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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