When Politics isn’t All Personal - Insight

Once again, Zeynep Tufeki zeros in on the key point. Summing up her essay on why dismissing Trump voters as hopeless racists is mistaken:

But I don’t think that means there is no hope, ever, of appealing to groups to whom others are trying to appeal based on racism, or, more accurately, on ethno-nationalism populism. What we’ve seen in 2020 is that people do respond, in complicated ways certainly, to what they perceive as both paycheck and economic security issues and cultural affinity. Neither demographics nor turnout patterns are destiny. Trying to change people’s hearts may or may not be futile in the personal realm, but there’s no need to determine that conclusively. People respond, sometimes dramatically, to policies as they perceive and experience them. The personal is political but all politics isn’t always that personal.

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