President Donald Trump: How and Why This Came to Pass
A History of the 2016 Presidential Campaign
Last summer, when Donald Trump began his long march to the White House, I did not treat him as a joke. But neither did I think he could actually be elected president. I considered his nascent run to be the last gasps of a dying white power structure. A threat to the last sixty years of social progress, but a manageable threat nonetheless. Writing as I am after almost twenty months of rallies and debates and elections, I must admit to being wrong on two counts: that white power structure isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and yet, most of those 62.9 million Trump voters did not vote to maintain it. Some voted to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency, some to deliver a ‘screw you’ message to the establishment, and some, most crucially, to save their nearly extinct way of life.
The short version of why Trump was able to win the presidential election made the rounds on the internet in the form of 1) this blisteringly honest viral video, here and 2) this prophetic passage written in 1998 by the late philosopher Richard Rorty:
Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack.
The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots . . . One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion . . . All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
My attempt at a long version, drawn from a year of collating articles, polling data, and personal observations, is below.
April 12, 2015. Hillary Clinton announces her candidacy for president.
Clinton thought this was her moment. 2016 would, by right, be her year. But over the course of a long, distinguished, and exceptionally controversial political career, Clinton had somehow become emblematic of everything ‘they’ — the losing side of the culture wars; the hollowed-out swathe of Middle America that has been betrayed and ignored by our leaders for decades; and the acolytes of Reaganism that are suspicious of Big Government in the hands of arrogant liberals — hate. That hate is primal and fierce and partly responsible for the most stunning election results in American history.
Undoubtedly, sexism played a role in Clinton’s defeat, too. A man with her career would never have been subject to such animalistic vitriol on the national stage. But, guess what? White women without college degrees broke for Trump in the general election by 28 points. Class trumps gender. Catcalls and the glass ceiling suck. But you know what sucks more? Trying to support a family while living paycheck to paycheck. Liberals forgot this fact — or probably never knew, because the C-word has long been verboten in American political discourse.
May 16, 2015. Bernie Sanders announces his candidacy for president.
As we now know, Sanders originally thought he had no chance to win. He wasn’t so much campaigning for the White House as he was attempting to spread a long-muzzled message, to make an argument in the public square that we could change our national priorities to create a more just and equitable country for all Americans. But then people started showing up to those rallies by the thousands…
He put up a damn good showing. Swimming very much upstream, having to contend with an initial media blackout, a knee-jerk American aversion to the word ‘socialist’, and a corrupt Democratic National Committee, he fought Clinton nearly to a draw. But, alas, power does not give up so easily. His populist bid essentially ended on April 26, when he took a shellacking in the delegate rich states of Pennsylvania and Maryland.
In the wake of Clinton’s defeat, recriminations over Sanders’ primary loss have been renewed. Maybe next time the Democrats will nominate a true champion of the working class, rather than another toady of the financial elite.
May 30, 2015. Beau Biden, aged 46, dies of brain cancer.
If he were not in mourning over the death of his son, would Joe Biden have run for president once more? Perhaps. But of this, I am much more certain: if Biden were the nominee, he would have defeated Trump. Still poor by DC standards, still largely speaks the vernacular of the middle-class, Biden possesses a credibility that Clinton wholly lacks. He could have shamed and called out Trump for his faux populism.
That’s a bunch of malarkey. I know the people you’re talking about, I grew up with them, and what you are promising them is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
And he could have repudiated Trump’s vile rhetoric without sounding like a smug aristocrat tsk-tsking the plebs.
We’re better than this. Better than all the terrible things you’ve said about women and minorities and the disabled. These are fellow citizens and fellow human beings and you are talking about them like they’re just fodder for your jokes. The president of the United States is supposed to be a leader for all Americans. How could you possibly be that leader when you insult all these different groups? You are asking good, decent people to sell their souls for a pipe dream, and it’s just not right.
Is there any doubt that Biden would have secured the Rust Belt for the blue team?
June 3, 2015. Vox publishes “I’m a liberal professor, and my students terrify me”.
Less than two weeks before Trump declared for the presidency, this polemical piece went viral. Writing under a pseudonym, an American college professor detailed polarizing new cultural mores taking shape on university campuses. Trigger warnings and safe spaces. Identity politics and social justice. ‘I’m offended’ and ‘I’m uncomfortable’. The list is familiar to many following the (mis)education of our youth. Whatever modicum of merit some of these concepts can rightfully claim, proponents and detractors have so far only spread the most radical and over-simplified interpretations into the society at-large. With each passing day, our culture demands more and more that we carefully calibrate everything we say. Politicians have operated by this standard for years, and now it has been unleashed on the rest of us by academia and the mass media.
But here’s the thing: you can’t shame someone into no longer being a bigot. You can, though, impress upon those who hold prejudices (which, if we’re being honest, is everyone) the truth of the common humanity shared by us all. Trying to do otherwise only builds resentment. So by the time Trump took up the mantle of the ‘silent majority’, stuffing his speeches with impolitic but seemingly authentic rhetoric, a backlash was well underway.
