The morning the results of the 2024 presidential election became clear, David Frum wrote in the Atlantic that those of us who didn’t vote for Donald Trump would “need to prepare to live in a different America.” We will have to learn how to live with our fellow citizens, the majority of whom voted for someone who stokes racist hatred and political violence, exercises a preferential option for the billionaire, and has no qualms casting democracy aside to enrich himself and hurt his enemies. This disbelief wafted around liberal circles when Trump won the 2016 election—how could so many people like this guy?—but it’s different this time. We know who Trump is and what he wants to do. We saw what he did in a first term—all the viciousness, corruption, and willingness to overturn a fair election—and heard what he wants to do with a second. Some of us were repulsed. A larger number of us saw it and wanted more.
I live in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, a town of about 19,000 people in Chester County, one of the “collar counties” in the Philly suburbs the campaigns fought over so intensely. My family and I moved here in July and we loved it right away; the town has a vibrant civic life and cultural institutions, lots of “third places,” and people who seem to genuinely care about their neighbors. But for months, Phoenixville has been divided against itself: every house has either a Trump sign or a Harris sign. It’s been almost comical to see so many twin homes inhabited by political rivals, only a wall separating them.
For a long time, I didn’t want to settle down in a place where everyone agrees with me politically. I didn’t want to live in a bubble, where I would never have to encounter or find common ground with someone with a different political worldview. And I never wanted to see my fellow citizens, no matter how much I might disagree with them on something, as impediments; I wanted them to be people who, while we perhaps disagreed on something, I could live alongside, work with on common goals, and befriend.
I still feel that way—I think. But as the yard signs popped up, I kept wondering: Why did my neighbors, perhaps people I saw at the grocery store or went to church with, support Trump? What are they hoping he’ll do for them? And more important: What are they willing to excuse to get it?
It’s that last part that has gnawed at me. When people are afraid, they’re willing to excuse a lot. And they are afraid—that they won’t be able to retire, that they can’t afford rent or healthcare, that crime is rampant, that they’ll lose their jobs to immigrants, that Haitians will eat their pets, that Christians are being targeted by the deep state. Some of these fears are based in reality, the result of years of fecklessness by “elites” of both parties; some are not, propagated by liars who thrive on fear.
How do we live with neighbors who may be supportive of, or at least okay with, grave injustices? We find ways, Frum writes, “to win back to the cause of liberal democracy a sufficient number of those Americans who voted for a candidate who denigrated this nation’s institutions and ideals.” We can’t disengage. We don’t have the luxury of writing people off. We have to fight for the good of everyone in this country, quelling their well-founded fears and showing the way out of unfounded ones. And in the meantime, we’ll protect those who will suffer the worst a Trump administration will bring—the undocumented, workers, the poor, the environment. Fight for them, and don’t be afraid.
