Out in FAFO County (guest post)
“How you talk does not merely express your internal state, it shapes it.”
Amy Olberding is President’s Associates Presidential Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of The Wrong of Rudeness and Moral Exemplars in the Analects: The Good Person is That, among other works, which you can learn about here and here.
Olberding says she is “meant to be writing a book on death and grief, on bereavement. As it turns out, it is more a book I am meant to be writing than a book I am, in fact, writing. When I try to write it—or write at it—I lay words to page only to then lay waste to those pages.”
But she has been writing a series of essays, each one a marvel of writing in a singular voice, with sentences to take your time savoring and ideas to feel rolling around in your head and down to your heart. They’re collected at Shadow Book, and you can sign up there to be notified when a new one is published.
Olberding is rare among philosophers in the United States. She is an expert in, among other things, ancient Chinese philosophy. And she also knows how to fix her tractor. From that unusual vantage, in the following guest post, she talks about professors and the people and their mutual perceptions of each other in our current political context.
This is the fourth essay in the 2025 Summer Guest Post Series. (It will stay pinned to the top of the home page for a few days.)
[photo by Amy Olberding]
Out in FAFO Country
by Amy Olberding
I spent some of spring getting ripped up by barbed wire. Storms that lately passed through our area brought our creek as high as I have ever seen it. The waters were so intense and swift that they ripped up barbed wire fencing that had stood sound for several decades. The waters flung creek debris, wire, t-posts, and even stout corner posts across acres of pasture, and I had to clean all that up. I used the USDA fence cost calculator and estimated our damage at around $5000—a pretty bad tally when you consider that our farm profits last year were $39, just shy of the money I’d need to replace the bibs that got shredded picking up all that wire. But unlike many of our neighbors around here, we’ll be fine. For some it won’t be so. The storms were accompanied by tornadoes, and the destruction these have left extends across the landscape—tin from barns flung into trees, trees torn from the earth and lain across homes, and places that once were homesteads looking now like bundles of trash and broken lumber.
All of this is bad for an area such as ours. The median income in the town nearest us is $27,891, with almost half its population living below the poverty rate. About a quarter of our county’s population is on Medicaid, about 30% of the children here receive food stamps. You don’t need all these figures to know the area is poor, though. You can just look at the people when they smile. Dental care is a luxury many do not enjoy. Such is to say that there just isn’t any give in local economics for clean up and repair. What some have lost looks to stay lost. This is in part because aid to the area has been slow arriving. The federal agencies that would once have jumped to the task have not, and it’s not clear when, if at all, they might be coming.
Why am I writing all of this to a bunch of philosophers? Because some philosophers in my Facebook feed have reveled in news of denied and delayed aid to the Ozarks and, much more broadly, in any news at all that describes how people in “red states” are now suffering from the decisions made by our red federal government. Facebook is the only social media I use, but I assume the same and worse is true across whatever other platforms academics nowadays are using. According to several philosophers in my Facebook feed, the people of the Ozarks “fucked around and found out” (FAFO). We are suffering leopards eating our faces because we voted for the leopards-eating-faces party. More formally, we justly endure the consequences of our own choices—though putting it this way misses the celebratory glee most of what I have seen displays. As one succinctly put it: “Hahahahahaha!”
There are almost surely ways to spin into something good, or at least defensible, the impulse to celebrate the misfortunes of others one perceives to have “earned” their suffering. I expect someone will inevitably chime in below with some of that. But I guess I want here just to lodge a protest, however naïve, and say that I wish philosophy conferred some better capacity for sympathy, compassion, or even curiosity upon its practitioners. I’d even settle for better political strategy, I suppose.
I trust that most can recognize that no area is politically uniform, and that tornadoes and flooding don’t specially pick out Trump voters for destruction. But I wonder why that gets lost in all the Schadenfreude? Perhaps the thought is that those who vote blue but live in red have also failed in acting as they ought? You deserve your fate if you don’t up sticks and move? Or maybe the celebration of suffering counts some collateral damage acceptable—it’s ok if some blue eggs get broken so long as you get the red-mess-omelet justice requires? Whatever the case, pointing out that people on your “side” are also suffering isn’t really the point. For me at least, I’d like it better if people were a little less pleased even when the only ones hurt are the red voters.
I expect that what informs an impulse to celebrate another’s misfortune is just the sense that the misfortune is deserved—in this case, that the misfortune is righteous comeuppance for how one votes. (I am assuming it must be the votes because from what I see around me, no one out here has much spare income or time to give over to political donations or activity. I guess they might be promoting political views on social media, but just like academics do, they’re doing that almost exclusively within their own agreeing bubbles.) I guess the reasoning is that if you vote as you ought not, the rest of us are entitled to dance on the grave of your home, now buried under rubble. Because you wanted this. Or, you should have known this could happen. But surely there is some important moral difference between recognizing that someone has voted against their own interests and the judgment that they deserve whatever follows from that choice. Surely there is some important moral difference between recognizing another’s error and actively celebrating the way he now suffers for and from it. These distinctions seem to matter.
Even if there is some general case to be made that celebrating another’s misfortune has some salutary purpose or good end, I am skeptical that such expressions are helpful in our current political climate. Where I live, I sometimes hesitate to tell people I’m a professor lest they assume I am one of those “elites” they perceive to harbor contempt and scorn for them. But I also sometimes like confessing my profession—say, when I have proven my mettle by repairing my tractor or engineering a solution to the flooded creek crossing, those occasions when my bona fides as a person capable of manual labor are not in doubt. Then, alerting others to my profession, I hope, works as a corrective, a way to say that see, professors really aren’t “the enemy,” we’re just regular people too. So I guess now I’m trying that same strategy in the other direction.
I’m telling you I live in the Ozarks and got cut to bits on barbed wire just so that you-who-celebrate might see that, hey, maybe those people you’re happy to see hung out to dry are not really that different from yourselves. Some of them are people a bit like you. And, as I try to reference above, some of them are a hell of a lot worse off than you. Some of them belong to categories—poor, underserved, socially and economically at risk—that in the abstract you often profess to care about. Nobody here needs your tears, but maybe spare us your mocking laughter? It would also be helpful to the general cause of academia if we who are in it could avoid confirming the worst stereotypes about us.
I am not a political analyst of any kind (which is surely already evident). My most recent work has been in civility and yeah, no one wants to hear about that now. But I can’t help seeing here something of a peril that the Confucians were quite alert to. How you talk does not merely express your internal state, it shapes it. Polite restraint, they understood, was useful as a form of self-cultivation, for it held you back from doing and saying things that would steer your psychology toward a worse version of its possible forms. Say too much that is contemptuous of human suffering and your moral-emotional capacities start to constrict, feelings of contempt become more easy and frequent. Not saying hateful things about other people is a strategy for feeling less hateful ways about them.
For those who enjoy celebrating misfortunes visited on the wrong-thinking, I expect the coming months and years will offer much that you can cheer. Here’s a teaser of coming attractions in my area: our already shoddy and desperate local hospital, the only one for miles around, is unlikely to survive Medicaid cuts and lost USDA contracts will destroy many of the remaining small family farms. So there will be more laughs ahead, but what is all that cheering going to do to you?
Some of my lament surely derives from being out of step with the new conversational norms encouraged by social media. From my vantage, social media looks like a Pavlovian lab for training bad rhetorical impulses, and hence bad moral-emotive impulses, into its population. I don’t much like what it seems most to reward. The tone is forever breezy, witty, knowing, at least when it isn’t scolding, mocking, and deriding. The best combine all of these, dispatching foes with sharp verbal darts while making it look both witty and fun. Hence all the leopards and acronyms, all the once-clever-now-cliched ways of mocking others that feature so often. I sometimes want to wail: I miss grown-ups! That is, I miss the world (perhaps fictive) where adults could not so easily confess publicly their cruelly juvenile tendencies, would not openly deploy hip-with-the-kids rhetoric to sneer at others’ suffering. I wonder if I am alone in this? I expect it’s hard to tell since people like me are just the ones mostly likely to pass by the celebrations in silence.
On seeing so many philosophers posting their Schadenfreude about my region’s late troubles, I did consider inserting a “Hey, you know you have peers out here in the destruction, right?” But I never did. That isn’t really the point. The relevant “peer group” I’d like to see acknowledged is just other human beings, not that far more limited set.
Read more by Amy Olberding at Shadow Book.
