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Dana Beach, South Carolina Coastal Conservation League November 14, 2016 Foxes vs. hedgehogs. The environmental meaning of President Trump. Prospects for the next four years. x �� NO COASTAL L IIP' A G 4. IIE The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Archilochus, by way of Isaiah Berlinger Folks, Like most of America, I've been fascinated by the discussion about the meaning of Donald Trump's election. I divide the commentators into two categories: hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs have discerned one big theme from the Trump victory. A popular example is the mea culpa theory: Progressive elites ignored real problems created by a growing inequality of income and wealth, and thus failed to appreciate the resentment rural residents and lower income people harbor toward the eastern liberal power structure. According to this view, the solution is to engage with this disaffected constituency so they will buy in to the progressive agenda. Another theme is the desensitization of Americans to candidate Trump's violations of basic civility and his callous disregard for "our shared moral ecology," as David Brooks writes. This perspective expresses astonishment that such a large percentage of the population appears not only to tolerate, but even embrace, the crude, misogynistic, racial slurs that punctuated the campaign. To these interpretations I say, yes, to a degree, but I would add a handful of more circumstantial explanations — like an especially flawed and vulnerable Democratic candidate, gender bias, James Comey, WikiLeaks, the electoral college... I suspect the hedgehogs have fallen prey to what Daniel Kahneman calls the coherence fallacy — the inclination to try to make more sense out of complicated circumstances than actually exists. We are all subject to the urge to unify and simplify the world, especially when the explanation conforms to our preconceptions and personal narratives.