Taking this as mourning

"I can't forgive those Trump Voters"

I am reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine¹ and came across this statement in Chapter 15:

When I look at this history, and then I look at the culture war, I see cause and effect. I see a war being fought over the spoils and the ruins of Progress by people who live in those ruins and are mourning the loss of something they don’t even quite understand. That sense of mourning is common on both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’. Whether they are mourning the end of the arc of history or the end of a country they miss without maybe having known it, the sense of loss is profound, even if unspoken. For many people, everything is broken.

The first half of Against the Machine is bleak. Thus far Kingsnorth has been laying out all that is wrong in our world, the hyper-real commercial experience we live in that obscures and destroys our more natural origins.² This chapter of the book is starting to gain what I hope is momentum to some kind of path forward for us in response to the mire he has so vividly described.

The idea that we are two camps,³ in opposition and mourning, hits. I take his reference to the “end of the arc of history” to be the progressive left’s general idea, expressed by Martin Luther King, jr days before he died, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”⁴ I take the “end of a country they miss without maybe having known it” as the suggestion in “Make America Great Again” that we once were great but are not now.

I am reading Against the Machine with a book club. When we discussed this chapter, one person was able to describe his own mourning in a very detailed way. It inspired further discussion of the things he feels a loss of and a desire for. However, he could not express a belief or understanding of the mourning of those he saw in opposition to what he was mourning.

And it is hard for us to expect otherwise. Everyone mourns in their own way — some violently, some quietly — but little can be done about the direction of ones mourning from the outside. All manner of relations tried to redirect Hamlet’s mourning to something more convenient. They could not change his mood or trajectory.

Forgive me for not doing extensive research on clinical approaches to mourning, but in a quick search I came across The Center for Loss & Life Transition, started by Alan D. Wolfelt. In his article The Six Needs of Mourning he lists

1. Acknowledge the reality of death.

2. Embrace the pain of loss

3. Remember the person who died

4. Develop a new self-identity

5. Search for meaning

6. Receive ongoing support from others.

I wonder about whether we are fostering our own process of mourning or simply striking out to avoid the pain of loss and the reality we are facing.

Right now, there are both numbers and words showing that people are abandoning Donald Trump. In numbers, polls of his approval are dropping. In words, prominent supporters have publicly distanced themselves from the administration.

If you are in opposition to Donald Trump, you have to consider what to do next. To one extent or another, these people have some responsibility for what you view as great ills. You will tell me that “great ills” is doing a whole lot of work there, holding death, cruelty, destruction.

These are things to mourn.

I ask a hard thing, in the midst of the rubble;

Without addressing anything external to these individuals, can you consider the feeling of abandoning something you believed in? Of abandoning hope that would resurrect what you have lost?.

In my social media these days the machines that are designed to feed me rage dressed up like news regularly show me people who I don’t know saying that they will not forgive any Trump voter, that they will not welcome them back. Some are Russian bots, but some are actual Americans, also in mourning.

In the past, I have said that this is stupid strategy unless your goal is authoritarianism of a left-leaning brand built on demonizing large swaths of the popultion.

It still is stupid, but now I consider the mourning, the grieving, the churning processes we are all experiencing. The tragedy that we can not give each other anything useful to our mourning as we have not the strength just now to reach that far.

That we have worsened our communities because our own mourning kept us from comforting our neighbor’s mourning.

1. Two notes: 1) I am not done with this book as of April 2026) 2) I am getting a lot out of the reading and reflecting but do not find perfect agreement with Kingsnorth. Worth a deep, critical read, I would say. Like in the old days when we read things that we didn’t completely agree with.

2. My one sentence description does no justice to 14 chapters of thoughtful explication. If you have not read the book, don’t take my description as thorough. If you have read the book, give me some grace for this summary.

3. I am uncomfortable with the idea we are such a binary, but feel a need to accept that broad generalization for the moment. I am talking about mourning here, not the variety of beliefs and motivations in the populace!

4. Originally a meditation by Unitarian minister Theodore Parker prior to the Civil War. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/15/arc-of-universe/