One minor addendum to this wonderful post: even if we should think that people who voted for Trump deserve what they get (and I agree with Amy Olberding that we should not), nobody’s minor child voted for anyone, and yet the harm very substantially falls on children.
A view from the coastal elites you caricature and seem to harbor such resentment towards:
‘Are White Rural Americans the Real Threat to Democracy?’ (March 5, 2024)/David Corn
https://link.motherjones.com/public/34564005
“People in rural areas often complain, with justification, that a lot of cultural representation of them is derogatory: hillbilly, redneck, yokel. There’s a tradition of mockery. But there’s also a tradition that has gotten stronger in recent years of cultural representations that present them as a kind of the ideal: the most patriotic, the most honest, the most real and authentic. You see Hallmark and Lifetime movies with the same plotline: A young woman from the city finds herself stranded in a small town or a rural area and discovers her first true love with a hunky rural guy. She dumps her no-good boyfriend back in the city and learns that this place is where she can find her true self. In the political realm, we’ve all heard politicians say what we need in Washington is small-town values. No politician ever runs for office saying we need big-city values in Washington, though you can make a case that’s more valuable when it comes to governing. Democrats and Republicans are asked to pay tribute to rural Americans. They are an honored minority in our political culture…
We can’t talk about threats to American constitutional democracy without talking about who poses those threats. There have been a lot of discussions about Trumpers and MAGA. But there’s been a hesitation, including within the mainstream and liberal media, to point out that white rural Americans, while not exclusively creating this democratic instability, are the tip of the spear. We cite about three dozen polls that are all public. Whether you look at levels of racism, xenophobia, anti-gay sentiment, and anti-immigrant sentiment, white rural Americans exceed the levels of not just minorities but of other whites who live in the suburbs and cities. In terms of conspiracism, they have the highest subscriber rates to QAnon conspiracies, election denialism, COVID denialism, and vaccine skepticism. They had higher rates among Republicans in believing that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
According to Suzanne Mettler at Cornell and her colleagues, in terms of anti-democratic sentiment, distrust of an independent media, opposition to free speech, the belief that the president should be able to act unilaterally, without checks from the bureaucracy, the Congress, or the courts, and the belief in white nationalism—specifically white Christian nationalism—rural white Americans are the leading edge. Whether it’s excusing, justifying, or even calling for Trump to be restored by force to the White House, rural white Americans show the highest rates of acceptance for this idea and for endorsing political violence as a suitable alternative to solve our problems. If this were true of any other group—Black Americans, Muslims, pink-hat-wearing lady feminists—we’d know about it because it’d be a chyron permanently on Fox News. Every talk-show host from Maui to Maine would be blaring how these people are undermining our democracy. But these patterns are true of one group, white rural Americans. And it needs to be said, as uncomfortable as that may be.”
The degree of sympathy, acceptance and forbearance extended to the inhabitants of rural America (who are also a glad to accept the tax largesse that flows disproportionately from urban communities to rural, ensuring the provision of basic services precisely because they’re subsidized by city dwellers, you’re welcome) has never been returned in kind.
Perhaps the lack of sympathy you feel your brethren are owed is lacking precisely because that ration of sympathy has been exhausted for those who, for generations, want to place themselves on a moral pedestal (simply because of living in low population density homogenous communities, it would seem), and seek to impose a rigid minority worldview on the rest of us.
Maybe the disdain is not because of who one is, or where one lives, but how one has acted, year after year.
Perhaps reflect on that.
Just in case anyone thought Amy Olberding was responding to a straw man…
“that ration of sympathy has been exhausted for those who, for generations, want to place themselves on a moral pedestal (simply because of living in low population density homogenous communities, it would seem), and seek to impose a rigid minority worldview on the rest of us.”
Replace “living in low population density homogenous communities” with “living in highly educated diverse communities” and this passage expresses exactly the way that white rural Americans would think about us urban academics. The rigid worldview we’ve promoted over the past decade is more of a minority (in the US and globally) than theirs is.
Where does she caricature the coastal elites?
Whenever I hear this point made, I wonder whether such geographical tax redistribution actually fits the narrative expressed or whether the redistribution is personified less by liberal professionals sending money to Republican hillbillies, and more by Wall Street bankers and Silicon Valley tech bros sending money to poor Blacks in Mississippi and Alabama.
You have some real good points here, Ian, especially about the mythologies of the small town. But they got lost behind some at least apparently unfriendly towards a colleague who, in her public-facing work, has always represented her subculture with honor and respect (she featured on DN years ago writing about being an academic of rural origins). So let’s get back to these points:
Life is complicated and not everything is a contest to see who has victimized whom.
Kevin, there’s a book on the American use of the rural that really enlightening, if you’re interested: Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash. I was amazed to realize how long-lived the theme is in American history.
Thanks Amy! I just put it on a reading list.
I disagree with the thrust of your comment, Ian. Elite, urban, knowledge-worker disdain toward non-urban populations is not only real but much more palpable than any supposed disdain the other way around. (Owning the libs is not a game the working classes tend to play — those cheering the university attacks and unconscionable deportations are elites, mostly of the right.)
Elite disdain is not necessarily put into words or measured in a one-off survey. It’s crystallized and made effective in bipartisan neoliberal governance that destroyed small towns and local economies, in widespread credentialism and the idea that going to college makes you worthy of making people value what you value and telling them how to speak and to live, or in telling those whose small communities were hollowed out to “move to the city if you need a job” or to “learn to code,” to give a few examples.
That said, I do think there’s something to the claim of an elite romanticization of the rural. To that point, there’s a great 30 Rock episode (Season 4, Episode 3) that plays with that idea. NBC exec Jack, an old-school Buckley fusionist, orders left-ish comedy writer Liz to hire a new comic from “real America” instead of from “the People’s Gaypublic of Drugifornia.” Liz keeps insisting that “real America” is nonsense, but Jack won’t relent, until some some antics ensue in a small comedy club in the South. I just thought you might get a kick out of it.
I don’t think I am expressing resentment or disdain for “coastal elites”? I’m writing to my peers in philosophy about a population many of them seem to find alien; if I were writing to what you call my “brethren,” I’d be talking about how professors aren’t really “the enemy” and aren’t trying to “indoctrinate” the youth.
Any attempts at humanizing conversations that seek to dispel caricatures on either side are hampered by people (on either side) who just insist the caricatures are correct. But caricatures are caricatures, and I’m disturbed at how ordinary people’s embrace of the caricature of their opposition so well serves a system that helps neither “side.” Do you not worry that just as a “red” voter may become a useful pawn in a ginned up culture war that undermines any possibility of truly useful political solidarity, so too academics can become pawns? Perceived “elites” smugly mocking rural America may as well count themselves Trump donors with the gift they’re making in enacting his convenient steroetype.
(For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure that on the metric you’re using, I’m married to a “coastal elite” – born in NYC, raised in CT, elite degrees, plays Beethoven beautifully. I’ll ask him if he is one when he’s done securing the corn patch from raccoons. I.e., people aren’t stereotypes…)
“Do you not worry that just as a “red” voter may become a useful pawn in a ginned up culture war that undermines any possibility of truly useful political solidarity, so too academics can become pawns?”
Do you not worry that by dismissing potentially real problems as “caricatures” you may yourself become a useful pawn in some political game?
C Thi Nguyen makes the point better than I ever could:
“Talisse … says that we tend to think group polarization affects the other side, but not us; we tend to “disregard our own vulnerability to the phenomenon.” But this disregard, he says, is itself the result of group polarization. …
What Talisse misses is that this sort of argument applies equally to all comers. Motivated reasoning isn’t just for extremists and radicals: the worry applies just as well to those who might call for civility, preach for moderation, and disdain extremes. Group polarization can beset any enclave at any place on the political spectrum, and motivated reasoning can affect those who love civility and moderation just as well as it can affect the extremists. The temptation to accept a Talisse-style view of symmetrical group polarization could itself be a result of group polarization—one arising in a body of like-minded centrists who would love to believe that the real problem was in all those irrational, polarized extremists.
… So what do we do? I think we have to fall back on the evidence. And there is evidence for the reality and causal power of asymmetric propaganda, and less evidence (so far) for the actuality and large-scale causal power of systemic group polarization.“
(The entire thing is very well worth reading: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/polarization-or-propaganda/ )
So what if it is not a caricature but an uncomfortable truth that some people’s souls have been rotted away by right wing propaganda? What if ignoring this truth is what “undermines any possibility of truly useful political solidarity”?
