How Ordinary People Might Become Unwitting Trump Collaborators

Here, Knobe cautions against knee-jerk pessimism. While daily events may seem overwhelming—or even enraging—the future is constantly being forged. Knobe emphasizes that humans have made tremendous strides in history, but often over decades—Trump’s may simply be an incendiary presidential administration that’s ultimately a feeble blip in time. He points to revolutionary changes in our perspectives on issues like racism, sexual harassment—and slavery. While these sensibilities are under constant attack, they’ve proven to be enduring values, not easily erased.

“If you lived in 1850 and saw someone with a slave, you might think, ‘How awful,’ but there’s little you could have changed about it, and it was widely viewed as acceptable,” Knobe said. “Now, we would be horrified.”

He warns that emphasizing polarization and the negativity of the current political landscape could have a backlash, just as Trump’s repeated evocation of a pending apocalypse could actually bring about the violence about which he warns, given the way the human mind works. Knobe points out research that college campaigns to reduce student drinking by emphasizing the problem may have triggered an increase in drinking. Better, he said, to emphasize the number of students not drinking or, in politics, what large numbers of Republicans have traditionally believed in the past to make them appear more recognizable and less oppositional.