Stop thinking the people who voted for Trump were uneducated racists, holed up in rural bunkers of ignorance. Trump won the race using Twitter. They have some of the same rebellious, progressive sentiments that propelled Bernie Sanders to almost clinching the Democratic Primary.
They are everyday Americans who have had enough of being excluded from establishment politics. The Democratic Party, the once fortress of working and middle class Americans spread out across the entire country and not just the East and West Coasts, has all but abandoned them. Get your head out of the think tanks and punditry (all wrong when assessing them this election) and go out and talk to them.
The income gulf and real wage decline that Sanders so articulately brought to attention, is what they suffer from; and also from Democrats who look right past them. Obama was shouldered with an economic crisis when he took office: he bailed out Wall Street, the mortgage companies, and auto makers. He did little to nothing for homeowners crushed with debt. And he didn’t prosecute anyone – anyone – for the Wall Street crimes. Believe me, this turned many folks to Trump.
Obama Care has helped millions previously without health insurance, but has done nothing to contain the skyrocketing costs of premiums and co-pays for people who have their health insurance deducted every week from their paycheck. This has turned many folks to Trump. Obama balked on the government option when Obama Care was being debated – a measure that would have helped immensely. No wonder Trump calls him weak.
Remember “It’s the Economy stupid”? Neoliberals shout out unemployment is 4.9%. Capital B, capital S – bullshit: the new jobs don’t pay and aren’t secure. And there goes Obama peddling another global economic deal that will help Corporate interests, not the people who work for them. Corporate interests, the Free Market philosophy, when did such influence overtake the Democrats? Something Bill Clinton would probably be proud of. Why look at the GDP growth! In what please ask – hedge fund management and rip-off Big Pharma sales?
Trump’s constituents see liberals stepping off planes, driving away in limousines, and steering public money to help the desperately poor simply to alleviate their own need to feel meaningful at arm’s length. This is the Dems’ bi-polar constituency in a nutshell: the way better off and the hardship poor living in metropolitan centers. But when it comes to Americans who are the backbone and heart of the country – out there somewhere – who may be plagued by a heroin epidemic, who are struggling to pay for health care, who are submerged in housing debt, who are sick of the endless war in the Middle East, who see college for their children unreachable… This has turned many people to Trump.
Many of you say Trump was a Brexit vote – the perilously stupid not voting for their own interests – a resentment vote. This is because you think the Democrats help them. They see a reality you don’t; like Detroit reality, not Gilded Age Manhattan unreality. The median income in Michigan is $27K. Try living on that in Manhattan or DC (where 92% voted Democratic).
Walk the streets of DC and its environs and you won’t get an inkling impression of the hardship the rest of the country is experiencing; drive beyond the suburbs to the surrounding counties, where people are not as mobile, where jobs have been laid off, where retirement pensions have been eliminated from the jobs that remain, where many owe more on the homes than what they’re worth, where they see more attention paid to providing public bathrooms for transgenders than their very survival, where affordable college tuition is a pipe dream, where you won’t find a single Democratic sign planted in any yard.
Look at the electoral map, not by state but county by county and it will become evident that urban centers with large populations of professionals (their jobs not threatened by illegal immigrants) who have benefited from the new American order of prosperity for the few, overwhelmingly voted Democratic. They believe themselves open-minded and tolerant supporting a multi-culturalism that hypocritically stops at the borderline with their city’s Hispanic neighborhood and only crosses by accident into the poverty and strife-ridden streets African American’s walk. Oh, but I forget Trump supporters are the racists aren’t they! Pardon me if I overlook that you voted for a half-Black president – a Harvard educated man who was afraid to support the Ferguson Missouri protesters and who has done nothing about police use of deadly force on unarmed African Americans.
The rural counties, people not exposed to Ethiopian restaurants, voted Trump. Is this a class struggle we’re witnessing? Or another Civil War, except the South is now rural America and the North is metropolitan? Remember, most of those who fought for the South did not own slaves – they rebelled against a haughty, technologically savvy, and better educated North who wanted to impose their governing ideas on the independent, traditional, church going, loyal until death South. Richer Northerners who wanted to feel morally superior to those Rednecks.
Perhaps that is why they look toward a strong man to lead them. Of course, not being educated (as journalists like to point out their demographic of implied stupidity) they’re lacking in intelligence and can’t seem to accept the Dems’ rhetoric about we’re all in this together; maybe it’s because they see the Dems obviously favor a special few. Maybe that’s why they can’t tolerate the policy explanations of a wonk like Clinton. What exactly was her message? She certainly wasn’t for labor unions, or against Big Money, or PACs, or lobbyists, or the destructive effects of globalization, or the injustices of Capitalism, or for transparency, or fighting the pollution industries, or marching with Black Lives Matter (though she did the photo ops).
In their search for a leader Trump’s followers are susceptible to a demagogue and charlatan, even a tyrant, but who they need is a Teddy Roosevelt who took on Big Business, Wall Street, and a corrupt Congress; who fought the Robber Barons and stripped the Gilded Age of its excesses. They crave an FDR who saved them from the ravages of an economic system that chewed them up and spit them out, who showed just exactly what government can do for its citizens, someone who will bring the Democratic party back to its base, will bring it back home. They need a hero, not Trump, but the real deal.
Trump’s constituents will soon realize they’ve been taken for suckers by a con man and pathological liar, and his narcissism, lack of respect for the Constitution, and Fascist inclinations will implode his presidency. This is the time for the Democratic pragmatists to step aside - didn’t Trump’s ascendancy just prove them all wrong! They should let its Progressives take the stage, for the party to stop shuffling in incremental steps, to take bold leaps like FDR and LBJ took, to turn a hard Bernie Sander’s Left and again pave the way for the uplifting of the Common Man of America – in all His or Her colors and backgrounds. And in so doing have a reckoning, take back its soul and come home where it belongs; to create an agenda the financiers of globalization will despise and the residents of Main Street will love. I hope Elizabeth Warren gets to read this.