As the “FAFO” mantra points out, the real threats to rural lifestyles emerge from the people who court and win the rural vote. It is not due to some lefty “caricature” that you are losing your hospital.
Why presume symmetry when the threat to *everyone’s* dignity is so one-sided?
It’s interesting to see how the caricature changed. Into the early 60s, the hillbilly caricature presented backwards people who might get burned through their naivety but who elicited sympathy (the inhabitants of Dogpatch in ‘Li’l Abner’, Doc Golightly in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’). By the late 60s, they were dangerous sinister criminals whose defeat was to be sought (the backwoods people in ‘Deliverance’, the pick-up truck guys in ‘Easy Rider’).
What changed? The civil rights movement and rural or small-town, especially southern, opposition to it. The Republicans’ southern strategy exploited this racism, and the strategy worked.
Is it an unsupported caricature to portray rural and small-town voters as racist? Sure, there are many exceptions and many racist voters on the coasts and in big cities. But increasingly unsubtle, racist dog whistles have worked in some regions more than others.
“But increasingly unsubtle, racist dog whistles have worked in some regions more than others”.
How much of this is because some people have ways to realise their racist preferences that are more subtle and more acceptable in polite society? By some measures, New York City has the most racially segregated school system in the country. Sure, I’ll pick a UES-liberal-who-started-going-to-church-again-so-that-they-can-send-their-kid-to-Episcopal-school over a Southern Trump voter wanting to re-introduce American apartheid anyday. But its a useful exercise in humility to think about what conditions enable the UES liberal to live the kind of live they live, and what they would do if they couldn’t.
Perhaps those who celebrate leopards eating faces think it’s a good thing, on consequentialist grounds. Maybe it even is a good thing on these grounds. It’s extremely hard to know. But even if it is, it’s not something to be celebrated.
This is a thought I’ve had repeatedly in response to people celebrating Ukrainian victories. That Ukraine inflicts losses on Russian troops and infrastructure might be what we should want – it’s a lot clearer case than suffering in the Ozarks – but the loss of Russian lives still isn’t something to be happy about.
I think this is a little subtle. I don’t think it’s wrong for citizens of a nation engaged in a just war to celebrate successes in that war. I agree that it’s wrong to celebrate the deaths of enemy soldiers qua deaths, even if their deaths are an in-practice-necessary or even logically-necessary aspect of those successes. And I realize it’s a difficult line to draw.
Beautiful piece, as usual, Amy. I can’t help but see the parallel to victim blaming. Your opponents, I suppose, don’t see these voters as victims. Then Neil’s analogy to war is helpful: increasingly in politics, those who get regarded as victims are only members of one’s tribe, never the “enemy.” Politics isn’t war, though, at least not among citizens. Perhaps politicians are combatants, but not your average voter in the Ozarks (or Oakland).
Clausewitz would beg to differ. What is unfolding in the USA (and by the USA) is politics by different means.
I do not see much schadenfreude on my social media, but then again, I’m not a philosopher and no longer live in the US, and I’m no longer on Facebook much, either, so I won’t doubt the author’s description of what she encounters.
That said, this isn’t really a radical proposition, is it — schadenfreude may not be the most salubrious emotion? Sure. I saw there’s at least one commenter who disagrees, but you’ll always find one.
But what would be an appropriate emotion towards those who, by their own actions, have caused harm for others and for themselves? Pity, surely, would be even more paternalistic, and hardly more welcome, than schadenfreude, but I cannot — and do not want to — feel unadulterated empathy for the far-right, however hard up they may be.
Good question — perhaps something like grief? We can grieve the existence of the situation, even as we refuse to revel in the suffering of others?
I have very complicated feelings about this. I grew up in Appalachia and most of my relatives voted for Trump. I don’t think reveling in the suffering of others is a good thing, but I do think that we need to put this in context. It is not just that Trumpers voted against their own interests. It’s that they did so to harm people like us academics and many of those we care about. We can’t lump all Trump voters together of course. Some voted for him out of a justified disgust with Biden and his aides covering up his woeful mental state and others were just angry about inflation. Those voters acted out of ignorance at worst and that I can undestand. Malice though is a different thing and many Trump voters, especially in places like Appalachia and the Ozarks, support Trump precisely because he promises to harm others. For them, the cruelty is very much the point and it always has been. They want to federal employees, they want to hurt college professors, and they want to hurt immigrants (though they’ll always say they don’t want to hurt the “good ones” whatever that means). A lot of my friends from college work in the federal government usually for idealistic reasons since they could earn far more in the private sector. Some of them have had their careers destroyed precisely because Trump did what he said he would. The “lucky” ones wake up every day wondering if they will be next. The better Trump voters in my hometown dismiss this as some necessary pain. Most revel in it though. Lots of graduate students in philosophy right now have seen their employment prospects go from bad to non-existent because of Trump’s actions. Philosophy professors and other academics at non-elite schools are going to lose their jobs. Most will never work in academia again. Again a lot of folks in my home town absolutely delight in this.
Well my hometown is also poor and it also depends on Medicaid and SNAP. And I find it very hard to summon much empathy for these folks if they get a big taste of the medicine their dear leader has been forcing down the throats of a lot of people I care about to their utter delight for months now. If someone tries to set your house on fire just how sorry are you supposed to feel if he manages to burn himself in the process?
On the other hand, like a lot of liberals I care quite a lot about what is happening in Gaza right now and I know that quite a few Palestinians have attitudes that I’d condemn for exactly the same reasons I condemn folks in my hometown. And I agree with Wallace that no one’s children deserve to suffer. (I do hope he and other right wingers here will apply this newfound moral sensitivity to Palestinian and Iranian children or all the children in Africa who are going to die from USAID getting gutted.) Perhaps more importantly, reveling in the suffering of anyone rots your soul. So I suppose the best reason not to do it is to not become like the Trumpers I so loathe in my hometown.
“He and other right wingers” – surely David Wallace is not a right winger. Did I miss some post where he celebrated cancelling USAid or something?
I missed it too. I’m a straight-ticket Democratic voter (Lib Dem/Labour in the UK), as it happens.
Your views do seem plausibly to align with those of the current Democratic party establishment in the US and the current Labour party establishment in the UK. How right-wing that would make you I leave for others to judge,
I mean, sure: if Obama is a right-winger, so am I.
I’m quite sure the “other” was just a harmless error and the commenter just meant “David Wallace and right wingers”.
In any case, I thought the comment was forceful and enlightening, like the superb original post, and that this is a glib distraction from the insights it offers.
Yes, it is distracting. But it’s perfectly reasonable to want to set the record straight when one is called something they’re not (and I doubt that “other” was accidental in “he and other right wingers”). Still, agreed that the comment and post were great.
We could model this situation as an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. So, cooperate=be civil, defect=be uncivil. (I’m counting staying silent as also being civil.) If both Blue and Red are civil then things go well. If both Blue and Red are uncivil, both are hurt (this accords with the judgment that uncivility has costs). However, if Blue is civil and Red is not, then Red doesn’t pay a cost while Blue pays a high cost. (Mutatis mutandis with colors flipped).
If this is an apt model, it doesn’t make sense to be civil if the other side is being uncivil. Tit-for-Tat is the optimal strategy.
Most would grant that the Red Team is being exceptionally uncivil these days. Consequently, being civil in the face of that is naïve and self-defeating.
So, if civility is being recommended, then either IPD is a bad model or the claim is that morality demands more than game theory and we ought to follow morality.
The latter claim is unsustainable for 3 reasons. (1) It’s too demanding. (2) People following morality will be outcompeted by those who follow game theory. (3) If one side consistently lose battles then they fail to advance their own ends, which would be morally bad if their ends are morally good.
But maybe the IPD is bad model for this interaction. I do think intuitively a lot of people are approaching the issue in this way.
I do wonder about the extent to which civility is pure cost in the battle with incivility. Civility may lose some initial battles but start to attract the people who tire of the viciousness, or who found the barbarism repellent in the first place. Sometimes we have to wait for a movement to burn itself out, and if we’re civil in the interim, we’re well-positioned to pick up the pieces after it’s bulldozed the glassware.
That said, I agree that civility is probably unsustainable, because, as you said, it’s too demanding.
Ok, so on this picture, IPD fails as a model because it doesn’t pick-up on slow building of coalition over time: the cooperators, because they are cooperators, are slowly gaining support over time which will eventually help them beat the defectors. Interesting. I’d have to think if this is a better model.
