Sunday, November 20, 2016

What the media got wrong/Our collective bubble


This post was supposed to be about Donald Trump losing his shit via Twitter (again). Since the election he has shown remarkable restraint and on 60 Minutes sounded almost presidential. This happily fit my post election narrative of a move towards the center; perhaps he really was the pragmatist that Obama predicted.

Yesterday and today the train flew off the rails. Once again Trump is the angry child stamping his foot because he doesn’t get his way. So much for my optimism.

I was telling this to my friend, Liz, and she said, “You know, most Trump supporters don’t care about this at all. This is the insider talk that they rejected on election day.”

She’s right. Election day alarmed me because Donald Trump was elected, but even more so because of what this signified about my reality: I’m an intellectual east-coast dweller who works in higher education.

My bubble was real and I failed to realize it.

The problem is not race or gender, Joan Williams writes in the Harvard Business Journal, but class. Many of the working class grew up in poor families that advanced themselves through discipline, thrift and a good paying job. Seeing the poor receive benefits that they had to work so hard for – or went without – seems unfair. To this group of people, a straight talker who made himself wealthy (this can be argued, but it’s the narrative Trump used) has the traits of a good leader. Democrats failed to appeal to these voters, who saw Hillary Clinton as the epitome of the system that produced this problem. For people who needed a message about economics/jobs, cultural issues such as gender-neutral bathrooms and Black Lives Matter seemed foreign. It was the message of east-coast elites who were clueless about middle America.

In her how-to column about covering Trump post-election, Margaret Sullivan writes that “smugness and willful blindness” were among journalism’s failures. Journalists must “represent the interests of all citizens.”

Independent journalist Chris Arnade spent a year with Trump supporters. He says that “parachute journalism” enabled reporters to come in, confirm what they thought and leave without exploring the deeper issues behind Trump’ support. According to Arnade, these journalists were unable to escape the bubble created by their cultural references. This allowed them to write off Trump supporters while failing to see the larger current of discontent.

One striking thing that Arnade talks about – and Williams also mentions – is dignity. The decline of a way of life, the changes that these Americans face make them feel “frustration, humiliation, and anomie,…feeling like not having a place, drifting”; Trump offered a vision that would restore their dignity.

In light of these insights I re-read a couple pre-election pieces about Trump supporters that I had flagged. In this Ezra Klein piece, the litany of bad things Trump has done can be read like the rant of a disgruntled insider indignant that Trump dares violate the norms and civilities of political discourse. Arnade and Williams would say that this writing does nothing to dissuade a Trump supporter – maybe it even convinces them further how out of touch the media is.

In this article, George Sanders correctly identifies that we are living in “two separate ideological countries.” He also picks up on working class anxieties, “[they] felt urgently that we were, right now, in the process of losing something precious.” But Saunder’s short stint following the candidate caused him to underestimate the pervasive power of these feelings.

For those who supported Donald Trump, his uninhibited Twitter rants and divergence from political norms DON’T. MEAN. ANYTHING. Neither do his outrageous statements nor his past actions. I can talk all I want about how unfit he is for office, but for his supporters, that’s just elite liberal insider talk. Mainstream media failed to understand rural America and thus were shocked when Donald Trump won. We were (are?) in a bubble. Me, my peers, liberals, political insiders, the media, have to recognize this.

It’s the only way to understand what is happening.

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