This is a story about one voter in one divided state, and how the pro-democracy movement should not despair but rather buck up and get to work, because a lot of people’s seemingly dangerous convictions are more shallow than we think.
So I meet this charming Egyptian-American man in North Carolina yesterday. He tells me he is likely voting for Trump. He sees my face change.
He was under the impression, because of disinformation, that President Biden is a living corpse, unable to string words together or function.
By chance, the person he was speaking to has met Biden and could personally attest that this is not true, also drawing on other sources.
To my shock, as soon as I presented what I had seen, he changed his tune. Oh, I didn’t know that, he said. I reminded him that hundreds of people work for presidents, doing the actual policy making. That reassured him further. He was really listening.
Now we got into Trump. I asked him if he knew that the Muslim ban was part of how Trump had begun. He said that, as an American citizen, it didn’t really apply to him.
But I explained that it was a war on people like him, and he started to get offended at the thought.
I mentioned Trump’s professions to be a dictator on day one. He hadn’t been focused on that, but he now made it clear that he really did not like the idea of anybody being a dictator. He is from Egypt. He knows dictators.
He was somewhat focused on his own safety because of his citizenship. So I mentioned that Trump had floated stripping citizenship from people, a profound break with American law.
This freaked him out. He cannot do that! No one can do that!
I often believe there’s a substrate set of issues beneath the loud ones. He now got to his: his fear around LGBT stuff as it’s being taught in schools, he said.
I’m a conservative, he said.
I responded that this issue of what is taught in schools has to be resolved in a democracy. Him and me and all of you arguing and figuring it out together.
But Trump wants to decide everything for himself. Trump doesn’t want him making that choice.
This, again, struck him.
And I have no doubt that he was more open than most people. But he didn’t like the idea of this being decided behind his back, which is what dictatorship is.
The conversation circled back to Biden. I told him that, apart from policy, Biden is a decent person, a person of family, as I suspected the man himself saw himself as. He is a good father and a good grandfather. The man said that this was an important thing.
I mentioned that Trump had been, let’s say, not that. Also, he was a New York Democrat for a long time, and pro-choice. The man was utterly shocked by this! A Democrat! Really? There is proof? There is, I said.
So all the stuff about quoting the Bible and saying he’s Christian? the man asked. Is that not real? I mean, it’s real that he says that, but it’s all lies. He is always lying.
This is not good, the man said. He really didn’t like this idea of bandying around spiritual books if you don’t believe in them.
By the end of the conversation, the man was asking if he could look up some videos where I’ve talked about this more so he could learn more.
He said he really hadn’t thought a lot about these things, and he didn’t like what he was hearing about Trump.
I asked him to promise to keep an open mind and try to learn more. If Trump wins in November’s election, there may be no more November elections, I said. He said that he had actually heard this and it was scary.
I tell you this because: We overly despair. We think fascism is rising because millions of people have deeply thought through it. In fact, lots of people are ambling into it because they are victims of disinformation, don’t spend a lot of time thinking about this, and have convictions all over the place.
The grave threat to American democracy is also, on the scale of millions of individuals, a strong opinion, lightly held.
When we exaggerate in our mind the depth of other’s convictions, we give up on democracy and persuasion. This was a particularly easy conversation. But I think there are millions more people like this man than we realize. We need to help them sense make.
Let’s get to work.
A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.
And today we’re offering you a special discount of 20 percent if you become a paying subscriber. You will lock in this lower price forever if you join us now!
This post was originally published on The.Ink.