The warmth of the fire, the hope of the electorate

There are ways to counter the damaging influences in Trump's America

Most people want to enjoy the fire, not learn how to build it. But we need fire-builders to step up. (Photo by Hayden Scott on Unsplash)

As a damp afternoon edged toward frigid dusk the other day, our nearest neighbors sent a text: “We hope we get to come sit by your fire sometime soon,” they wrote. You hear a lot about Americans’ lost sense of community, so we feel lucky to have friends comfortable enough to invite themselves over. The wood was already stacked in the fireplace, anyhow, so all we had to do was put on the teakettle (and check the whisky shelf too, truth be told).

There’s something alluring about a crackling fire, though I understand why some friends have switched to gas burners: It takes a lot of work to keep the homefires burning. During the years we lived on the edge of a forest, we heated mainly with a woodstove, which took us through about a half-dozen face cords of firewood a year. That’s a lot of logs to stack, split with an axe, haul into the house and poke into the stove. When we finally moved into a home with a thermostat-controlled furnace, it seemed that we had finally arrived in the modern era. Yet we still wanted a fire in winter, so we got the chimney rebuilt and the flue repaired. All these years later, the fireplace remains the comforting center of our home in winter.

Scientists can’t fully explain why we find the flicker of a flame so mesmerizing. A UCLA anthropologist hypothesized a couple of decades ago that modern people are drawn to fire in part because we no longer have to master fire-making skills in childhood, leaving it an attractive lifelong curiosity. In more primitive societies that still use fire as a daily tool, UCLA’s Daniel Fessler noted, children typically lose fascination with it at about age 7, as they learn how to tamp down fire’s destructive power and harness the flames for use. So it is “inadequate experience with fire during development,” he wrote, that draws those of us who no longer need fire for cooking and heat to still be drawn to the fireside throughout our lives.¹

Perhaps because I was staring into the fireplace that neighborly evening — a perfect place to let your mind wander, you know — I began to consider how our lack of understanding of fundamentals in other areas likewise often leaves us wonderstruck. And while I wish political matters didn’t crowd into my mind at such moments, I couldn’t avoid the notion that this might help explain why Americans first turned to so flawed a character as Donald Trump as their leader.

Maybe a lot of us didn’t grasp the visceral appeal of a rich celebrity in a society where we’ve witnessed the decline of moral forces that cautioned us against the lure of wealth and self-absorption. Perhaps many Americans succumbed to what the professor called “inadequate experience” — in this case, not understanding how the mechanics of government and the norms we cherish could be disabled by a careless and amoral figure.

So even as I was transfixed by the golden flames in the fireplace, I began to wonder if the forces that propelled Trump forward might be turned into something for our own good, just as the destructive power of fire now is a source of warmth and fellowship. It gave me a bit of hope.

Since we’re all rubbed raw by the coarse friction of politics these days, I feel compelled to ask your forgiveness for returning us to the fray for just a few moments. Grant me, please, this brief glimpse into how we got to this point, and forgive the breach of a taboo: While a politician can’t ever complain that voters are misled, I can.

That is, candidates must affirm that citizens are the ultimate repository of wisdom, because to suggest otherwise is offensive to the very people whose votes those candidates covet. But if you don’t need to appease voters’ egos to advance your career, you can disagree with their decisions while still insisting on their right to choose. That’s where many of us find ourselves today: fully accepting the choices made by a slim majority of our fellow citizens, yet deeply disappointed and quite sure that they made a bad call.

How did we ever get to this point?

One reason that voters were initially susceptible to a crass billionaire’s emergence into political prominence was because we’ve lost a lot of the skepticism that Americans once brought to their view of the uber-wealthy. The world’s religions are straightforward in their hostility to selfishness. In the Gospel of Luke, for example, Jesus is recorded offering a warning: “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”² That sort of teaching fell out of favor in mid-20^thcentury Christianity, and it has practically disappeared from American culture as religion has receded from prominence and as admiration for consumerism and greed has overtaken us. In fact, many people were drawn to the flagrant wealth of Trump — his gaudy gold-trimmed buildings with faux royal interior décor — and to his flouting of morality as he switched mistresses and wives and used bankruptcy laws to shield his wealth from creditors.

