From Democrat to Deplorable: A Review

AKA hollymathnerd.
Feb 2 · 12 min read

the book the Democratic candidates should read…but won’t.

Jack Murphy is one of the approximately 9 million Trump voters who were Obama voters first. His book tells the story of how he moved from an Obama voter to a member of Team Deplorable.

Section 1 of the book is the story of Murphy’s life. Section 2 is a series of vignettes from other Obama-Trump voters. Section 3 is a series of essays that give Murphy’s thoughts on five important issues: wage stagnation, globalism, campus life, modern feminism, and “the blue church.”

The book is unusually well-written, so I’ll be quoting a lot. “Direct quotes from the book will look like this, in bold italics.”

Section One

Surprise! This is Not the Story You Think It Is.

American society has a trope of “the guy who got burned in the divorce and it turned him into a red-pill asshole who spends the rest of his life being horrible to as many women as he can.” Having met a few guys like that, I was 50% expecting that story and 50% not sure what to expect.

This is NOT that story.

Murphy grew up in ideal circumstances for learning both gratitude and empathy, lessons he absorbed. He was bused from the suburbs to a city magnet school in an integration effort. The different worlds he and his black classmates lived in, despite their shared classrooms, gave him profound awareness of the power that social class and luck play in life trajectories.

“Our parents shipped us from our cornfield development into the crumbling city as a prayer for the nation.”

It also gave him a hunger to help people who hadn’t started life out with as much good fortune as he had. This led him to work in charter schools.

He worked in Washington, DC, a cobalt-blue city heavily influenced by education majors and teacher’s unions. The work was arduous and he dealt with kids who had much bigger problems than learning their spelling words.

The story he tells of the end of his charter school career involves specious claims of racism and sexism filed against him, driving him out of the field.

Here’s why, despite being inclined towards skepticism, I have no trouble believing him.

I do a lot of calculus tutoring. Far and away, the Wokest of the Woke are the future schoolteachers. Education majors introduce themselves with their pronouns and are fully capable of commentary on the “white privilege” of homeless people, without irony. They are training to raise up a new army of social justice warriors — a term they consider a badge of honor.

So when I read that a straight, cisgender, traditionally masculine white guy was running schools in cobalt-blue DC — schools wherein he was the boss and bucked the usual trends, doing unorthodox things — zero difficulty guessing how that story ends.

“Rather than my white maleness offering me an advantage, as I was told it did, it now stood in my way of affecting real, positive, social change.”

A difficult divorce that cut his time with his children sent Murphy reeling. He’d done everything right to the best of his ability — got an education, got married, tried to devote himself to helping make the world a better place, applying the lessons he learned as a kid about how powerful luck and circumstances could be— and he found himself alone, unemployed, and smeared as a racist.

As the 2016 race was heating up, Murphy and his fellow Democrat-to-Deplorables were good-hearted, well-intentioned people doing their best to play by the rules, help their neighbors, raise good children, and yet they kept finding themselves on the receiving end of ire and even hatred. With the demands of the left’s (rapidly intensifying) orthodoxies weighing down on them, they faced serious consequences, like his education career, that went way beyond hurt feelings.

In short, they found themselves conscripted into battles they didn’t want to fight. Once there, without a choice as to IF they fought, they had to pick a side.

Enter Donald Trump.

Democrat to Deplorables Are Not Trump Cultists

We’ve all seen those memes where Trump is portrayed as fit and svelte, articulate and powerful, often with Jesus hovering over him, guiding his every move — memes as scary as they are weird.

Murphy and his fellow Democrat-to-Deplorables are not Trump cultists.

The book is quite clear that Trump is in many ways distasteful and cringe-worthy, even to them. A few quotes:

Agree or disagree about Trump’s principles or lack thereof, but nobody can say these people were ill-informed or had bad intentions.

Indeed, many were able to see that jumping on the Trump Train was as much about themselves as the man whose name that train bears.

Eloquent, mature, honest self-awareness. Hugely refreshing.

The narrative insists: “But the alt-right! They put up with the alt-right in their movement. Even if they’re not racists themselves, they were willing to put up with racism, and that’s why they’re morally monstrous!”

Murphy is, again, refreshingly honest on this. He went on a search for information about these people — after all, he had been unfairly demonized, so he certainly knew it happens — but found what they were and worked hard to marginalize them.

