Tag Archives: Trump voters

Tearing Down the Bastille

This blog has a lot of very perceptive readers. The fact that my “day job” precludes my weighing in on conversations among commenters doesn’t mean I don’t read what is posted, and I was particularly struck by the following observation, in a comment to last Tuesday’s post on the politics of resentment:

I would describe the executive orders and Congress’ legislative “agenda” (such as it is) so far as governing by revenge. Nothing done or proposed has any constructive elements in it. You’d think they were tearing down the Bastille.

As another commenter remarked, the mob won, and they’re cheering every brick that comes down, even when it lands on them.

I’m certainly aware–as the old academic adage has it–that the plural of anecdote is not data. But the image of “tearing down the Bastille” is eerily consistent with the attitudes of the Trump people I have encountered.

Most of the Trump voters I know personally ( I’m happy to report that I don’t know many–but then, I live in one of those diverse urban bubbles) nurse attitudes that I can only characterize as racist and misogynist. In at least two cases, both older white men, their bigotries were on  display long before Trump emerged. They both were among the fringe crazies who appeared to “lose it” when Obama was elected; it was obvious that they experienced the ascension of a black man to the White House as incomprehensible and deeply disturbing, not to mention a personal affront. (In an email, one of them recently characterized President Obama as a “Fabian socialist progressive.”  I have no idea what that terminology is supposed to mean, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t either; he just knows that the black guy must be a commie.)

I have also been made aware, however, of Trump voters who seemed less motivated by racial animus or sexist attitudes than by a general hostility to “the system,” and a desire to tear it down. For these voters, Trump’s intellectual and emotional deficits and general buffoonery were assets–his lack of experience, his ignorance of government, his recklessness, volatility and especially his eruptions of uncontrolled anger–all promised chaos, and chaos was precisely what they wanted.

I am unable to fathom a fury that reckless. I can only assume that it is the result of a life experienced as deeply unsatisfying coupled with a conviction that things will not or cannot improve, and that the only satisfying course of action is therefore a destructive one.

If the destruction hurts a lot of innocent people, well, those are the breaks.

Whatever the motives of the 26% of (disproportionately white and elderly) eligible voters who cast ballots for Trump, the rest of us are left with a choice: man (or woman) the barricades and try to minimize the harm being done, especially to the powerless and  disadvantaged; or sit on the sidelines and watch the bricks fall.

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The Big Lie(s)

With every announcement of a cabinet nominee, the news gets more depressing and surreal. Trump is deliberately naming agency heads who oppose the missions of the agencies they will control–nominees who can be expected to eviscerate efforts to address climate change, undermine public education and favor saber-rattling over diplomacy, among other disasters.

All of them are contemptuous–or ignorant–of demonstrable facts.

Case in point: Andrew F. Puzder, the fast-food chief executive Trump has chosen to be his secretary of labor. As The New York Times has reported, Puzder has a “passionate disdain” for both the Affordable Care Act and efforts to raise the minimum wage.

He says the law has led to rising health insurance premiums, “reducing consumer spending, resulting in a reduction in restaurant visits.”

He has also argued that the act has given businesses an incentive to cut back on full-time workers to avoid the costs of providing them with insurance, as the act frequently requires.

The problem is that the available data largely disagree.

Fast food sales are actually up since the ACA took effect, and there is no correlation between employment growth in the industry and health insurance premiums. States where premiums increased more did not tend to have lower employment, and the percentage of people who are forced to work part-time even though they prefer to work full-time has fallen dramatically since the Affordable Care Act was enacted.

He is similarly wrong about the effects of raising the minimum wage; employment has actually increased in the wake of most such raises.

Puzzler doesn’t know what he is talking about, so he will fit right in with the other cabinet nominees, and with Trump and his voters.

It turns out that most of those voters inhabit our new “post-fact” society. A survey fielded after the election may illuminate the gap between those voters and reality.

* Unemployment: Under President Obama, job growth has been quite strong, and the unemployment rate has improved dramatically. PPP, however, found that 67% of Trump voters believe the unemployment rate went up under Obama – which is the exact opposite of reality.

* Stock Market: Since the president was elected, the stock market has soared, nearly tripling since the height of the Great Recession. PPP found that 39% of Trump voters believe the market has gone down under Obama – which is also the exact opposite of reality.

* Popular Vote: As of this morning, Hillary Clinton received roughly 2.7 million more votes than Donald Trump, but PPP nevertheless found that 40% of Trump voters believe he won the popular vote – which is, once again, the exact opposite of reality.

* Voter Fraud: Even Trump’s lawyers concede there was no voter fraud in the presidential election, but PPP found that 60% of Trump voters apparently believe “millions” of illegal ballots were cast for Clinton in 2016 – which isn’t even close to resembling reality.

* Soros Conspiracy Theory: A whopping 73% of Trump voters believe George Soros is paying anti-Trump protesters – though in reality, George Soros is not paying anti-Trump protesters.

The survey goes a long way toward answering the question repeatedly asked by so many anguished Americans: why on earth would anyone vote for this monumentally unfit, unethical buffoon?

Americans live in the age of confirmation bias, where you can find sources on the Internet supporting your preferred worldview, no matter how ridiculous or flat-out insane. Propagating the Big Lie has never been easier.

The strategy of the Big Lie comes to us courtesy of the Third Reich; as Joseph Goebbels helpfully explained it,

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Joe Nocera wrote a column a few years ago in The New York Times, explaining our more sophisticated modern Big Lie techniques,

You begin with a hypothesis that has a certain surface plausibility. You find an ally whose background suggests that he’s an “expert”; out of thin air, he devises “data.” You write articles in sympathetic publications, repeating the data endlessly; in time, some of these publications make your cause their own. Like-minded congressmen pick up your mantra and invite you to testify at hearings.

