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US Politics for $1000: Who said the following three quotations about whom?
"You know how you make America great again? Tell {him] to go to hell."
“He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”
“I think he's a kook. I think he's crazy. I think he's unfit for office."
A Democrat? An anchor from a liberal-leaning news network? No. It was GOP Senator Lindsey Graham in 2015 and in 2016, talking about a candidate for President. A year and half later, Graham said, “I’m concerned by the media’s attempt to label [him] as a kook or not fit to be President." Recently Graham said, “To every Republican, if you don't stand behind this President, we're not going to stand behind you." What happened? Graham compromised, like approximately 90 percent of Republicans who had previously opposed the nomination. Why? Graham’s approval rose as he defended and aligned with 45. A recent Winthrop poll showed Graham's numbers ticked up since he began cheerleading for the President. Graham conceded his political motivation: “If you don't want to get re-elected, you're in the wrong business." To get along with his fellow South Carolinians, he got behind 45, just as other people may have backed off from even mentioning his name to get along with a spouse, a boss, relatives, or the person staring back at them in the mirror.
But by what process does someone end up backing a person s/he called a crazy, race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot? Ask your neighbor, family members, and co-workers. Some of them wouldn’t want their kids to say (or tweet) many of the things 45 says and tweets. They wouldn’t approve of their kids making thousands of false claims. But a lot of them voted for 45. It turns out, quite a few of them, secretly.
A 2019 study entitled “Motivated Secrecy: Politics, Relationships and Regrets” found that many people who voted for the current President didn’t discuss it with anyone. Why? They worried that voicing their political support would create conflicts with those around them, and expressed concern that if they revealed who they really voted for in 2016, “their reputation would suffer. It was this second motivation—concern for one's reputation—that made people's secret votes particularly burdensome. When people were more concerned for their reputation, they were more likely to ruminate on the secret. In short, they felt disingenuous in their interactions with others” (Michael Slepian, 2019). This touches on the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, and suggests that political polarization in the U.S. might be even more extreme than we thought, where folks’ voting behavior remains cloaked in secrecy even from their closest friends and family members.
While I do think it’s okay to hold folks accountable, and to question why they support someone, this study gives me pause. Public critiques of his supporters' morality or congruence (or vote shaming) may just perpetuate folks’ tendency to say one thing in public and to pollsters, and do something else in the voting booth. Sort of like Vegas, but what they did in there doesn’t stay in there.
Chuck Rosenberg, former federal prosecutor, and host of The Oath podcast, has this to say about the slippery slide into incongruence and moral compromise: “People make bargains with themselves. ‘I can hold my tongue and I can live with this because I am doing x and x is more important in the long run.’ And once you start making bargains, and rationalizing the trade-offs, you’re done.”
In my life, friends who laughed off the possibility the current President would even get nominated (even bet $100 he’d never get the Republican nom, but for some reason haven’t paid up) actively and vociferously support 45 today no matter what he does or says. Their loyalty to him is unfaltering, even as their loyalty to who they were and what they believed has seemed to fade.
People tell themselves fictions every day so that they can rationalize all sorts of things, just to get by—just to make their lives, their jobs, their relationships, or the political situation in the country, livable. I prefer the truth: About who we are, what we believe (for example, accountability, the importance of coequal branches of government operating with checks and balances, and that no one is above the law), and about where we are going as a nation. How about you?