Democrat-to-Deplorables Are Not Racists

They voted for Obama and were proud that our country had come so far, so fast — a black man born in the era of segregation had become President well before he was 50! Genuine joy at the dramatic change in the fortunes of black Americans and heartfelt pride in how far the civil rights movement had come to make it possible is not compatible with racial animus. It just isn’t.

They simply refused to capitulate when told the definition of racism had changed and that they were now, by definition and virtue of their melanin (and the assumptions made about its meaning), guilty.

They felt trapped. They had to pick a side. Many picked Trump’s nervously and even reluctantly.

Section Two

The Democrat-to-Deplorable stories are diverse and interesting, enjoyable, and well worth the time to read. I’m only going to mention one in detail, because it’s the one where he almost lost me.

Sarah was a Sanders supporter with a harrowing story to tell about DNC shenanigans. She became one of the 20% of Bernie supporters who voted for Trump, unable to bring herself to vote for Hillary after her experience.

Reaching a crisis point in her life, Sarah found happiness in, among other dramatic life changes, becoming a traditional wife who cedes leadership to her husband. (Which, if that works for them, great. Any individual marriage of which I am not a party is none of my business.)

But. Most human beings — male and female — need achievement in some arena outside of their homes, and implying that this is the default for men but not women, because of tradition? That is both false and a bad strategy.

Murphy is nuanced and quite careful here, but the implication that other women can or should find happiness in this traditional path still comes through, as in these quotes:

All psychologically healthy people love their spouse and family more than their job. DUH.
Sufficient self-knowledge for your own pursuit of happiness is an individual responsibility.

In several different passages, Murphy praises his mother and other women who have substantial career achievements, and repeatedly praises the early feminist movements, with their emphases on equal opportunities, as righteous. He is definitely not one of those repeal-the-19th-amendment lunatics.

The attitude of many on the right — that career achievement is a male thing that women try on— is what I was hearing in the Sarah chapter (and to be fair, I’ve heard that enough from people on the right that I may be hypervigilant).

But intellectual and career achievement are not solely the domain of men. Mathematics, science, medicine, and the like are not male pursuits — they are human pursuits. If educated young women have to choose between a side that is, yes, likely to regard us as fragile flowers (but at least we get to DO mathematics and science) and a side that regards us as unnatural and unable to be happy by seeking equal relationships and career achievement, few will go with the latter.

Advocating for family-friendly workplace policies that enable women to prioritize their families without walking away from career dreams would take the Democrat-to-Deplorable movement much farther than promotion of “traditional wife” lifestyles. The former allows for the latter as a matter of individual choices, but the latter sets the former as abnormal at best.

Section Three

Here Murphy gives extended thoughts on wage/standard of living stagnation, globalism, college/campus politics, modern feminism, and “the blue church.” I will comment on two.

(To his credit, on the others, he made convincing cases that will cause me to do my own research in weeks to come.)

Here is where I both agree and disagree the most sharply with Murphy.

On Campus Life

Murphy sees the college campus as an infection vector where “the college student is patient zero.” A brilliant analogy, and he nails it. A small example:

Uh-huh.

I’ve taken the Implicit Association Test four times for classes and, most recently, some of my classmates (well-connected ones, likely to take their psychology degrees into HR departments at their parents’ companies) argued that the IAT should be used in hiring and jury selection.

On Feminism

This section was both very valuable and very frustrating in helping me see what my fellow Americans saw in 2016 — to slip on their glasses and take a look.

Murphy’s view of the 2016 campaign and Clinton’s role in particular was mind-boggling to me. He seemed to see an aggressive feminist shoving her genitalia in America’s face. I didn’t see it that way at all. The fact of her sex was not an ignorable thing, given the historicity of her candidacy, but it never once seemed to me to be the centerpiece of the campaign.

Perhaps I saw it differently because, while never a huge fan of Hillary, I never hated her, either. I saw her neutrally — as a complicated woman who had done both things I respected (a trailblazing lawyer advocating for children in the days of second wave feminism, staying married after getting professional counseling in 1998–1999, raising a successful daughter, running for the Senate) and things that I was appalled by (various scandals, including but not limited to the Clinton Foundation finances and the email stuff).

Murphy saw her as something else entirely. This passage in particular blew me away:

Not only did I not see the slogan this way, I kept remembering Trump’s revolting comments on his dick size. Trump was the only person in the campaign I remember bringing up genitals at all.

