Babies were too young to join the “basket of deplorables.” Image by Getty Images

Hadley Freeman, a writer everyone should read (and a Jewish woman!), made a really key point about the election in a recent Guardian column:

“To call out [Trump] voters for falling for such damagingly racist and sexist messages is viewed by politicians as a vote-killer and dangerously snobby by the media, as though working-class people are precious toddlers who must be humoured and can’t possibly be held responsible for any flawed thinking.”

The central takeaway (one that’s becoming clear to observers on the right as well, and one that I’m reminded, rereading my forthcoming book’s afterword, I’d been obsessed with back in July) is that Trump’s side has embraced white identity politics. It’s done so in the of-the-moment way that isn’t just about vaguely celebrating an identity, but that’s about defining members of a particular group as The True Aggrieved. More on that later. An actually-also-central side note is Freeman’s use of the word “toddlers.”

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I’ve been seeing this a lot. Although, to be fair, sometimes they’re “babies” rather than “toddlers”:

I argue about politics with family members *all the time* and have tried *everything*. They are not babies who are simply misled.

— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) November 12, 2016

The babying & glorifying of “real America” is toxic. Education is a good thing. Open-mindedness is a good thing. Progress is a good thing.

— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) November 12, 2016

To be clear (although I suspect it is clear, but you never know): These commentators aren’t saying that Trump supporters are babies. They’re saying — we’re saying — that Trump supporters have been treated like coddled infants in news articles and op-eds.

This is all too often the case even in explicitly anti-Trump commentary. Yes, I’m thinking of the thing where we’re now meant to calmly sit down with, and educate, the voters who got us in this mess. While I think there’s something to that — call-outs appear not to work — it’s not clear that education is the missing piece. Free college tuition, perhaps, but not “education” in the sense of presuming that if a Clinton voter and a Trump voter take tea, the latter will be the persuadable youth in that situation. If we are going to have those conversations, we need to do so adult to adult, and if the other adult stands firm in his or her bigotry, we need to condemn that bigotry, not brush it off as ignorance.

But why toddlers, why now?

A big meme of the last several years was that progressives — campus activists especially — were babies. “Young people are entering college as budding adults and being immediately turned back into babies,” wrote Matt Walsh, in a piece from a year ago yesterday. The real adults, went the thinking, know the value of free speech, and hold sophisticated views on things like offensive Halloween costumes and cultural appropriation.

But now that Trump has decided to frame his supporters as the true identity-based victims, oh how the tables have turned! Some commentators on the left have opted, in turn, to call out the hypersensitivity of Trump voters. Witness a great recent column by Tabatha Southey, bearing the headline, “Trigger warning, Trump fans: This column calls racists ‘racists.’” Writes Southey:

“That [Trump voters] are adults who are accountable for their choices was largely taken as an unduly harsh sentiment in this election. But there is no parent’s note for bigotry. No teacher would accept ‘Little Timmy can’t help but hate Mexicans today because he had a dentist appointment.’”

OMG I am in actual love with that last sentence. It gets the point across, doesn’t it?

Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at [email protected]. Her book, The Perils of “Privilege”, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017.

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