Isn’t virtue supposed to be its own reward?
I agree with Robert Gressis, but I’d put the point more strongly: I don’t know any evidence that the incivility of Trump’s core supporters has ever been electorally helpful to him in general elections. (Almost certainly it has been helpful in primaries.) In 2024 Trump won only a very narrow plurality of the popular vote against a candidate closely associated with a deeply unpopular incumbent president during a period in which the incumbent party has been losing elections badly right across the world. Had Nikki Haley been the GOP candidate I would have expected her to have won a lot more decisively.
At the least, there is no obvious consequentialist argument for being uncivil if some people on the other side are. And that ought to make it easier to avoid it on ethical grounds.
Wallace,
Delon,
Kalef,
& On the Market Too
Assemble!
Man are you obsessed.
That went over my head, sorry. I assume it’s a compliment, since it involves being compared to members of a group who saved the entire Universe.
Some philosophers adopt what they consider a healthy disdain for the life of the mind. This can take various forms. Some, in a quasi-existentialist vein, emphasize “real life” as more important than philosophical analysis, which they somehow think is not part of “real life.” Some romanticize good old fashion hard physical labor (I vaguely recall photos of Heidegger chopping wood in the Black Forest). Some talk endlessly about their rural bona fides and respond to hearing that I grew up in Los Angeles and went to school in Boston with the reverse snobbery of “ew…that’s interesting.” My general strategy with respect to these gestures of disdain for my own background and chosen career is to avoid such people.
I hasten to add that I agree with Parfit that no one ever deserves to suffer, and I include people whose own actions feed their misery directly. I also think it’s a very poor criticism of someone (or a group) that they voted against their own interests. After all, it’s pretty paternalistic to decide for someone what their interests are. For all I know, rural folk who voted for Republicans did so because their interest is in outlawing abortion or trans identity and they are willing to sacrifice their own healthcare or food stamps to further those (in their minds) righteous aims. The other side of the coin is the liberal elite (many of whom are millionaires) who vote for Democrats knowing that these Democrats will raise their taxes. These folks are willing to make that financial sacrifice to further other (moral or cultural) interests they have.
Louis, just want to say I hope you don’t think *I’m* one to think growing up in LA is “ew.” And I expect you’re right that “voting against one’s interest” might not be a useful framework understanding loads of voters. There are too many kinds of “interest.”
I’ve never met you. It seemed relevant to the topic that at several universities where I’ve taught, I have been introduced to academics who clearly expressed disdain for my coastal California background while continually stressing their own moral good fortune for having grown up “on the farm.”
Professor Olberding makes a good and important point here — Schadenfreude is bad, also for one’s own character — but this point is couched in a lot of needless apologia.
“I miss grown-ups! That is, I miss the world (perhaps fictive) where adults could not so easily confess publicly their cruelly juvenile tendencies, would not openly deploy hip-with-the-kids rhetoric to sneer at others’ suffering.”
Me too! What I’d give for some more grown ups. But it is Olberding’s peers who have voted the cruelly juvenile into the highest offices. It is Olberding’s peers who cruelly cheer when others are renditioned to foreign concentration camps.
“Say too much that is contemptuous of human suffering and your moral-emotional capacities start to constrict, feelings of contempt become more easy and frequent. Not saying hateful things about other people is a strategy for feeling less hateful ways about them. … So there will be more laughs ahead, but what is all that cheering going to do to you?”
We don’t need to speculate about the negative effects of hateful rhetoric. Olberding can observe them in her peers whose media exposes them to an unending deluge of it. Again, I wonder whether she says the same to them.
“there is some important moral difference between recognizing that someone has voted against their own interests and the judgment that they deserve whatever follows from that choice”
There is indeed. Voting against your own interests may be a good thing if your interests are opposed to some other good. Many people are in favor of paying more taxes if it means that more people get healthcare.
But I don’t think “voting against your own interests” is a useful frame here at all. Many people’s interests include living in a more just society and they vote according to these interests. We can assume that everyone votes in their own interests, once we accept that people have non-egotistical interests.
If we apply the same reasoning to Olberding’s peers, we must conclude that their interests include living in a more cruel society: they will accept some suffering for themselves as long as certain other people suffer more greatly. These are the preferences revealed in their actions and reflected in the valorization of cruelty on the right.
Of course, they don’t see it that way as they mistakenly construe this cruelty as a good. We can see that this is *mistaken* by the averse reaction whenever the cruelty comes home that is construed as good when manifested elsewhere.
There’s your moral difference.
“misfortunes visited on the wrong-thinking”
I don’t think this is about the wrong-THINKING. It is about some who have ACTED to hurt themselves and others.
It is good when people experience the consequences of their ACTIONS, including voting actions. Especially in an era where nobody listens to expert assessments and predictions anymore one can say without any partisanship: if democratic politics is a collective effort of incremental improvement by try and error, facing consequences is important.
This doesn’t mean it is right to delight in someone else’s suffering. It is also a wrong when other people suffer these consequences. It’d be better if nobody had to face these consequences at all. But if they have to be faced, the best outcome is one in which they are disproportionately faced by those who caused them. Some may cheer when this outcome is approximated.
So to sum up, the demand for “civility” can apparently be paraphrased as this: yes, some people have willingly inflicted suffering onto themselves, others, their own children and neighbors, often with rabid joy and perhaps even as part of a cold calculus where they accept suffering for themselves as long as others suffer more — but the really important part is that you are nice to them, regardless of whether they are nice to you, or whether they consider you subhuman.
I can see that this is a defensible moral position; Olberding has an Aeon article that makes a strong case. But I doubt that civility can work as a one-way street like this. So what she is asking for is not collective civility but one-sided *grace*.
Professor Olberding is entirely right about the deleterious effects of hateful rhetoric on one’s morals character, but wrong about the target. You want civility? Start by shutting off the machine of right wing hate media that has rotted away so many people’s moral character.
the distinction between thinking and acting is crucial here, and there’s no reasonable way to argue that voting is the present u.s. system isn’t a form of action.
i’m not defending schadenfreude as virtuous (although of course it is thought rather than action), although its seems to be a common part of the human emotional make up.
that said, there are two arguments worth considering here. first, ought we feel the same sympathy for those who suffer but acting out of resentment or hatred contribute to a) causing demonstrably more suffering to tother, and b) causing that suffering on those more vulnerable than they are? i suspect that if we examine the history of the 20th century, we will often find it is difficult to think that e.g. everyday non-radicalized germans during the third reich era who voted for n.s. were blameless or that their suffering under the stipulations of versailles in some way excused the suffering their action helped cause. of course, this is not the third reich but if the bar is mass murder perhaps it is set too high.
second, it appears to me that maga has reached a point of complete illogic and that it is unlikely that dedicated maga people will change their minds based on cruelty, constitutional crisis, habeus corpus, loss of public lands, dismantling of social services, medical research, education, illegal foreign acts of war, rising prices due to tariffs, and so forth. (sure, some maga followers may regret their vote or have changed their minds, but it hardly seems to be the case that this is widespread.) so we should ask, what will change hearts and minds? what would it take for dedicated maga follower jane x. to realize that this is bad news, to rebuke maga/far right (not conservatism, maga)? is it beyond the realm of possibility that only their suffering at the hands of what they have engendered would do so? that’s not to say that the suffering is deserved, of course. it is to say that it may be the only thing that keeps the u.s. from becoming a permanent authoritarian state, a possibility that will affect far, far more children than just those who voted for trump and were afflicted with a hurricane.
