Tending to “the Trump voter,” in that generalized sense, involves trafficking in a view of the country that we ought to leave behind. We can’t compromise about that. Baldwin came to understand that there were some white people in America who refused to give up their commitment to the value gap. For him, we could not predicate our politics on changing their minds and souls. They had to do that for themselves. In our after times, our task, then, is not to save Trump voters—it isn’t to convince them to give up their views that white people ought to matter more than others. Our task is to build a
...more
