Why They Vote for DT....

Kwame Anthony Appiah who writes "The Ethicist" column in the New York Times  is always interesting, and today's column includes  a letter from someone who is thinking of stopping communication with her friends who voted for DT.  She feels she can't be friends with people who share the president's values.

 Appiah's answer is worth reading in whole, but the meat of it, to my mind, is  "...perhaps the gulf between you and these friends arises from differences in your epistemic capacities — the ability to gain reliable information. Our beliefs depend not just on our own brains but also on the social worlds we live in....people can be epistemically disadvantaged by gaining their beliefs from social networks that are radically unreliable. We get many of our false beliefs in the same way we get true ones: by listening to the views of people we trust.....the misjudgment here may not reflect bad moral values."

I love the idea of "epistemically disadvantaged."

I've been talking a lot with various friends about why people vote for DT, and I've come up with these reasons:

1) Some people see most of DT's failings, but are willing to accept them as long as he is the best chance for stopping abortion. One-issue people can set aside a lot to support their cause.

2) Some people see DT as giving the finger to the establishment, and identify with this.

3) We are all influenced deeply by the people around us and what they believe/how they see the world.

This is pretty close to Appiah's "epistemic" argument, about the people around us, but it's also about the ways we get our information.  For example, I read The New York Times and The Nation, rarely watch television news, but do occasionally listen to radio news: NPR  or 1010 WINS, if I'm in the car.  

I'd also add that while my liberal and left-wing friends are at least as intolerant of their opposites as the Trumpsters, I do feel that their relatively high level of education is significant.  Obviously there are people who went to college and those who didn't on all sides, but people who are formally educated (and those who have educated themselves with serious effort, including reading books) have access to everything the people who rarely read have-- plus a lot more.  They may also have training in how to sift through sources.

I'm struck by how many of my high school Facebook friends who are religious Christians seem to  adore DT.  One man alternates Facebooks posts of Biblical quotes with short lessons that seem quite thoughtful with reposts of godawful screeds with little basis in fact.  

I suspect that people who didn't go to college (or in the case of this friend, went to Bible college) tend to look at what they do read as texts to be accepted and shared as they do the Bible.  This doesn't mean they worship right-wing pundits, but that they are perhaps oddly too respectful of the written word.  If you are trained in memorizing and searching texts for enlightenment and life-lessons, it may be carrying over to anything else you read.