Leaving aside the ethics, purely prudentially it’s a bad idea to conflate “dedicated MAGA people” with “people who voted for Trump”. The former group does show worryingly cultish features – but they’re maybe 20%-30% of the electorate. Lots of people are much more persuadable, as you can tell from the fact that Trump won in 2016, lost in 2020, and won in 2024.
i’m skeptical of the persuadability argument for the simple reason that a great majority of the very bad things we are seeing were clearly broadcast by the trump people and didn’t seem to affect the majority of voters.
given what we know about about trump 1.0 and what we were clearly told over and over during a campaign filled with lies and mistruths, trump voters still chose to vote for him. maybe they didn’t like harris, and of course that’s a perfectly reasonable reaction (i don’t like her either).
so while it is true that hardcore maga and trump voter are not synonymous, still the action of voting for trump facilitated all that we are seeing and was chosen out of three+ options. there is simply no reasonable argument that the trump voter couldn’t have known what would happen—it was largely clear.
if you are given a choice between enabling a net growth in suffering that targets those who are vulnerable (voting for trump) or not (not voting, voting for democrats, voting for a third party candidate), and provided that with only a modicum of reading and analysis you can see exactly what voting for trump is likely to result in, if you vote for trump you are morally culpable for the increased suffering, whether it be out of malice or out of ignorance. are you solely to blame? of course not. are you helping that suffering happen? you are.
again, none of this means that you deserve suffering yourself. but david likes to abstract and i live in a deeply red area where i can see daily how the clearly marked trump voters (trump signs, 1776 stickers, gadsen flags, etc) comport themselves. it is ugly and frightening and more importantly, entirely predictable as a result of another trump victory.
it’s very possible that come the midterms, the non-ideological trump voter may vote differently for any set of reasons. but the damage done in the past *6 months* exceeds anything we’ve seen in this country in living memory (unless you think the great society and new deal destroyed the country, i guess). it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that because of norm changes and increasing misinformation that the midterms will involve violence, voter suppression, legal challenges that prevent democratic change and so forth.
so here’s the thing: if you actively politically contributed to a regime that seeks to turn the country into a non-democratic authoritarian state when you could have done otherwise, when other candidates could’ve been supported, when you could simply have not shown up, and when the information was all out there, you made a big, big mistake and the starting position needs to be that this was a mistake. maybe the maga true believers will never get there, but i’m not seeing any indication in my relatives or community or the national news that this is happening even given the stuff we’ve seen so far.
i don’t disagree that normal, generally humane people have voted for trump. i don’t think all trump voters are maga fanatics. but i do think that the non-maga trump voter failed a world-scale moral test that clearly broadcast its danger– just as the maga fanatic did. more than the moral test though is that countless people are suffering/will suffer and/or be denied opportunities you and i have had as a result, very much including my son.
if you had all the information, if you could reasonably predict where this was going and you chose to do it anyway, haven’t we admitted that persuasion has failed? you might not be persuaded that harris was worth voting for, but you can easily asses that trump was not worth voting for.
“A great majority of the very bad things we are seeing were clearly broadcast by the trump people …. Given what we know about trump 1.0 and what we were clearly told over and over during a campaign filled with lies and mistruths, trump voters still chose to vote for him.”
But BS is part of Trump’s brand, so lots of voters discounted what he and his team broadcast. They took his statements of intent for a 2nd term to be exaggerations, jokes or tactical mis-directions. Some just ignored his statements (another effect of rampant BS), thinking round 2 would just be a repeat of his 1st term, with Republican/Pentagon adults-in-the-room preventing his excesses.
These voters should have known better (given all the evidence that Trump had figured out how to avoid such curbs). They should have been persuaded before. As you say, they’re culpably ignorant. But some portion of these Trump voters (not the hardcore MAGA) should be persuadable after seeing Trump’s 2nd term.
i don’t disagree with your last sentence but when the damage has been done, and continues to be done, i maintain that the starting position must be an acknowledgement of the initial failure and it is here where “having conversations” and “good faith engagement” are so difficult.
let’s try out an analogy. when witnesses intentionally lie under oath in a courtroom setting, we take it as standard that their testimony as a whole ought to be viewed very skeptically because they have chosen to disregard the norms of the court and the oath they took at least once. this is often (if not always fairly) seen as an indication that the witness is no longer trustworthy.
now, that one lie under oath might *not* indicate that their entire testimony is questionable in real life. perhaps beyond that one lie, everything they said was true. but because they chose to lie while under oath and with clear guidelines about not lying, we are no longer licensed to engage with their testimony in the same way that we engage with the testimony of a witness who did *not* lie under oath.
the reason for this, or so it seems to me, is that the liar *chose* to lie in a circumstance in which they were entirely informed that they were not to lie and that they agreed to. now if that lie wasn’t due to some existential threat against the liar or the liar’s family but rather to exculpate themselves or to misrepresent the truth in order to achieve a selfish goal (revenge or receiving a payoff or failure to admit guilt), we know something about the liar’s character or at least decision making that makes it difficult to trust that person.
on this analogy, “having conversations” and “good faith engagement” would be continued trust in the liar’s testimony even after we know they lied on purpose for selfish reasons. we would disregard the lie and continue to assume that the rest of the liar’s testimony was trustworthy. why don’t—as a default position—we do this in the courtroom? why maintaining trust in a person who has betrayed that trust under oath once seen as an unwise decision?
Apologies for the late reply, I missed your original post.
God, if he exists, might well be concerned with the all-things-considered judgement as to whether Trump voters are morally bad people because of their voting pattern.
Not being God, I am largely uninterested in that question. Precisely because I share your deep concerns about the consequences of Trump’s election, I am extremely interested in the Democrats winning the 2026 midterms and the 2028 Presidential election.
A great many people who voted for Trump in 2024 (including millions of nonwhite people, FWIW) voted for Biden in 2020. I would like those people to vote for anti-Trump candidates in 2026 and 2028. I am really unconvinced that a good starting point in achieving that is adopting a judgmental moral stand towards those people. And, human nature being what it is, I don’t even think persuading people that they made a mistake is a good strategy.
(I also think suffering is suffering, and pain does not hurt less if you have sinned, but that’s a different matter.)
Incidentally, I do like to abstract (what do you expect – I’m a philosopher of physics) but I also live in southwest Pennsylvania, and you don’t have to get far outside Pittsburgh to be in deep Trump country. I’m not entirely ignorant of the facts on the ground, though I’m sure it’s not as visceral as actually living there.
“that’s not to say that the suffering is deserved, of course. it is to say that it may be the only thing that keeps the u.s. from becoming a permanent authoritarian state, a possibility that will affect far, far more children than just those who voted for trump and were afflicted with a hurricane”
There seems to be a blurring in a number of the comments here between ‘suffering’ and ‘adverse consequences resulting from one’s own choices and actions’, where some of those adverse consequences afflict the children or other assumed innocents residing in the same community as the right wing authoritarians.
The blurring is this- are we somehow expected to withhold condemnation, and continue to offer material assistance to, individuals and groups that actively pursue policies and programs that are the source of catastrophic harm, misery and death to countless others, when those same individuals and groups routinely say and show they will not reciprocate?
The logic of demonizing and dismantling federal agencies (and sometimes violently attacking federal officials), but provide federal assistance when subsequently in need escapes me.
What should we make of such a wildly asymmetrical social contract? A social contract that grants one group impunity while binding all others doesn’t seem like a grand bargain.
I’m probably misunderstanding, so my apologies for the naive question. Are you suggesting that we should withhold material assistance from Amy Olberding’s neighbors in case of disasters because statistically they are likely to have supported a candidate keen on dismantling federal agencies?
If someone were to generalize or essentialize about, say, Blacks, or Palestinians, or trans people, or immigrants, the way you do here about the population of the Ozarks, I imagine you would object.
(Also, weren’t you telling us only a month ago (https://dailynous.com/2025/05/07/dealing-with-offensive-comments/) that you regarded your commenting at DN as a vice that you indulged only because the comments section was a cesspit of idiocy and bad faith and it was better to descend into the mire than to leave comments uncorrected? Weren’t you advocating that Justin should shut comments off and just run with his own posts and guest posts? I’m not sure how to reconcile that with your directly commenting on said guest post.)
In case this wasn’t clear: I am speaking only and entirely about the people who voted for this result and only judge them in relation to this particular, individual, voluntary action. Your examples, by contrast, are about immutable characteristics.
I said we’d be better off without comments, not that comments would be better off without me (we’re in a suboptimal equilibrium). I have great respect for Professor Olberding and her work; she is entirely correct about the deleterious effects of hate and malice. She didn’t say where these effects are at their most deleterious which led the debate astray.
As Olberding concludes in the Aeon piece I reference above:
“righteous incivility would issue from a deeply moral wish against its own necessity. It would come about as forced, a sorry step one feels reluctantly obliged to take. Morally good people want to respect others – they want a world in which we can, in all good conscience and effect, treat each other humanely and kindly. They do not want to signal disrespect even when they see they must. They are people who perceive a moral need to be rough and inconsiderate as distressing or at least a disappointment.”
So here we are, distressed and disappointed.
There’s a problem in current debate culture: that one cannot tell certain truths without fear of being branded biased or partisan. Daily Nous is crawling with people who make it worse by enacting the branding. Above likened to the Avengers (presumably the ones from Civil War).
