Difficult things and easy things
How the Democrats seized defeat?
I’m no-one’s idea of an expert on US politics, but I’m very struck by a suggestion I’ve heard that the trans issue may have been decisive for Trump.
Most of what are or should be the big issues in politics at the moment are genuinely difficult: the economy, who pays for healthcare and how, climate change, foreign policy, immigration. These are big, dauntingly complicated subjects. One smooth-talking politician tells you one plausible story on the economy, say, or healthcare; and then another tells you a different story. It’s easy to feel bamboozled and outgunned by clever people who know more.
In contrast, if one politician tells you that some women have penises, and the other tells you that that’s silly, and the first politician is taking you for a mug — well, that’s not hard, is it?
I saw something parallel in a discrimination case I did many years ago. My client had a complicated and highly contingent claim for hundreds of thousands of pounds. Our schedule of loss dealt with the valuation of the loss of a chance, grossing up, actuarial factors, the correct approach to discounting for accelerated receipt, pension loss. It all hurt my not-very-numerate head, and I was braced for a difficult, technical fight. But the difficult, technical fight didn’t happen. Instead, my opponent focused all her attention on trying to knock down our modest claim for injury to feelings by £10-15k. I was mystified, until the penny dropped. The explanation was that my opponent was even more daunted than I was by the complexity of the claim, and had seized on the one aspect she knew how to argue about.
It’s an instance of Parkinson’s law of triviality: the tendency to give more attention to easy things than difficult things, even if the difficult things are more important.
(Before everyone shouts at me: I am not saying that protecting gender-confused children and adolescents from mutilation, or women’s right to ordinary everyday privacy and dignity, or to fair play in sport, etc, are trivial matters. What I am saying is that they have been widely and successfully painted as “niche” issues affecting only a small minority. The point is that even though most people would put these issues way down their list of reasons to choose a political representative, if people find the other issues hard and this one easy, telling obvious, shameless lies on this subject is a serious unforced error for a candidate.)
Let’s hope that left-leaning politicians the world over will learn the lesson.
Writing from New York City as a HUGE admirer of yours. You offer an interesting perspective that I think may well be true for some, particularly those who are not all that troubled by Trump to begin with. What I’d offer is that there is another contingent of voters who are left of center who felt—and were —so betrayed by the Democratic Party that it became impossible to vote for Harris, and in some cases moved them to vote for Trump.
I am a Democrat, and I voted for Harris, but did so in a state of unalloyed fury with my party. Had I a child or family member who got ensnared in the gender trap, though, I can well understand how it would have been impossible to do so. A good example of this is Erin Friday, a lifelong Democrat whose child was in danger of harming her body, and no Democrat in the state of California came to her aid. You can learn more about her, in her own words, here: https://twitter.com/ErinFriday75490/status/1814315159009272018
Another person, in the area of sports, is Kim Shasby Jones, cofounder of ICONS, whose daughter had to compete against Will/Lia Thomas. She was aghast. Among other things, as I recall it, she reached out the the ACLU, who rebuffed her. She writes about the experience here: https://www.iwf.org/2022/07/25/a-mothers-journey-through-the-upside-down-world-of-college-swimming/ I believe Jones voted for Trump. Here is a window in to why: https://twitter.com/KimJonesICONS/status/1853561798261166490
None of this is unthinking, or grasping at the easy explanation. Rather, it arises out of severe anguish and betrayal.
It’s not difficult - unless you are so invested in identity issues, “inclusion” (which means inclusion for males and exclusion for females), and “equity.” And if you tell a lie on a simple subject it’s a red flag for all the other stuff we don’t know anything about. My WDI acquaintance Kara Dansky wrote an open letter to Harris this summer, warning what was going to befall the Dems if they carried on their rickety, misogynistic policies. But would they listen? Of course not! And shortly the case of USA vs Skrmetti opens in the Supreme Court, concerning the prescribing of puberty blockers and opposite sex hormones for minors: the man and woman in the street are properly vexed about this.