“Shame on everyone who allowed Trump to come to power! Because you didn’t vote for Hillary, you are guilty of, at best, accessory to crime or criminal negligence.”
Outbursts like this appear somewhat frequently on my social media feeds. Frustrated or frightened by the Trump administration, members of my network chastise the voters (i.e. small-minded fools or bigots) who brought Trump to office. Because a Republican president was elected, much of this kind of shaming currently comes from left-leaning folks, but I’m sure many conservatives do the same when the tables are turned, blaming an undesirable political outcome on the ignorance, stupidity, or moral depravity of the other side. I refer to this tendency as “voter shaming,” whether or not the shaming is made explicit, because its aim is to change political opinions/behavior by making certain voters feel ashamed of the way they voted. The perspective underlying voter shaming implies that the root cause of Trump’s election is the cumulative bad decisions of individual voters. Coming from a group of people who consistently assert that the root cause of outcomes other than the election (like poverty, for example) is ultimately not individual decisions but an inequitable system, this seems somewhat inconsistent.
In this post, I explore what it might mean to apply the same kind of system-level thinking to the election that Democrats generally apply to other social phenomena. What would happen if we viewed Trump’s election as the emergent result of a complex system, and not the additive sum of individual votes? Continue reading