Here is one of these truths: many of the people Olberding references did vote, willingly and voluntarily, to enact cruelty. Right wing media has warped their moral character to effect this result, by exploiting exactly what she stated about how hateful speech affects character.
It isn’t easy to say it out loud. It is mean and dismissive, it sounds partisan and biased. In short, uncivil. The Avengers will be right on your case.
I’d prefer to say that these same people had merely a different direction towards a goal that is ultimately common to us, or a rational disagreement that could be bridge in frank debate. But none of this is true. That is difficult for good people to accept.
But it has to be said in discussions like this one. Sometimes I feel the need to do so, but always with distress and disappointment.
I’m not going to engage with most of this because it obviously won’t go anywhere constructive, but just to satisfy my curiosity: why is ‘immigrant’ an immutable characteristic? My wife wasn’t an immigrant ten years ago; she is now. Come to that, nationality isn’t immutable, for broadly the same reasons. (My son wasn’t American at birth; he is now.)
Yeah, you think I’m the problem and I think you are the problem, so there is nowhere constructive for us to go. I can acknowledge that. It is weird that you can too, since you always call for continued debate with right wingers, no matter how unconstructive the prospect.
National origin is an immutable characteristic (and a protected class). Everything else is semantic hair splitting.
One of the main reasons I can acknowledge it is that I don’t see much point having constructive engagement with someone who keeps attributing to me things that I have not said.
For the record, I don’t endorse the Avengers branding. Eugene has unfathomable fantasies.
Since I’ve now read the Aeon piece you cite, then – slightly against my better judgement – let me say that my reading of it is radically different from yours. You quote the features Olberding attributes to ‘righteous incivility’, take as read that your incivility is righteous, and so attribute those features to yourself. But Olberding’s actual point as I read it is that it is all too easy to kid yourself that your incivility is righteous when really it is performative and indulgent – indeed, she doubts that her own incivility is ever righteous.
To quote a little more of the article:
It’s a good piece, isn’t it?
In the six years since its publication I think we have learned a bit more what would be required for righteous incivility. Or rather, we learned what is unrighteous civility: engaging with obvious bad faith as if it were good faith, responding to bald faced lies as if they were sincere assertions, construing willful cruelty as a difference in opinion.
I don’t think I’m particularly righteous (“vice”, remember?), I just think the alternative is worse.
I’m ultimately with Olberding on this point, but I agree with you that these are some very important considerations. I think one helpful way of thinking about this is in the context of much of the debate about anger. Broadly there are pro-anger and anti-anger people. The pro-anger people (like Myisha Cherry in The Case for Rage) make compelling (although I think ultimately unsuccessful) arguments about how anger can be important and good. But unless one is expected to be a saint, I think it’s going to be hard to feel and express all and only the good anger; some stuff surely is going to slip in around the edges, and it’s going to come out in the form of something like “FAFO” and other forms of schadenfreude.
In other words, if it’s okay to get angry at people who voted for Trump sometimes, then who but an angel is going to spend their whole life refraining from uttering the FAFO sentiment even once? And with the magic of the Internet, if every human being once in their lifetime tweets something they ought not to in a moment of weakness, you can get 10 of those delivered to your door every day from 10 different people, which can give you the impression that the entire world is constantly slipping up over and over.
Thus I think one lesson to draw from the topic Olberding is looking at is that we’ve got the wrong sort of framing in her post here. The worry is about whether one ought to express the FAFO sentiment, but that’s not really the issue. This is a question about how often to express the sentiment, and the difference between “never in your entire life” and “once in your entire life” is completely meaningless unless expressions of the sentiment get indelibly preserved and bundled together with many other expressions via twitter, Blue Sky, etc. The real problem Olberding has (and it’s a problem almost all of us have) is that her Facebook feed is showing her all this junk. If you got a push notification on your phone every time someone you loved did something you disapproved of, it would mess up your life. And via a Facebook algorithm pushing all the high-engagement (read: controversial) stuff in your face, we now basically have that. This gives us a distorted picture of what everyone else is like.
Do Olberding’s friends really harbor so much ill-will? Or did they take 10 seconds to think an untoward thought, toss it off unthinkingly, and unwittingly become part of a series of comments which make Olberding think the problem is worse than it is? Surely at least in some cases we have a false impression of what others think because a momentary whim they tweeted ends up echoing in our minds far longer than it echoed in theirs. How often is that the case with (e.g.) the FAFO sentiment? Since I agree with Olberding I don’t think I’ve ever expressed the FAFO sentiment, but I must’ve posted stuff online which is not reflective of what I more deeply believe but which (when joined together with similar posts from many other people) has given someone else a distorted picture of what their friends think.
I’m not proud of it but God knows I’ve expressed the FAFO sentiment often enough, albeit never in a public space. (More over Brexit than Trump.)
That is definitely an element. I expect most have felt such a way about others. But we now have the means to broadcast the sentiment quite widely. And then of course there are all the “likes” and laughing emojis and the adding on in comments. I think they don’t just distort what the viewer sees but how the poster sees the sentiment.
For what it’s worth, I agree. Glee at another’s misfortune, however karmic it may appear, will only sully your own spirit. I also agree with Amy’s follow-up (appearing as I type this) that the dynamics of social media might make even the occasional (and entirely forgivable) slip sully it worse.
I only disagree with couching this point in apologia (and with how such apologia are then taken up by the DN commentariat).
You get it.
The only quibble I’d have is that I think the influence of right-wing media is less determinative in shaping the worldview of its consumers than generally assumed.
I think the content of right wing media is best construed as a response to and reflection of themes and notions preferred by, and to some extent, already held by, the audience. Which is to say the viewers of right wing media should not be characterized as passive vessels or innocent dupes. It’s not evident why the rank and file right wing are so consistently infantilized in this way in supposedly learned depictions of this cohort. These are adults with agency who make choices, and they are as much the source of the reprehensible narratives promulgated by right wing media as the market for them.
This should be abundantly clear because much of what is espoused on right wing media today can be found in written form decades before the technology for broadcast television and social media existed. That is, the reprehensible attitudes were being spoken and written and shared amongst each other long before technology made it widely visible to those outside these communities.
If we view the inhabitants of rural White communities as adults with agency, we can reasonably assign them responsibility and so moral culpability for their choices and actions.
It’s astounding to me how frequently we are asked not to hold this group to the moral standards applied to urban dwellers.
I genuinely enjoy reading stories of Trump voters who are suffering in part as a result of their own doing. I also feel a bit guilty about enjoying these stories (though I think my enjoyment falls short of glee). If I had to try to pinpoint WHY I enjoy them, here is my basic guess:
It is not that I necessarily enjoy that they are suffering. It is more that I enjoy that they are suffering TOO. They voted for someone who made quite clear that he would cause massive amounts of suffering – to immigrants, trans persons, and so many more. Now they are caught up in the very sort of suffering they were voting to inflict on others.
Now, of course, not every Trump voter was motivated by causing suffering to others, but it is quite clear that many were. (I will not venture to suggest a percentage here.) And those who voted for Trump for some other reason either knew or should have known that he would cause massive suffering.
Maybe I just have a limited well of empathy, and all of it is being spent on people who are suffering through zero fault of their own. Maybe deep down I actually think the suffering Trump voters truly deserve it. Maybe I need to work on these things. I am not sure.
A couple more thoughts to add to what I wrote above:
1. A lot of the stories featuring Trump voters suffering from his actions also include those people blaming anyone but Trump and/or making clear that they do not regret their vote. I am way more likely to feel bad for the person who learned as a lesson after their actions caused their own suffering than the person who will clearly make the same mistake again and again. Of course, many might actually learn from their mistake. Given that, enjoyment seems clearly wrong.
2. Relatedly, many of the stories I have read of Trump voters suffering involve the sufferer basically appealing to Trump – like if he only knew he was hurting ME, he would stop this (e.g. Latinos for Trump organizer being targeted by ICE, Trump voter losing their business due to tariff threats, etc.). That person’s message seems to be clear: Other people’s suffering is fine. My suffering is bad. I find it really hard to have empathy for such people.
Still, these might be the rarity – the stories I have read might be exceptional cases. In fact, none of the examples used by Prof. Olberding seem to fit the sort of cases I am talking about. So, maybe I shouldn’t be extending my thoughts on these exceptional cases to all suffering Trump voters.
“Many of the stories I have read of Trump voters suffering involve the sufferer basically appealing to Trump – like if he only knew he was hurting ME, he would stop this.”
