I didn’t see this Nicholas Kristof column until sometime after it ran at the end of August. I heard about it later, when he did a voice piece on NYT Audio speaking back to readers who had given him unmitigated grief for the column, headlined “Here’s Why We Shouldn’t Demean Trump Voters.”

Nicholas Kristof

You should be able to read it at that link, but if you’re too much of a slacker, I’ll tell you it was a good piece, and Kristof is completely right.

The piece starts with a quote from Bill Clinton speaking at the Democratic National Convention:

“We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by phony issues or overconfident…. ”

“I urge you to meet people where they are,” said Clinton, who knows something about winning votes outside of solid blue states. “I urge you not to demean them, but not to pretend you don’t disagree with them if you do. Treat them with respect — just the way you’d like them to treat you.”…

Well, that’s pretty basic, and no one who follows any of the multiple moral codes on this planet that share a version of the Golden Rule should have an argument with it at all. But I know that some will, and they will express themselves vehemently. Including some of y’all — and me.

I know Kristof is right, and I resolve before God and all of you to act accordingly. But I fear I will fail, as I often have before.

The reason, of course, is that I’ve never been able to think of a single reason to support Trump that doesn’t fit into one of two ugly categories. I’ve often raised the question, Which is it? Is Trump evil? Or just stupid? All, or at least most, of the halfway believeable excuses for backing him seem to fit in one of those categories. To overlook the legion of shocking problems with the man, it seems you must be as bent on destroying all the best things about this country I love, or just completely insensible to all evidence, and incapable of reaching a rational conclusion.

Of course, in my struggle to show the love I owe to every brother and sister on the planet, and my frequent failure to do so, I reveal my own evil, and my own stupidity.

I’m probably going to get myself in trouble with the NYT copyright lawyers (even though I’m strongly urging you to read the original, and even subscribe), but here are some excerpts from the Kristof piece:

By all means denounce Trump, but don’t stereotype and belittle the nearly half of Americans who have sided with him….

Since I live in a rural area, many of my old friends are Trump supporters. One, a good and generous woman, backs Trump because she feels betrayed by the Democratic and Republican political establishments, and she has a point. When factories closed and good union jobs left the area, she ended up homeless and addicted; four members of her extended family killed themselves and she once put a gun to her own head. So when a demagogue like Trump speaks to her pain and promises to bring factories back, of course her heart leaps.

Then her resolve strengthens when she hears liberals mock her faith — it was an evangelical church that helped her overcome homelessness — or deride her as “deplorable.”…

Since the Obama presidency, Democrats have increasingly become the party of the educated, and the upshot has often been a whiff of condescension toward working-class voters, especially toward voters of faith. And in a country where 74 percent of Americans report a belief in God, according to Gallup, and only 38 percent over the age of 25 have a four-year college degree, condescension is a losing strategy.

Michael Sandel, the eminent Harvard philosopher, condemns the scorn for people with less education as “the last acceptable prejudice” in America. He’s right…

And so forth. He concludes:

Whatever our politics, Trump brings out the worst in all of us. He nurtures hate on his side that we mirror.

So let’s take a deep breath, summon F.D.R.’s empathy for the forgotten man, follow Clinton’s advice — and, for the sake of winning elections as well as of civility, remember that the best way to get others to listen to us is to first listen to them.

Of course, that requires “them” being willing to listen to us, or even talk to us. Trump’s great triumph is in splitting us further apart. In a way, it’s his whole strategy. An America in which people who disagree speak and listen to each other is the America I grew up in — a place that would laugh a man like Trump right off the stage as he makes promises to hurting people that he has no intention of keeping.

I know how hard all this is for all of us, but we must not give in to Trump’s strategy. We need more of what happened in my yard several weeks ago — a neighbor who is super-involved in local GOP politics and has a Trump sign in his yard (I think — it’s awkwardly placed at the border of his yard and the one next door) came over and struck up a friendly conversation with my wife and me, even though he knew people close to him would think him crazy for doing so.

I appreciated it. We had a very amicable exchange of views, and have had another such talk since then.

It was really kind of wonderful. We all need to have more such talks. And I feel obliged to take the next step myself. And I know how. I used to have a lot of such conversations. It’s just been awfully hard lately…

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