How Can the Worst Person in the World Get Almost Half the Vote?

 It's going to be hard for the modest majority who voted for Biden to forgive the substantial minority who voted for Trump.  It is also essential that they find some way of doing so.

By far the most common sentiment I've heard from Biden voters is that they simply don't understand how anybody can vote for the Worst Person in the World.  The prevailing theory seems to be that half the country has gone full-blown batshit crazy.  That's a theory with dark implications, because you don't reason or negotiate with crazy people; you defeat and contain them.  Needless to say, the Trump side will resist that.  This is a fine recipe for at least a cold civil war, with more than an outside chance at a hot one.

So it'd be nice to have an alternate theory.  I think I have one.

First, because I live in Texas, and have children who live in Georgia and Florida, I'm exposed to Trump people.  Most of them aren't crazy. They are, by and large, perfectly decent, intelligent citizens.  So I'm forced to the conclusion that they've made rational decisions.  That doesn't mean that I agree with those decisions, but they shouldn't be dismissed as illegitimate.

People judge political leaders, either explicitly or implicitly, based on their own priorities and how well the candidate performs with respect to those priorities.  I and most of Biden voters have put an extremely high priority on the president not being the Worst Person in the World.  As a moderate conservative, if Trump had been semi-normal, I would have still had trouble with a lot of his accomplishments (or lack thereof), but I am, in principle, in favor of a government that's as small as possible but no smaller, with only essential regulations, and with a fairly conservative view of the law.  That these policies were implemented by an incompetent, in a fashion that provided minimum benefit for maximum pain, causes me to score Trump below average on them.  But I suspect that I would have scored potential Biden policies even lower.  But I didn't even consider any of this when I voted, because Trump's loathsome and alarming character meant that he was instantly disqualified.  Similarly, I voted almost straight Democratic, because people who enable the Worst Person in the World also score low enough on the character scale not to be trusted.

But reasonable people can disagree about the importance of character.

We've had plenty of presidents with less than sterling personalities.  None of them (including Nixon) have been nearly as bad as Trump, but that's a matter of degree, not kind.  It is a rational decision to rank character lower than policy in your own personal presidential calculus.

I think that this is what 60% of Trump World did.  They knew they were making a deal with the Devil, and they decided that it was worth it.  We may view that as an incredibly bad decision, but it's not an irrational one.  We have a fine process for working through opposing views on decisions: it's called participating in a democratic republic.  That process is still there.  It's been battered and bruised, but it can heal.  The political operators in it can decide to allow their norms to revert closer to the mean, and things will be... if not okay, at least better.

But it leaves two big questions.

First, what do we do with the 40% of TrumpWorld that really isn't rational?  That's roughly 20% of the country.  That's... unfortunate.  But we've always had 20%-30% of the country that was pretty much crazy, arrayed in varying proportions on the two extremes of the political spectrum, and we've done okay until recently.  My first approximation to an answer to the problem posed by those people is that we try to understand the reality behind what makes them crazy, address it as best as possible, and treat them with respect, even if we don't feel that they've completely earned it.

The more troubling question is this:  How could we have gotten to a point where 30% of the country could make the moral calculation that Trump's policy ends justified his loathsome means?  How could so many people discount character as an important quality in a president?

And there, I don't have a good answer.  The best one I have is that this is what happens when you stop valuing a common culture that has at least a few unquestioned norms.

This is of course a fairly mainstream conservative argument.  After all, the root of conservatism is to conserve.  When we stop valuing cultural traditions, they wither.  When they wither, the vacuum they leave behind is going to be filled by something.  That "something" is a lot more chaotic than what it replaced.

Sometimes that chaos is necessary.  There's always been a balance in America between forcing diverse cultures into the American consensus and embracing the diversity of those cultures (and appropriating the bejeezus out of the interesting parts to make the consensus culture better).  There's no question that the knob has been turned much farther to the left for the past sixty years than it was before that.  There are good reasons to have done that, but there are also good reasons to think that you can only force change like this so quickly before things either crumble or there's a terrific backlash.  In our case, both of those things are happening.

I'll go out on an absolutist limb and state that that's bad.

But there is a balance to this.  Full-blown reaction won't work, but neither will cramming cultural chaos down the throats of a near-majority that hates it.  That balance can be negotiated.  But it requires acknowledging that the two poles requiring balance are both legitimate, and then capitalizing on the good will that comes from acknowledging that legitimacy.