Reminds me of what I heard from a guy whose family lived under Stalin. People would complain bitterly about the bureaucrats and mid-level, local Party poobahs who’d screwed things up. “If only Stalin knew, he’d fix ’em!” They’d write letters to Stalin, and when nothing changed it was because low-level Party members screened Stalin’s mail.
The practice didn’t start with Stalin!
see e.g. https://www.thecollector.com/letter-writing-to-tsar-russian-tradition/
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Tsar,_bad_Boyars
“Now, of course, not every Trump voter was motivated by causing suffering to others, but it is quite clear that many were. (I will not venture to suggest a percentage here.)”
Maybe this can be pieced together from the facts that (1) 32% of the electorate voted for DT, (2) David Wallace estimates (above) that as much as 30% of the electorate are “cultish” “dedicated MAGA people,” and (3) approximately all cultish dedicated MAGA people can be assumed to have voted, that being a feature setting the cultishly dedicated apart from the apathetic.
There are two different uses of “electorate” here. I meant that maybe 20%-30% of people who voted are committed MAGA. Of course nearly 50% of people who voted, voted for Trump, ~twice the number who are MAGA (of course these are very rough numbers).
I assume you’re using “electorate” to mean “people eligible to vote”. I’m not saying 20%-30% of that larger group are committed MAGA.
I have to say I am very sceptical of the model of empathy as a depletable resource to be spent on certain people. While it’s certainly true that we have a limited amount of resources to spend as a result of the felt empathy – only so much money to give to charitable causes, only so much time/mental energy to spend on being upset about things – I don’t think that’s the same thing as empathy itself being a resource.
In my own mind, I find that the effect of those emotional resources being depleted by too much news of suffering and injustice is not to feel less empathy, but to turn away my glance and focus, and perhaps feel tired instead of sad. Definitely not turning to glee.
(Though perhaps there’s something *humorous* about the “FAFO stories”, akin to seeing a clown step on a rake and get hit in the face? Laughing at that is not the same as taking joy in the pain of the clown.)
You understand it exactly. A mean person who wanted to see his neighbor get badly hurt planted a rake in the yard, but then accidentally stepped on the rake himself. You don’t have to delight in his suffering to see the humor here. It’s like all the cartoons where Wile E. Coyote schemes extravagantly for the road runner’s demise but then falls into his own trap. We might even sympathize with him and find the roadrunner annoying, but it’s funny.
I would like to point out there’s a different reason to express a FAFO attitude. A reason that’s different from just taking pleasure in the unhappiness of others qua their unhappiness. And that is taking pleasure in being right. It’s what motivates you to say I told you so, when you were right in some dispute with someone.
Say you are in a dispute with your partner about which route to take to work. You tell your partner: “You will get stuck in traffic that way. It always happens.” Nevertheless, they insist on taking that route. Surprise, surprise, they get stuck in traffic. You may or may not say I told you so, but you take a little pleasure in being right. Since you love your partner, you’re still all things considered unhappy that your partner is unhappy. But there’s still that lingering pleasure.
I think there are genuine epistemological reasons to keep this kind of emotional reaction around. It attracts us towards the truth. It’s a learning signal. You realize you like being right so you try to be right more often. And if you’re wrong, it’s valuable to keep that chagrin around. It’s a motivation to avoid being wrong.
And I think a big component of the schadenfreude mentioned in this article is simply the pleasure of being right. Indeed, I think most who express such schadenfreude if they could press a button to alleviate the suffering of those in Olberding’s neck of the woods, they would do so without hesitating. But they might still think, “Can we at least remember that your choices were bad? And I predicted that?”
If the FAFO sentiment were costless this would be a (small) point in its favor. But given its costs I think on balance it’s still bad to feel and express the FAFO sentiment. One reason to think this (in addition to the reasons Olberding mentions): you can be right about this sort of thing in ways that do not vindicate the FAFO sentiment.
E.g. you can correctly predict that Trump will harm innocent immigrants (the “good ones,” in the parlance of some Trump supporters), and then he goes and does this, but this doesn’t license the FAFO sentiment, since it’s not the supporters themselves who are being harmed. As long as you’re better at predicting what Trump is going to do than the Trump supporters, and as long as you take pleasure in this in various ways (e.g. feeling intellectually smug, whatever) you can get some emotional pleasure hits with a positive epistemological upshot without falling victim to all the extra nasty stuff that comes along with the FAFO sentiment. Indeed I think there are ways to get the good epistemological results without anything bad (even feeling intellectually smug might be kind of bad). So it’s not like we need the FAFO sentiment and similar sentiments to get the good epistemological stuff.
Ultimately it’s a largely empirical question about whether feeling and expressing the FAFO sentiment is epistemologically good enough to outweigh the bad stuff, but the way stuff looks to me, the answer is obviously no, and you really have to cook the books to make the numbers even potentially come out otherwise. But I might be wrong.
One final note, which doesn’t go beyond anything Olberding says, but which bears repeating given your button example: maybe you are right that everyone expressing the FAFO sentiment would press the button. But the more one leans into the FAFO sentiment and similar sentiments over time, the less one becomes the sort of person who would press the button. And, much more appositely, the less one becomes the sort of person who would press the button in a context where pressing isn’t costless. And of course in real life, pressing the button is not costless. If you actually care about Trump supports and their suffering and you actually want to alleviate it, eventually you will have to do the equivalent of pressing a costly button. It might not be very costly (it might just be higher taxes, for instance). But years of saying “get bent, red states!” might eventually weaken your resolve to help out the red states.
This too is an empirical claim: maybe people actually are so self-possessed that they can spend as much time as they want feeling and expressing the FAFO sentiment and then turn on a dime and care deeply about the people in red states, since they can (e.g.) keep their epistemological brain separate from their caring brain (or their heart, or stomach, or wherever the caring lives). Certainly a friend of the FAFO sentiment would claim they were able to do this. But I have my doubts…
Getting one’s news from one tailored social media platform feed and then deploring the tribal mindset…
Where does Olberding say that she gets her news from one tailored social media platform feed?
It’s clearly not what she says in the excerpt I’ve copied below, or anywhere else in the guest post published on this page, so you must be reporting something she said or wrote in a different venue. Could you please point me to that?
Copied passage (from Olberding’s guest post on this page):
“[S]ome philosophers in my Facebook feed have reveled in news of denied and delayed aid to the Ozarks and, much more broadly, in any news at all that describes how people in “red states” are now suffering from the decisions made by our red federal government. Facebook is the only social media I use, but I assume the same and worse is true across whatever other platforms academics nowadays are using. According to several philosophers in my Facebook feed, the people of the Ozarks “fucked around and found out” (FAFO).”
Nah. I grew up on a farm in Appalachia. Hunted for food. Heated the house with wood. Used an outhouse for awhile. Hand pumped water from a well. More than a few neighbors had no electricity and no running water. Saw family members get caught up in the opiate epidemic. Saw some go to prison. I’ve seen rural poverty and dysfunction, lived in it for awhile, and you’re not getting any hillbilly elegy from me.
Rural voters aren’t stupid, they aren’t self-deluded, they aren’t victims of false consciousness. They vote for their favorite political party over and over again because that party gives them what they want. But I ain’t never seen mountain people ask for sympathy. We have far too much pride.
I hope this is satire.
It is not.
I’m an Appalachian ex-pat, but sounds like the same upbringing minus the outhouse (though the back porch often sufficed). I don’t feel sympathy for their suffering. We’re experts at suffering. But I might ass/u/me that what you mean by “that party gives them what they want” means the GOP tells them what they want to hear? I don’t recall “getting” much of anything but empty promises from any political party. And over the last decade I’ve watched blue dog democrats turn into MAGA republicans simply because of how the in-group dynamics have shifted at the pulpit and at the dinner table.
We’re proud alright, but too often it is the misplaced pride of ignorance. Wrapped up in talking point spoons fed by conservative media and parroted in small circles where people sagely nod their heads without question. Which is why I don’t feel schadenfreude when we FAFO, I feel pity. Because that same pride in willful ignorance continues to perpetuate our people’s suffering.
It has always seemed to me that a corollary of the pride is a great sensitivity to humiliation. And politicians who promise to fight those perceived responsible for the humiliation get a lot of traction. I suspect that the more apt element really isn’t the pride itself, it’s the sensitivity to humiliation and what follows from it.
