Or this: People have to choose between heating their homes, buying food or buying health care and you want them to worry about the survival of the planet or transgender stuff? I respect business and I distrust government. That’s the American way. I don’t want illegal immigrants taking our jobs. I don’t like liberals who shop at Whole Foods talking down their noses at me because I shop at Wal-Mart. White lives matter, too, you know. That woman forgot that — and lost. We lost our discipline and our moral code in this country. So we need honest Trump to shake things up.

And this: We need God back in our schools. We can’t just condone anything our kids do. Nobody’s gonna run God or guns out of our country. I don’t want anybody telling me I can’t defend myself. I don’t want to take a knife to a gunfight. Don’t tell me I can’t have a gun if the crooks have one. It’s a matter of taking care of myself. If this country ever told me I couldn’t have a gun, I’d be out in the streets.

These are composites from Trump World. It’s important to hear people out. That’s democracy: listening to what people say. There are hateful racists among Trump supporters; there are also many decent, thoughtful, anxious, patriotic Americans who felt they were losing some part of their country’s essence. The liberal complacency that holds that these people simply need to be “educated” is self-defeating. If that’s what the Democratic Party exudes — coastal complacency — it will lose, just like Ms. Clinton did last year.

As Abe Streep, a journalist and writer based in Montana, put it to me: “Nobody’s ever been convinced by being made to feel stupid.”

I spoke to Alexandra Arboleda, a lawyer in Phoenix, who was elected last year to the board of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District. She’s a Democrat in a Republican county and a woman who feels strongly about climate change in an area where such convictions encounter hostility.

“You have to be more receptive and see where people who don’t think like you come from,” she said. “Most people are concerned about climate change. But where in Telluride that might be priority number one, with Republicans it’s down the list. So you have to adjust. Instead of talking about sustainability and climate change — words that set them off — talk pragmatically about drought conservation plans. Persuade them that increasing irrigation efficiency at a time of the longest drought in recorded history on the Colorado River System benefits everyone from farms to downstream city users. It’s doable. But you have to curb the liberal arrogance that’s out there.”

America needs the conversations it’s not having. They start, for both sides, with listening. The alternative is bloody confrontation.