I listened to a podcast recently about a young man who had a violent encounter with a plain-clothes police officer in Stockton, CA back in 2011. The young man, a sixteen-year-old boy, was trying to buy candy for his sister at a gas station convenience store, and the clerk didn’t want to take the torn dollar bill on offer. As the two argued, it so happened that standing in line behind the young man was a Stockton PD officer in plain clothes. He decided to intervene, and the young man told him to mind his own business – not knowing at first that his assailant was a police officer. Eventually, the young man agreed to leave the store, and it could have just ended there, but the officer decided to grab the young man and throw him to the ground, punch him repeatedly, and arrest him. A jury later found that the officer had used excessive force and had no cause to accost the young man in the first place. So why did he do it?
By way of answering this question, the story introduced me to a new phrase, “contempt of cop,” which is law enforcement jargon describing people whom officers perceive as disrespectful or insufficiently deferential to their authority. It describes the real motivation behind many instances where an officer arrests someone for “failure to obey a police order” or “resisting arrest,” particularly when one of these or something similar is brought as a standalone charge.
For me, something about the idea of “contempt of cop,” as both a motive and a rationale, connected with other thoughts I’ve had about Trump supporters, because of their explicit demand for “respect.” I thought about the reaction several years ago to Hillary Clinton referring to a swath of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” and how Trump’s supporters themselves pulled the phrase out of context and understood it as a broad condemnation of all Trump supporters. Eventually and bizarrely, they embraced it as a label for themselves, putting “proud deplorable” in their Twitter bios, for example.
I thought also about the “Pennsylvania diner” trope of Trump-era journalism, where ivy-educated reporters scattered to small towns to probe the minds of heartland conservatives. Ironically, despite the pandering that’s implicit in the very existence of a genre that centers Trump supporters, one thing that emerged from the pieces is the notion that Trump supporters feel disrespected by leftist elites and by the entire mainstream cultural establishment that has drifted left over the last few decades.
There it is again, the rage against being disrespected.
On the left, the steady stream of Pennsylvania Diner stories prompted a backlash. Leftists (like me) were confused and irked by the whole project, and the tenacity with which the news media pursued these stories. Why did they believe it was so important to understand Trump supporters? Why did these pieces seem to pander to notions of “real America,” and the suggestion that the rest of us, in our coastal cities, are posers somehow? There were no similar efforts to understand Hillary supporters or Obama supporters. Some leftists didn’t just challenge the idea of centering Trump supporters and giving them a platform. They wondered why we should want to learn about Trump supporters at all, because they are bad people. Trump is uniquely awful, and to support him on any level is disqualifying.
There are softer voices on the left as well, preaching about civility, about our common humanity, about how we need to listen to each other, and about how love is the only solution. This has been a common theme in advice to families and communities – churches and other organizations – who have been fractured by political differences. We just need to listen to each other, we are told, to see and focus on our common humanity.
I have wavered across all of these different perspectives, and I have held conflicting thoughts. Many Trump supporters are bad people, I have thought. And also, they are my fellow humans, my fellow Americans.
During the first few months after Trump was elected, I was as shocked and confused by the whole thing as anyone. I had always seen Trump as a blowhard and a clown, and a crass and cruel one at that. The idea that anyone could take him seriously at all, let alone admire him, was unfathomable to me. It still is. For a little while, I made my own efforts to search out Trump supporters and engage with them, because I wanted to answer the same basic question as the Pennsylvania diner news stories – what do people see in this guy? In the end, my own project failed. I found that the Trump supporters I engaged with mostly just parroted right wing talking points. They were amazingly consistent and didn’t base anything on actual facts or evidence as far as I could tell, because they were unable to go beyond one or two simplistic talking points on any issue. When I presented them with contrary evidence or even gently probed with questions, they would resort to namecalling or pivot to a completely different issue. I never found common ground on anything remotely political, and it became hard for me to muster basic compassion.
I didn’t like this deficit in myself – the inability to muster basic compassion for my fellow humans and countrymen. And then came the experience I had while listening to the story of the Stockton cop’s assault on the young man in the convenience store, when I saw that the yearning for respect is all about ego. Ego is a hell of a drug, and this is where I found compassion.
Quick definition time. When I refer to the ego, I am referring to our sense of selfhood in general, and I am also referring more specifically to the source of our more instinctual impulses and base drives –the id, in Freudian terms.
I thought about my own battles with ego, and how ego is a trap we’re all born into. In my own journey – to overcome self-hatred and fear of vulnerability, to address anger issues and control my temper, to learn to connect with people, I have had some wonderful teachers. They have led me to places where I have seen my own ego and its power in my psyche. I have repeatedly experienced ego-death through psychedelics and other rituals, which is always both terrifying and incredibly liberating.
As I listened to the story about the cop who assaulted the young man in Stockton, I thought about the role of ego, and I felt some compassion for the cop. This was a little jarring to me, because of course I mainly felt compassion for the young man, the victim. But the cop? I tuned into my thoughts and sort of interrogated myself, and I understood that my compassion for the cop was not the same as accepting what he did. It didn’t even mean forgiving him, because it was not my place to forgive him. But I know that ego is a kind of commanding officer – an invisible one with a very powerful hold on all of us – and until our eyes are open to this, we simply follow its orders without any sense that we have other options. I understand how the cop is trapped, because I understand how all of us are trapped, how I have been trapped, and I understand how much damage I have inflicted on people as a result.
Fantastic piece