I agree entirely that “a corollary of the pride is a great sensitivity to humiliation”. And what I object to, when it comes to a call for sympathy, is that’s just humiliating. Sympathy (and pity) are political emotions directed from superiors to inferiors. Pity them poor ignorant inbred hillbillies what done shot theyself in they own foot. Well, that’s gonna breed a righteous lust for vengeance. I ain’t got no sympathy for my backwoods brethren, cuz I ain’t superior to them.
“Sympathy (and pity) are political emotions directed from superiors to inferiors.”
Is this true of all sympathy? When terrorists associated with the so-called Islamic State attacked Paris in 2015 and killed 130 people, many social-media users around the Western world applied ablue, white and red filter to profile images in a display of sympathy. There’s much you can criticise about this. But I don’t think most of those of those who used the filter thought themselves superior to the French in general, or to Parisians in particular. They thought they were _better off_, in that they had not been recently the target of a terrorist attack. But that’s not the same as taking yourself to be superior. Perhaps, right now, an academic in America cannot express sympathy with the people of the Appalachian mountaints without it being patronising. But that’s more to do with the current state of affairs in America then with the nature of sympathy.
Agreed. Does sympathy become condescending when directed at people because of allegedly self-inflicted suffering, where the suffering is seen as foreseeable? The model lay in parent-child relations (e.g., touching the stove).
I think this is on the right track. But, I think the condition is more narrow: Self-inflicted harm where the suffering is foreseeable and the sympathiser would not have inflicted on themselves the same harm. There seems to be nothing condescending about a reformed Trump voter expressing sympathy with another Trump voter. An analogy here might be one intravenuous drug user expressing sympathy with another drug user who got a serious infection through sharing needles. The sympathiser recognises that the harm is self-inflicted, but they also recognise that they themselves ‘got away’ by sheer luck.
This gets more complicated the more abstract the ‘luck’ gets. Some healthy upper-middle-class academic may say that — ‘but by the grace of God’ — they too would have been an intraveneous drug user. If they had come from a broken home, had been unable to find a stable and rewarding job, had been prescribed opiates by their doctor, etc., they too would have started injecting drugs. Still, their sympathy for the intravenous drug user is much more condescending than the sympathy of their peer. And to look at the Appalachian Trump voter and say “well, if I had been born in those circumstances, I’d have made the same mistakes” might be the height of condescension. I’m sure it would seem so to the Trump voter.
That’s why I said “nobody out here needs your tears” in the original post. It’s not about the tears or pity but about the mockery. And about what the mockery does to the ones doing it.
Yeah, I get that. And I agree that the mockery does bad things to those who do the mocking. But this is an ancient social division, which brings real political enmity on both sides. Every academic I’ve ever met has been deeply condescending towards Appalachia (and I’m sure towards other rednecks and hilly billies and so on). I wish I knew how to fix that, but I don’t.
“We’re experts at suffering”. Very well put. So I suspect the result is a politics of vengeance: Sure, us rural folks will suffer more, but for us it’s marginal, and we’re already tough. But MAGA will inflict greater suffering on our class enemies. Maybe. What I suspect is that suffering is entirely irrelevant to the politics of vengeance. Perhaps the rural folks are willing to accept marginally more suffering for the sake of vindication. Of course, I’m not sure about any of this. I just bristle at the thought that Appalachian (and other) mountain people are a class that deserves sympathy from some other class (which seems here to be a well-educated non-mountain elite). That’s just patronizing.
Thank you, Amy Olberding, for this humane reminder.
If it was 1942, and I read an article asking me to “spare [suffering Nazi sympathizers] [my] mocking laughter,” I would have scoffed before continuing my fight against Nazis. I’m not sure why I should react differently here.
One difference is that the addressees of this piece still share an imperfectly democratic polity with Trump supporters. With a bit of exaggeration, enemies of Trump and MAGA in America have two options. Perhaps civil war is inevitable. If so, you better learn how to clean a wound, mend a uniform, shoot a gun and then go up the mountains. If you don’t think its time for that, then you must think that the MAGA movement can be defeated within institutions that are still implicitly supported by its members. That will require a degree of civility in your interactions with them.
When the Nazis took power in 1933, the largest contingent of their supporters were workers and the unemployed. Workers were underrepresented compared to farmers, white-collar employees and petty bourgeois shopkeepers. Still, they made up a substantial plurality of the population overall, so they made up a plurality of Nazi supporters. There were three major factions in the emerging underground opposition. Social Democrats, Communists and the Lutheran Confessing Church. At least the first two of these were accutely aware of the suffering of the workers, the unemployed and the poorer white-collar employees. (This is in the middle of the Great Depression.) This included the workers etc. who had supported the Nazi Party. The idea that they could offer them a better material deal than the Nazi Party was central to the calls for resistance for which they would be hanged. Of course, the Communists and Social Democrats would also not have hesitated to kill Nazi-supporting workers if it was strategically useful to defeat the Nazi regime.
The sense that absolutely no empathy was owed to the enemy in WW2 also contributed to use nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In retrospect, that is at least controversial.
To follow up on this, you can also consider how Americans actually came to fight Nazis. From 1940 to the December 11 attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, there was a strong isolationist movement in the US opposed to entering WW2. It was called the “America First Committee” and lead by Charles Lindbergh. Its followers believed that America would be better off using its resources to re-build after the Great Depression, that France and Britain had not re-paid their debts from the Great War and therefore did not deserve American support, and that war-profiteers who (they believed) had scammed Americans into participating in the Great War were now trying to do the same with another European war. For some supporters, including Lindbergh, this took on a decidedly anti-Semitic flavour. The war-profiteers, according to him, were the Jews. And the Jews, he said, were now exaggerating Germany’s anti-Jewish discrimination to provoke another war. And anyways, German steps to limit “Jewish power” were reasonable and justified. Perhaps, he thought, America could learn from them…. Those people can be fairly described as Nazi sympathisers (and their appeal was much broader than the swastika-wielding, straightforwardly Nazi German-American Bund).
In his famous radio-broadcast “fireside chats”, FDR tried to persuade Americans to be prepared for entering into the war. In them, he tried to summon national unity. He began every chat with “my friends” or “my fellow Americans”. He sharply denounced Charles Lindbergh and his anti-Semitism. However, he acknowledged as legitimate concerns about the cost of another war and the aftermath of the Great Depression. This involved empathy with Americans who were at least the fellow travelers of Nazi sympathisers. Of course, the US only enter WW2 after it was directly attacked by the Japanese Empire. However, FDR’s fireside chats likely contributed to the war consensus emerging very quickly after Pearl Harbor.
Of course, the current situation is very different. For one, there are no powerful foreign enemies to democracy, and the people interested in defending it do not hold the presidency. Knowing as we all do about the Shoah, I find America First’s anti-Semitism revolting, and I would find it very difficult to conjure up much synpathy for its supporters. Nonetheless, I think we should try to understand history in its complexity rather than turning it into simple templates.
“there are no powerful foreign enemies to democracy”.
I wish that were true.
What are you doing to fight the current administration?
It might sharpen discussion if people considered whether Dr Propst has anything to apologise for. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/10/doctor-texas-flood-post-apology
Another relevant Guardian link: Hannah Merriott, “‘The damage is terrifying’: Barbara Kingsolver on Trump, rural America and the recovery home funded by her hit novel,” July 5, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/05/the-damage-is-terrifying-barbara-kingsolver-on-trump-rural-america-and-the-recovery-home-funded-by-her-hit-novel
“‘We have classes in this country. We have class barriers.’ … [Kingsolver] says, that myth [of self-made success] is powerful: it ‘brainwashes’ people; it can lead to self-blame. Shame, she believes, is intrinsic to Trump’s success…. ‘He’s the guy who says: “I’m not like them. I’m not a fancy educated guy. I’m one of you.” That’s what appealed to people. Shame is such a part of this. He got under people’s sense of shame and found other places to put it.’ She lives in Trump country, and says she understands how he ‘hooked’ so many people, but she never demonises Trump voters herself.”
not to say that this specific interview reflects this, but i’d encourage anyone interested in kingsolver’s political takes to listen to/read her interview with ezra klein (nyt) from roughly 2024.
i’d argue that her view of the rural/urban divide as expressed there is simplistic at best and deeply naive at worst. she may be a great novelist, but she is not imo a nuanced political thinker.
fwiw, i grew up in the rural west (town of less that 18k over 2 hours from the nearest “city,” which then had a population of 200k), so i’m not coming from the perspective of the urban elite when i say this.