We just got off another truly inspiring Live conversation, this time with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who’s running for Senate in Michigan, and with our own Leigh Haber, who’s heading up the brand-new Ink Book Club. And both conversations focused on how to stand up to Trump — not just by fighting against his regime, but by building community, and engaging in the kind of radically empathetic acts that let us build the America that could and should be.
For Dr. El-Sayed, that’s first and foremost about defeating Trump politically, winning the fight. But it’s more importantly about winning the peace by offering a real vision for the future.
And ultimately, that’s about approaching Trump voters — the people we’re going to be sharing the country we build with, the people who allied themselves with a bully out of a deep, deep insecurity — with the empathy it takes to bring them over. As he told us:
So often we are so frustrated by where we are as a society, about all the pain that we’ve seen at the hands of Donald Trump, that we want to go to those folks who support him and be like, “Don’t you see how stupid this decision was?” And we want to prove them wrong.
And I think if we’re serious about the future, we’ve got to get them to being right. And that’s a very different process.
That’s not about me being right and you being wrong. That’s about you being right because I created a space within which you felt safe enough to have a sense where you could look at facts and reality and say, “You know what? I made a mistake.” Where we’re not going to jump on them and be like, “Yeah, you did.” No, no. Hey, we’re all trying to move forward here. We get that sometimes when scary, powerful people come along, that they turn other people against the truth. So let’s get folks to be right.
And that ties directly into something that came up in our conversation about the Book Club, because, as Leigh pointed out, reading is an act of profound empathy that counters the deep insecurity at the heart of Trumpism. If we look at Donald Trump, who’s said not to be able to read anything longer than a page, we see a person totally dependent on the opinions of others but without any capacity to judge those opinions or trust any of them. He’s lost, insecure — a bully who’s the weakest of all.
Reading is what lets us get out of our own heads and what lets us communicate with others, form opinions, and make judgments — the opposite of Trumpism is reading.
You won’t want to miss this one, and we hope you’ll share it far and wide. Let’s keep going. Let’s keep growing. Thank you, one and all.
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A programming note: More Live conversation!
Join us again on Monday, May 5, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when we’ll be back with scholar of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. We hope to see you all there!
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This post was originally published on The.Ink.