And I didn’t find any reference to pussy hats until after the “grab them by the” tape dropped, suggesting to me that pussy hats are about his boasting of assault, not about her historic candidacy.

Seeing “I’m with her” as an aggressively feminist statement also surprised me. In 2016, it was an amusing, novel conversational shortcut that the highly, historically unpopular candidates could be discussed as “him” and “her.” (As I did in the previous paragraphs, see?)

Instead of “Romney or Obama” we could say, “Are you voting for him or her?” It was funny and cute — one of the few nice things about that awful campaign. That it came across to many as an aggressive reminder of genitalia was startling, but also made the reactions to Clinton make soooo much more sense.

Gender expression as a woman? I didn’t see this at all — her pantsuits were hardly ‘feminine’ attire.

Murphy’s take on 2016 really made me think about how Americans see the same events unfold yet come to such radically different conclusions.

Perhaps part of it is that America is an enormous country with many different cultures. I grew up in the buckle of the Bible belt, then moved to New England — totally different cultures.

Murphy repeatedly — and rightly — points to the lunacy on the Left as science denial. (Yes, the dimorphism of biological sex is a fact. No, there are not 73 genders. No, we are not blank slates.) He credits appreciation for reality and science to the right.

Which is easy to do…if you didn’t grow up in Mississippi.

Those of us who did were told that evolution is a lie, the Grand Canyon was formed by Noah’s flood, women have one fewer rib than men, the sun stood still literally and NASA had proved it, and other laughable falsehoods based entirely in the denial of science and reality.

This section also goes on at length about white men, who Murphy sees as society’s primary villains. He has an obvious point, but an incomplete one: I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been personally blamed for Trump because I’m a white woman. (Also been told several times when I was crying that my tears were fake and performative, manipulation that I should be ashamed of lest it get a POC killed. See why I said he nailed campus life?)

White men are absolutely demonized, but if anything, the ones who don’t go performatively Woke are just written off. White women are expected to do service to intersectional aims on the theory that we benefit from them.

Example: in a wage gap debate (on which Murphy and I would be on the same side) he would be written off as a misogynist, whereas I would be diagnosed as pathologically insecure, desperate for patriarchal approval, and in need of professional help to get over self-loathing.

In part because of my experiences on the wrong side of the Woke, the “Intersectional Feminism has created a war and white men have to step up and be soldiers in it to save Western civilization” rhetoric was extreme to me, even if rooted in many facts. That’s why this book was also one of the most frustrating I’ve ever read — recognizing the truth in what he was saying, but aspects of it seeming rather distorted. Throughout this section, I kept thinking, “yes, but” and “OK, that’s on a 1–10 spectrum and the real world is a 7 — why are you at 12 and a half, dude?”

Yet, because the first two sections give such a clear, nuanced window into Murphy’s (and other D-to-D) life, views, and personal journey, I can understand why he believes these things. And that’s huge.

From my vantage point, he takes them to extremes that are counterproductive both to Americans in general, contributing to our polarization, and to his mission and movement in particular — but that’s a good-faith disagreement that Murphy and I can have civilly, with no deplatforming or accusations of hate, and that is 90% of the way to progressing beyond it.

Conclusion

This book is insightful, thoughtful, and ultimately hopeful. If anyone reading this has any “in” to any of the Democratic presidential candidates or to influential voices in our discourse, you could do much, much worse than buy them a copy and encourage them to read it.

Murphy has found a political home, one that surprised him and about which he is realistic, but one that fits.

The Democrats are rapidly leaving behind me and other white women who refuse to jump onto the transgender-activisim-critical-race-theory-intersectional-is-everything train.

His book did not convince me that I could belong in the same place as him and the other Deplorables. Not with Trump as the leadership and face of the party.

But it did show me how and why my fellow Americans got there, and that’s so valuable. I owe him a debt for writing it.

From Democrat to Deplorable gave me a lot to think about and answered a lot of my questions about how my fellow Americans could possibly have voted for this guy. I didn’t get it.

I get it now. And in our polarized times, that is no small gift.

About Me

College senior, majoring in mathematics. You can follow me on Twitter. I mostly write here on Medium about statistics (for laypeople). If you enjoyed this and you want to support me, I’m a broke undergraduate who always appreciates amazon giftcards (send to hollymathnerd at gmail) or CashApp to $HollyMathNerd. Thanks!

AKA hollymathnerd.

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Just a maths geek who likes to write sometimes.

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