Harvard: Don’t Let Hate Trump Love

“If you voted for Trump, I hate you.”

This statement, which appeared on many Harvard students’ Facebook feeds in the aftermath of Election 2016, perhaps most succinctly encapsulates the anger with which that election’s results were received here.

It is a painful, dire expression. Given the caustic rhetoric and distressing policies that led up to the election, it is perhaps understandable. But due to its sweeping bitterness, the remark is symptomatic of dangerous disconnects between Harvard University and the country beyond it.

Hate is a grave emotion, and its use here suggests that one's vote for president is increasingly viewed as character-determining. It reflects the record high sentiment among partisans that the opposition threatens the nation. It hints at the zero-sum game into which Election 2016 twisted identity politics. More than anything else, it cries out for us, as students and global citizens, to do a better job of listening to each other and empathizing with others’ decisions.

Anyone here at Harvard during the days following November 8th―when campus felt like a surreal mix between The Twilight Zone and The Walking Dead―would have recognized the degree to which the election’s results shocked and hurt our community. Indeed, more than 87 percent of surveyed Harvard undergraduates preferred the losing candidate. This is unsurprising: significant parts of the campaign’s rhetoric were hostile to many of our ideals and our people. But while no one should be in the business of telling others how to feel, hatred is a response that if left unexamined risks harmful festering.

If we at Harvard aspire to be effective leaders and compassionate people, we must be willing to disarm and discuss. Removing the poison from our language is probably a good way to start: “If you voted for Trump, I hate you.” The central problem with those who, disappointed by President Trump’s victory, responded by condemning those who voted for him is that this generalizes Trump voters as hate-deserving. This begets hypocrisy: if anti-Trumpers disapprove of Mr. Trump’s generalizations of Mexicans, Muslims, women, and others, they must take care to not themselves cope with loss by levying stereotypes.

Those unconvinced by this argument might insist that all Trump voters are in fact hate-deserving because they supported, or at least weren’t sufficiently bothered by, a candidate’s racism, sexism, and xenophobia. This retort would be complicated by the people who voted for Obama twice in key states like Pennsylvania and Michigan but who switched to Trump in 2016 and seem to have been crucial to Trump’s victory. The 29 percent of Hispanic voters and 42 percent of female voters who chose Trump further complicate sweeping claims. Evidently, perceptions vary greatly.

Democrats at Harvard and across the country make a grave political and moral misstep if, instead of analyzing why their platform fell short, they blame bad people rather than bad policy. While “-isms” may certainly have been motivating factors for some Trump voters, neglecting other factors like economics is a mistake.

For example, consider someone who lives in eastern Ohio, who voted for Obama twice but is facing rising prices and layoffs, who is confronted by rising healthcare costs and falling life expectancy, and who is called deplorable by a wealthy coastal liberal. People like this certainly exist, and they may lack the privilege we at Harvard have to evaluate a candidate’s pros and cons differently. Their vote for Trump should not earn them hate; it should earn them our earnest, problem-solving attention.

Hurling hate upon Trump voters is unhelpful and unwise. That some Americans were economically or otherwise desperate enough to weigh his promises greater than his denigrations is a phenomenon that should concern Democrats, not enrage them. That loyal members of the Democratic base were hurting enough to de-prioritize the race and gender issues they previously rallied behind should encourage analysis, not elicit scorn. We’ll have enough walls without raising mental ones between us. We must not let our humanity be this election’s casualty.

Many have observed that the echo chamber generated by Harvard’s lack of ideological diversity may discourage attempts to listen deeper. But we can take steps to be more productive political actors. In casual political conversations, we shouldn’t assume our peers think as we do and automatically speak derisively of the other side―this bankrupts the discussion. We should seek exposure to varied news sources, because to develop our arguments we must test our worldviews, not indulge them. To advance the cause of mindful civic participation, we ought to seek reasoned truth rather than psychological confirmation.

Just because the blue-collar Democrat who helped swing the election to President Trump lacks a seat in our wood-paneled halls does not mean she doesn’t exist and it does not mean she is somehow hateful, irredeemable, or lesser. It means we have to do a better job of checking emotion, invoking thoughtfulness, and reaching out. Hopefully we are successful in encouraging productive dialogue so that politics may again be about building each other up rather than tearing down the other 49 percent.

Because as it always should, love trumps hate.

Liam Baughman ’19 is a sophomore in Cabot House studying Applied Mathematics.