On the 7th of November, I was having lunch with a good friend who lives a few miles south of here. We settled into a friendly little mercado—one of those charming community-based stores that combine a small café with a market offering fresh meat, produce, and everyday essentials. They remind me of the local markets and “general stores” that have all but vanished from mainstream America, leaving behind a yearning for that personal touch and connection to the community.
At the table next to us, a group of five men was also having lunch. A crew truck was parked outside, and all the guys wore company uniforms. Four of the men were Latino, and one was Caucasian, and though they were laughing and talking quietly, we were close enough to overhear their conversation. They were all Trump supporters, and they were happy.
In our travels from the mountains to the foothills that week and excluding a few notable exceptions, the mood of the people we encountered was generally upbeat and hopeful. In the grocery store, strangers struck up conversations with each other. People were being nice to the cashiers.
Only a few hours away from the mercado, the mood was decidedly grim among another group we visited. Some were still shocked and disbelieving. How could this have happened? What’s wrong with America? All the stages of grief were in evidence, but anger was getting the most play.
For the most part, we just listened and nodded. “If everything you say is true, I’d have to agree with you. Let’s not talk about politics right now. Is that my phone? I really need to take this call.”
Between elections, when emotions are not running so high and people are less sensitive, they will sometimes share the thought processes that led them to support a certain party or candidate. Why did you support them? What information did you use to form that opinion? Where did you get the information?
I’m still astonished at how narrow the window can be through which partisans view the world, and how thoroughly the distinction between fact and interpretation has been clouded by the masters of narrative. Even though trust in news organizations is at historic lows, partisans rarely question their sources when the information given agrees with their preconceived notions.
In the classic Robert Heinlein novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, a futuristic society suffers from a scarcity of truth. As a remedy, it has developed the “Fair Witness,” which is a human trained and conditioned to observe and report events with perfect accuracy and impartiality. In their official capacity, Fair Witnesses are used in legal proceedings, scientific inquiries, and contractual procedures.
“Stranger” was written in 1961 when American society was embarking on a period of unrest and turmoil as traditional values were being challenged. The Cold War was heating up; rapid technological change driven by the Space Race was unleashing creative destruction, and the specter of nuclear annihilation haunted anyone who had ever done a “duck and cover” under a school desk.
There are uncomfortable parallels between that time and now, and we have no Fair Witnesses to help us separate the wheat from the chaff and the needle from the haystack as we form our opinions about the world. Corporations also owned newspapers and television stations in the ’60s, and there was competition for control of the narrative then as well as now, but the number of independent sources was much greater than what we have today.
While this holds true for mainstream sources, the opposite is true in cyberspace, where everyone with a phone or a computer is a reporter, a commentator, and an influencer. Here you can always find someone who agrees with absolutely anything that you prefer to believe. It is the purest form of free speech we have, but in this realm, there is about as much falsehood as fact. Here amid the noise, you can also find the facts which some would do just about anything to conceal, and that’s one of the reasons why the struggle for control of this space is ongoing.
So how do we tell the difference between fact and fiction, or even fact and interpretation? We don’t have Fair Witnesses, and we don’t trust our fact-checkers, some of whom are suspected of being compromised as well. How did the voters who made the difference for Trump, for the Senate and the House—not the ones who would have voted for Republicans anyhow, but the large numbers who switched parties when it came time to mark their ballots—how did they decide what was fair and what was important?
Among the voters who empowered the Republican sweep, I think it came down to a contest between the productive class and the contemplative class. Hold on. I’m not saying that contemplative people can’t be productive or that productive people are not thinkers, and I’m not fond of the word “class” in this context, but bear with me.
When Stranger in a Strange Land was written, the majority of college-educated voters were Republicans. Voting Republican was considered “smart business,” and the “little guy” voted Democrat. By the time Obama came to office, a shift to the left was well underway, and in 2016, the majority of college-educated voters, for the first time, voted for the Democrat.
Put another way, the Democrats in 2024 missed the fact that the Republicans had become the “big tent” party while the Democrats were perceived as the party of the elites. They missed some obvious clues, like going into debt to pay for celebrity endorsements while Trump was serving french fries and riding in a garbage truck. The information they trusted, mainstream media, the networks, the legacy media, and prestige press — were not fair witnesses.
The contemplative class is the idea factory of society, and when your raison d’être is ideas, your ideas can become as personal as anything you hold dear, and you will defend them passionately. The contemplative class has a tendency to vote for ideas, which become ideals when they are insulated from the requirements of living and working in the productive class. The problem with ideals at election time is that ideals require ideal conditions in order to function ideally.
The productive class certainly has ideals as well. Many of those are faith-based. When it’s a question of faith, faith usually always gets the vote. Beyond that, ideals take a back seat to pragmatism. I have to get back to work. Groceries are too expensive, and I don’t know how we’re going to pay the bills this month. I’m spending 30% of my income on rent. I worked hard to come to America, and I don’t want to lose my job to someone who will work for a lot less. Why do they think they know me just because I’m Black?
You may disagree with any or all of these statements, but they are a fair witness to statements made by swing voters when asked why they voted for Republicans. Finally, in 2024, there was a small but significant shift among college-educated voters and urban voters back to Republican candidates. So productive, contemplative, or both, the fair witness for the swing voter this year turns out to be common sense. That doesn’t mean that common sense is always right, but if you want to win elections, it pays to give it some consideration.
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Outside The Box 