I don’t live in a complete filter bubble — I am privileged enough to have other people’s political opinions not cause me immediate, direct, harm, and so I have friends, or at least friendly acquaintances, across all political divides (though I try as best I can to persuade them round to my way of thinking, because those views *do* hurt other people — and I have been successful more often than you might imagine, or I wouldn’t be able to justify such friendships even to myself).

But I do predominantly tend to be friendly with people who would, to use an over-simplistic model, share the bottom-left quadrant of the political compass with me. People who support LGBT+ rights (and who would mostly add a few more letters to that acronym), who think black lives matter, who want greater economic justice. (Truth be told, even most of my right-wing-voting friends pay at least lip service to those values, though I don’t yet understand how they reconcile that with their voting).

So I’ve seen a lot of explanations mooted for Trump’s “victory” on Tuesday (if you can call getting two million fewer votes, even after your opponents’ voters have been systematically disenfranchised, a victory):

It’s because Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate helped into position by her cronies in the DNC. Bernie would have won it.

It’s because of all those Bernie bros who couldn’t get over themselves and vote for a woman when they lost.

It’s because of all those Jill Stein voters who put ideological purity over winning

It’s because of all those Johnson voters who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary

It’s because people are lazy and didn’t bother to vote

It’s because of the media convincing people Hillary was corrupt.

It’s because of the media convincing people Hillary was more popular, so they didn’t need to vote.

It’s because liberal elitists don’t listen to ordinary people

It’s because of trans people

All of these, except the trans one which is just batshit crazy and a good example of how bigotry isn’t confined to the right, may have an element of truth in them, and may contain important lessons for the future. But there’s one thing they have in common — they’re all blaming *people who didn’t vote for Trump*.

At the same time, I’m seeing (usually from self-described “moderates” and “centrists”) a lot of people saying “well, we need to understand the very real concerns of Trump voters”.

Now, I am no political genius with a finger on the pulse of the public, particularly the American public, and I don’t claim infallibility here, but I *think* this is a bit the wrong way round.

I think — and correct me if I’m wrong — that to the extent there is someone to blame for the US having elected a fascist strongman demagogue to a position where he could, if he wanted, actually destroy the whole world, that blame doesn’t primarily lie with the people who *didn’t* vote for him and didn’t want it to happen.

It may be a simplistic analysis, but I think *if you’re going to blame people*, starting with the bad man and the bad things he says and does, and the bad people who voted for him, is a good place to start.

In particular, blaming the people who brought in voting restrictions designed specifically to keep people of colour and other marginalised people from voting, using racist and anti-democratic tactics to depress Democratic turnout in swing states, seems like a good idea if you’re looking for someone to blame. But that’s just me.

Personally, I don’t think blame is a good idea. I think *responsibility* is a good idea, but the only way it’s good is if it’s turned on oneself. “In what way am I responsible for this loss? What lessons can I learn to make sure this doesn’t happen again? What can I do to fix it now?”

Blame is a way of evading responsibility, of saying “it’s not my fault!” — “Don’t blame me, I voted for blaming someone else instead”.

And that’s OK for some people — if you’re a black person turned away from the polling station because you can’t produce the ID you’ve never been able to afford, then blaming the people who stopped you voting is entirely reasonable.

But most of the people I’ve seen making these arguments are people with a reasonable amount of power themselves — people who could actually *do something about it*. Maybe not much, but something. Donating money or time, writing to elected representatives, volunteering to pay for ID for someone denied the vote because of racist restrictions. So rather than blaming others, they should look at what they can do themselves.

And the idea that someone voting for a fascist has “legitimate problems that must be understood”, but that someone who doesn’t vote at all is “just lazy” or “doesn’t care”, or that someone voting for a third-party candidate is “a narcissist who doesn’t care about the real world”, is just extraordinarily wrong. If fascists are allowed the basic respect of being listened to, *surely* libertarians or Greens should be allowed the same respect?

So listen to *them*. Find out what can be done to persuade *them* to vote for your preferred candidate next time.

Believe me, I understand the appeal of being able to shout “you’re all a bunch of bastards and if everyone had just listened to me and done exactly what I said, everything would be OK instead of the complete disaster it is now” — that is, in essence, a summary of about three quarters of my blog posts, including this one.

(The other quarter say “the Beach Boys are good”, “the Monkees are good”, “Doctor Who used to be good but isn’t any more” and “I like Batman”, in case anyone was wondering. Now you’ll never have to read my archives again.)

But indulging yourself in the narcissism of small differences, to point out how much better you are than people you mostly agree with, might be a fun hobby, but it’s not a good way to get them on your side.

Please don’t confuse it with being productive, and don’t allow it to get in the way of doing something useful.

(And then right after typing all this I see that Jack Graham has managed to say pretty much all of this better than I could. I disagree with him at the end about his critique of liberalism, but where I disagree is that “the dominant ideology of the mainstream political and journalistic establishment today” and “the underpinning of the entire electoral/representational system in most Western democracies” are anything I’d call liberalism, not that those things are terrible — in much the same way that he would argue (and I would agree) that Stalinism was an evil perversion of Marxism. The rest of it’s spot on though.)

This blog post has been brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?