You’re chosen for an investigative panel related to your topic. When other panel members, after inspecting your evidence, reject your thesis, you claim that they did so for ideological reasons. This, too, is repeated by your allies. Soon, the echo chamber you created drowns out dissenting views; even presidential candidates begin repeating the Big Lie.

Thanks to fake news and the Internet, Big Lies have become much easier to sustain.

Thanks to uncritical, uneducated citizens who lack both civic and media literacy, facts, credibility and reality no longer matter.

The rest of us are screwed.

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White Man Malaise

Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution has surveyed the post-election analytic landscape, and considered the varying explanations for the outcome. He traces what he calls “the malaise of white middle America” in the trending data about mortality, life expectancy, suicide and opioid use, and suggests that it ought not be surprising that areas in which people are turning to oxycodone are also the ones that turned to Trump.

Bernie Sanders says that Trump’s “campaign rhetoric successfully tapped into a very real and justified anger.” To his mind, people are “tired of having chief executives make 300 times what they do, while 52 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent.” Well, maybe.

Meanwhile Jenny Beth Martin, president and co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, says that Trump’s victory is a validation of their agenda: “Repeal…Obamacare, protect our borders, stop illegal immigration, restore fiscal sanity and get the government off our backs and out of our lives.” Well, maybe.

There is lots of work to be done to truly understand the complex picture that emerged on November 8. But it doesn’t look to me as if economics will take us very far in terms of understanding white pain, at least in any simple way. Scott Winship of the new think tank Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity delves into the numbers, and concludes that “there is little empirical support for the idea that ‘it was the economy, stupid’.” I agree. This was an identity vote more than an income vote. Many white men, especially those of modest education, feel as if they are being overtaken and left behind. “It’s relative status, stupid!”

Kathy Cramer is the author of a recent book, The Politics of Resentment, in which she relays her research and conclusions from her interviews with the white, working class men (and some women) who voted for Trump. She says they compare their lives to a bygone world in which men like them could easily get jobs paying a decent wage, were automatically considered the “head of the household,” and “always knew that they were superior to people with darker skin.” All of those basic assumptions about the way the world works have been challenged, to say the least.

And of course we’ve had a black President since 2008. As James Baldwin warned almost half a century ago, “the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity…The black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken out of their foundations.”

The unanswerable question is: what happens when these people realize that Trump cannot undo inexorable social change? That despite “telling it like it is”–i.e., giving voice and “respectability” to their resentments–he cannot put women back in the kitchen, gays back in the closet, or send African-Americans back to the back of the bus?

As Reeves concludes,

Loss of relative status is painful, no doubt. But it is the inescapable price of equality. Trump has no cure. Nobody does.

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Telling It Like It Is

In the wake of the election, those of us who opposed Donald Trump are being told to “get over it.” News organizations are doing puff pieces that “normalize” a decidedly abnormal President-elect. Uncharitable descriptions of Trump voters are met with the sort of admonitions that liberals typically (and appropriately) offer when unpleasant characteristics are ascribed to an entire group of people.

If we had just emerged from a hard-fought election contest between sane candidates with different policy prescriptions, those responses would be appropriate. If a significant number of Trump voters could somehow have remained unaware of his core message, you could argue that economic distress or partisan loyalty prompted their support (although research confirms that most Trump voters were not economically disadvantaged, and that educated Republicans deserted him in droves.)

But this election was decidedly not normal, and refusing to acknowledge its implications is dangerous.

I think Jamelle Bouie, Slate’s political correspondent, got it right, when he wrote that there is “no such thing as a good Trump voter.”

Donald Trump ran a campaign of racist demagoguery against Muslim Americans, Hispanic immigrants, and black protesters. He indulged the worst instincts of the American psyche and winked to the stream of white nationalists and anti-Semites who backed his bid for the White House. Millions of Americans voted for this campaign, thus elevating white nationalism and white reaction to the Oval Office.

When Trump voters are accused of responding to racist demagoguery, nice people clutch their pearls. Michael Lerner, for example, wrote in the New York Times that “Many Trump supporters very legitimately feel that it is they who have been facing an unfair reality.” Lerner attributed the vote to  “people’s inner pain and fear,” and blamed liberals for failing to sympathize with those emotions. He acknowledged the racism, sexism and xenophobia employed by Trump, but insisted that the vote didn’t reveal “an inherent malice in the majority of Americans.”

I beg to differ. As Bouie points out,

Millions of Americans are justifiably afraid of what they’ll face under a Trump administration. If any group demands our support and sympathy, it’s these people, not the Americans who backed Trump and his threat of state-sanctioned violence against Hispanic immigrants and Muslim Americans. All the solicitude, outrage, and moral telepathy being deployed in defense of Trump supporters—who voted for a racist who promised racist outcomes—is perverse, bordering on abhorrent.

It’s worth repeating what Trump said throughout the election. His campaign indulged in hateful rhetoric against Hispanics and condemned Muslim Americans with the collective guilt of anyone who would commit terror. It treated black America as a lawless dystopia and spoke of black Americans as dupes and fools. And to his supporters, Trump promised mass deportations, a ban on Muslim entry to the United States, and strict “law and order” as applied to those black communities.

A voter would have to have been blind and deaf not to hear and understand Trump’s central message.

A vote for Donald Trump represented one of two things, both reprehensible: either the voter was attracted to Trump because of the bigotry, or s/he didn’t find it sufficiently offensive or problematic to justify withholding support. There is no other category.

We have all heard the stories about the good Germans who refused to see that what was happening to their country after Hitler took power was not “politics as usual,” who refused to call out the virulent anti-Semitism, who didn’t want to “rock the boat.”

And then it was too late.

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