At the same time, we’ve become a society eager for distraction and less interested in the nuances of real issues. It’s remarkable to consider the format and texture of the first 1960 presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon: Each candidate made eight-minute opening remarks, followed by questions from four leading journalists and then three-minute closing remarks. Hearing their debate now prompts wonder at the candidates’ depth in discussing issues, especially in contrast to the 2024 presidential debates, which rewarded impatient voters with glib two-minute responses to questions and one-minute rebuttals.³

Meanwhile, the emergence of powerful partisan media sources — Fox News and its ilk — has made facts harder for voters to decipher. Joe Biden’s admirable record in his first two years in office were obscured by the emerging reality that he had been disqualified by age, a fact that also damaged the chances of his vice president. Voters were unimpressed by what the Democrats’ four years had actually produced, including more new jobs than any single presidential term in history, the lowest unemployment in a half-century, and historic investments in infrastructure that will bolster the economy for a generation.⁴

What 2024 voters were fixated upon was what they could see right in front of them or on every TV screen: high grocery and gasoline prices, unaffordable mortgages and migrants streaming across our southern border. Those were real issues, if misunderstood. You can argue that America fought back inflation better than any other western nation — and it did — but that fact didn’t square with the lived experience of voters; and while Trump, JD Vance and such dishonest media platforms as Fox News have for years grossly exaggerated the threat presented by immigrants — nobody was eating Americans’ pets, you know — the fear of newcomers has been a potent political issue throughout U.S. history.

Beyond inflation and immigration, though, Trump supporters were motivated by issues that you might fairly say they simply didn’t understand. Pew Research polling over the course of 2024 found, for example, that 92 percent of Trump supporters believe that biological sex is finally determined at birth — which is scientifically untrue. Similarly, almost 9 out of 10 Trump supporters believed that gun ownership increases safety, which research has found to be incorrect. Two-thirds of Trump backers said that immigration is not “essential to who we are as a nation” — a stunning misunderstanding of the history of a nation in which 97.4 percent of the citizens trace their heritage to another country.⁵

At least three imperatives are underscored by these facts: First, we need more effective truth-based journalism if our future is to be secure. Second, our political system must reflect a moral message that can speak to an increasingly unreligious population. Finally, we need brave educators to step forward at all levels with lessons in history, economics and civics that will help rising generations of Americans better understand who we are and where we’ve come from.

We can’t expect people whose attention spans have been affected by a generation of social media influence to focus easily on long-form journalism, nor will generations who haven’t absorbed the lessons of history quickly embrace a new political message. But we ought to demand that our best journalism outposts — both the powerful legacy newsrooms and the emerging not-for-profit organizations — shape their vital messages in forms that can reach that distracted public, on social media platforms and wherever people communicate. In the political realm, we must focus our support behind leaders who can speak to the morality of democracy, and who will use their voices in a call to reassert our national conscience. And we need to be advocates for fearless education, from childhood through the university level, and be ready to do battle with politicians who would stifle truth-telling in pursuit of partisan gain.

When we had a woodstove, an old friend cautioned me against becoming what he called “a wood bore.” He explained that the wood bore — not to be confused, of course, with the wood borer, a helpful beetle — will always eagerly tell you a lot about how to handle a woodpile. I could share some experience right here: Stack your wood bark-side down (except on your top layer), leave air gaps between logs, tarp the top of your stack in winter to keep the moisture off, criss-cross the wood stacked at the end — well, I could go on and on, of course.

But that’s not why you’re here. The wood bore faces peril because he (it’s pretty much always a “he”) mistakenly believes that people gathered around the woodstove or the fireplace want to know how the magic of that setting is produced. No, folks just love to gaze at the blaze, feel its warmth and lose themselves in some reverie while sipping a beverage. Few people are interested in maintaining a good woodstack or building a fire themselves.

The challenge now for people who want to counter the Trump influence in America is to deliver the fire without the bore: to build the structure that will bring illumination and warmth without losing those who simply want to admire the fire we’ll produce. We need the expertise of the wood bore, but we don’t want him to block us from the fire’s warmth.

There’s an opportunity to rebuild America in that community around the blaze. But it will only come if those of us who know how to build the fire take on the task.

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228354432_A_Burning_Desire_Steps_Toward_an_Evolutionary_Psychology_of_Fire_Learning

2. Luke 12:15

3. https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/tnc-172

4. https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/biden-presidential-record-legacy-rcna184617

5. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/11/13/what-trump-supporters-believe-and-expect/

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-REX SMITH