don’t pay for their healthcare.”
I tried to explain to her that our health care is more expensive than what it costs in other countries with public health care or insurance, and how the lack of insurance drives up ER use (though it turns out, this is a myth). She was having none of it, flatly denying that other countries have figured out how to pay less for health care. I talked a bit about Single Payer and she denied it reduced costs, but then the conversation took a conspiratorial turn. She went on that the secret of Obamacare was that it was intentionally set up to “not work” so that we would be forced to go to Single Payer. I told her this was ridiculous, suggesting that private insurance companies and the protection of their profits by BOTH parties was the reason that Obamcare didn’t work. When I asked her where she got her information about the secret plan to make Obamcaare not work she said, “don’t you know, the architect of Obamacare, he said it himself….you know, the Jewish guy.”
Maybe it was the look in her eye, or the tone of her voice, or the fact that I’d been reading Rebecca West this week, but I was done with politely listening to the other side. She protested that she had many “Dear Jewish friends.”
In Rebecca West’s post-war essays collected in A Train of Powder, there is a comment from someone she describes as an able Jew who had returned to Berlin after the war. I think he explained a voter like this one pretty clearly:
You see, under the Nazis, strangers did not come by night and take you away unless you were a Jew or an important Social Democrat, or an important liberal or a party member who had got in with the wrong higher ups. If you were not a Jew or a conspicuous politician or party member, and were an unimaginative person as well, you did not realize what this meant, and perhaps persuaded yourself that it didn’t really happen. And if you were a sufficiently unimportant German, who only knew the people next door, and had no Jewish friends, and never joined the party, then you might very well never get any intimation that it really did happen . (Rebecca West, “Greenhouse with Cyclamens II, 1949)
And today it is only ICE that is knocking on the doors of the homes, schools and churches of immigrants, and only “random individuals” who burn down Mosques or shoot Black people in church, or call bomb threats to the Jewish community centers, and the President and his cronies only advocate the silencing of protesters and newspapers who oppose them, or who dare to criticize the police. But voters like Nancy can live in their bubbles, spending their money happily on their comforts, while others suffer, invisible, outside the boundaries of their limited imaginations.
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