This topic is dealt with also in an op/ed that will be appearing this weekend in Trump country, where I live, in the rural Virginia congressional district where I was the Democratic nominee for Congress in 2012. The text of that op/ed piece appears here below the video. Its title in the newspapers is “To Admit Error, or Not.”
(The video has been one of my most watched, with just under two thousand views.)
To Admit Error, or Not
I assume my Republican readers regard me as a partisan—a Democrat. That bothers me because I know that’s not where I’m coming from. I am not saying things to help “my side” but because I think they are true and important.
The striving for truth has been my life’s work. It was the purpose of my education and has driven me for more than sixty years. It has been my passion. I’d have preferred if the times had allowed me to ignore politics.
So when I say that voting for Trump was a catastrophic mistake (in terms of American values and well-being), it’s not to score points for my political tribe. It is because the professional tools I’ve spent my life developing lead to that judgment.
That’s no proof I’m right. (Though I’d say the evidence supporting that judgment becomes more powerful by the day.)
But even though some medical doctor’s opinion might be wrong, because of the doctor’s professional body of knowledge, his medical opinion should be given due weight.
In the same way, my hope would be that my Trump-supporting readers – rather than dismissing my judgments as mere attacks from a political foe – would give my arguments “due weight.”
The Cost of Admitting Error
But that won’t happen, I know—for one reason, because the cost would be too high.
There’s a psychological cost to admitting a mistake. And the bigger the mistake, the greater the cost.
It would be one thing if it were just one wrong choice on one ballot. But for many, the error of voting for Trump would be the culmination of years of choosing wrongly. If one supported Trump throughout the past decade—despite all the evidence of his consistent destructiveness—recognizing an error of that magnitude would surely be painful.
But many would have made a journey that was still longer: from supporting the decent Ronald Reagan to embarking on a path that led -- through Gingrich to Fox News to Karl Rove and on to Trump – repeatedly choosing sociopathic and deceitful actors on the national stage.
Who would have the guts to recognize that long sequence of choices for what they were—consistently giving their power to a party with no positive vision, no interest in improving things? A party whose only motivation seemed to be fighting to gain more power.
A Hard Truth to Face
It’s understandable, then, that those conservatives who have traveled this path would resist taking seriously what I say about Trump and the Republican Party. To acknowledge their error would mean acknowledging that, time and again, they mistook the Evil for the Good.
And not many would be willing to recognize having made an error so grave as that.
When I say that, I recall a friend of my family who’d felt compelled that he had been very wrong about something very important. As a young man in the 1930s, he’d been one of those Americans who supported Josef Stalin – the communist dictator in Russia. Then there came a time when he saw Stalin for the Evil that he was. That realization of his own blindness shook him to his core, leaving a lasting effect on his confidence in his own judgment.
For me, it is part of my ethic as a truth-seeker to admit when I’ve erred. But the errors I’ve had to acknowledge have been small potatoes compared to mistaking the Evil for the Good.
I’d like to think that—if I made a mistake that grave, over a long stretch of time—I’d admit it. But I’m not sure I’d have the courage that would require.
Trump’s utter wrongness for the presidency was so obvious—certainly by 2024—that a good person would have to enter some strangely disconnected frame of mind not to see it. And in a subculture where admission of error is seen not as a virtue but as weakness, that admission would be even harder.
Choosing Personal Comfort Over Moral Truth
For those reasons, my expectation is that the great majority of Trump voters will go to their graves never questioning their rightness, and their righteousness.
No matter how great the catastrophic impact on the nation – and the world – of this mistaking the Evil for the Good, I don’t expect many of them will ever acknowledge their error.
If Trump’s reckless tariffs tank the American economy, they’ll likely say it wasn’t his fault. If his abandonment of America’s role as “leader of the free world” leads to war in Europe, or to China invading Taiwan, someone else will be blamed. If Trump’s abuse of power intimidates the press into becoming a puppet of the ruler, they’ll say the press had it coming for being an “enemy of the people.”
Already, I’ve witnessed people who should know better twisting their thinking into pretzels to avoid seeing what’s right in front of their eyes.
That self-deception—the need to justify past choices—has played out in history before. Societies have fallen into authoritarianism because too many people refused to admit they were wrong until it was too late.
To admit to having been so wrong, about something so fundamental, perhaps for so long, would require a level of spiritual fortitude that I expect will prove rare.
That is the tragedy of this moment in American history.