Reading Baron’s story helped me realize emotionally something I knew intellectually. It’s tempting for those of us who interpret politics for a living to overstate the importance of competing philosophies. We shouldn’t forget the enduring role of sheer vanity.
That brings us to Monday’s New York Times article about Bill White and his husband, Bryan Eure, headlined “How a Liberal Couple Became Two of N.Y.’s Biggest Trump Supporters.” The answer: ego. A former big-ticket Democratic fund-raiser, White went straight from Hillary Clinton’s election night party to Donald Trump’s when he realized which way the wind was blowing.
Those of us who are comfortable with ideas, and trained to think from principled abstractions, are prone to forget this: some people are merely things that eat, and they go where the food is best.