No, everyone who voted for Trump is not complicit in storming the Capitol

Note: I don’t recycle Facebook content here often, but I decided to make an exception this morning. This is based largely on a Facebook comment I made, so if you follow me there it’s a “director’s cut.” Sorry about that.

More than 74 million people voted for Donald Trump. That is about 35% of the 18+ population of the United States (not 35% of registered voters). I recently encountered the assertion/assumption that everyone who voted for Donald Trump is complicit in the events of January 6.

I don’t think that’s the case. There can’t be 74 million people in the country who wish to commit or abet violence against the state, or who are even ambivalent to it. So we can say a nontrivial number of those 74 million people could not have been reasonably expected to anticipate the armed insurrection against the Capitol.

“How can this be?” the informed readership of BoWilliams.com thinks. “Trump has been directly stoking this fire for four or five months, and has periodically inflamed these factions throughout his presidency. This was easy to predict!”

Yes, it was, if we assume that every single one of his voters consumes news regularly, that every single one of his voters engages in vigorous discussions with his/her friends and neighbors, that every single one of his voters chooses candidates to support in the ways that we do, and so forth.

Yes, it was, if we assume that all 74 million people are like the people reading this post.

(That’s confirmation bias, about as naked as it comes.)

So how many one-issue pro-life voters are out there? Best I can tell with a casual search engine spin, that number might be as high as one in five. How many voters out there vote the way a spouse, a pastor, or some other highly influential person (or institution) says to? There’s a powerful reason employers, civic groups, and so forth endorse candidates. How many voters out there really are in a news/opinion echo chamber, where everything they see/read “verifies” everything else they see/read, and all is well in that chamber? We’ve seen that even in the aftermath. (Bigly.)

Now certainly, there are arguments here that these people should be more informed, should engage more in their governments and how they are selected, and so forth. But that they aren’t/don’t doesn’t make them complicit in the events of January 6.

That’s a bridge too far.

And if we’re ever going to find any unity, or even sustained peaceful dissent, we definitely can’t march forth into a future in which we assume every one of these 74 million people is a co-conspirator.

No, everyone who voted for Trump is not complicit in storming the Capitol

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