Near the end of the piece, the anonymous author declares in reference to his most recent point (though it could be applied to the burgeoning intellectual and cultural movement as a whole),
This is terrifying. No one will ever accept that. And if that becomes a salient part of liberal politics, liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.
Well, shit.
June 16, 2015. Donald Trump announces his candidacy for president.
When Trump undertook his campaign for president as the supposed savior of a decaying nation, he tapped into a swelling rage and despair felt by millions of Americans. These are men and women who believe the greatness of 20th century America — our strength, our prosperity, our national character — is eroding before their very eyes. Their children, heirs to this greatness, are being stripped of their birthright. America, land of freedom and opportunity, is dying. Trump, in plain language, promised to fix everything, to rescue us from our precipitous decline, to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.
And his appeal worked. Trump played the part of a textbook demagogue for nearly a year and a half and convinced a demoralized and distressed nation that he was The One.
But the proximate cause of his meteoric rise was something even more sinful: the gobs of free coverage he received via a ratings-chasing and click-hungry mass media. Every outrageous statement, every ignorant pronouncement — given top billing by cable talk shows and newspapers and websites alike. Recognizing how this buffoon was brilliantly conning our media establishment, Matt Taibbi foresaw the outcome (though he retracted his stance when Trump appeared to implode late during the general campaign) in February:
President Donald Trump.
A thousand ridiculous accidents needed to happen in the unlikeliest of sequences for it to be possible, but absent a dramatic turn of events … this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant with the attention span of an Xbox-playing 11-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised.
[…]
Trump isn’t the first rich guy to run for office. But he is the first to realize the weakness in the system, which is that the watchdogs in the political media can’t resist a car wreck. The more he insults the press, the more they cover him: He’s pulling 33 times as much coverage on the major networks as his next-closest GOP competitor, and twice as much as Hillary.
Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star. It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.
February 6, 2016. Marco Rubio malfunctions during a debate.
Having mustered a strong showing in Iowa, Rubio’s campaign picked up steam, with many thinking he would now seize the mantle of the anti-Trump candidate. But on a debate stage in Goffstown, New Hampshire, Rubio revealed himself to be a pitiful empty suit, repeating verbatim a memorized 20-second spiel four times. Three days later, Trump claimed his first primary victory with 35% of the vote in New Hampshire. A Rubio victory (or at least a 2nd place showing) may have cleared the field of most other contenders, allowing for the party establishment to coalesce around his candidacy. Rather, he finished an embarrassing fifth in the state, providing Trump with a fractured field for the next two months. Remember this: Trump never took a majority in any contest of consequence (I’m discounting the mere 9 delegates Trump earned with a landslide win in the Northern Mariana Islands caucus on March 15) until the New York primary on April 19.
February 13, 2016. Antonin Scalia, aged 79, dies in his sleep.
The death of the polarizing archconservative justice left a precious vacancy on the Supreme Court. Almost immediately, the Republican Senate leadership announced their intention to not hold confirmation hearings for anyone President Obama nominated to replace Scalia. We will not consider any nominee you put forth, they argued, because we are too close to an election, and so the vacant seat should rightfully be filled by the next president. When Obama nominated Merrick Garland a month later, the Republicans held firm to this promise. A new year is nearly upon us, and a successor to Scalia has yet to be confirmed.
The outright repudiation of Garland, though, was not an isolated incident on the part of the GOP. Over the course of Obama’s two terms, the Republicans obstinately refused to work across the aisle on any issue of national significance; shut down the federal government for 16 days; and, at last, declined to hold a vote on a Supreme Court nominee, forsaking an explicit constitutional duty. Simply put, Congressional Republicans have refused to do their jobs.
And yet, amazingly, they have managed to convince huge swathes of the electorate that their years of obstructionism does not constitute a failure to govern. It has been a noble effort to save America from Obama’s radical Marxist agenda. This, of course, does not jibe with reality. Obama is not Lenin. He isn’t even Eisenhower.
Yet the Democrats meekly conceded this argument to their opponents, even, and especially, during this election cycle. They should have been hollering — in every interview, every press conference, every speech — this mantra: the Republicans don’t give a shit about the country. They wouldn’t let anything worthwhile or necessary get done, and they wouldn’t negotiate in good faith to pass any meaningful legislation. Vote us into power if you want something accomplished because these fanatics won’t let us make things better. That is why you are suffering and that is why America is not as great as she should be.
But when confronted by Trump, who vanquished his GOP foes by presenting simple solutions to complex problems, and by speaking to the deeply-held fears and overwhelming economic suffering that had been left unaddressed by our government for years, what did we hear from the Clinton campaign? Trump is a cretin and he’s making everything sound way worse than it is because [insincere blather about how America is already great].
March 1, 2016. Donald Trump dominates Super Tuesday, claiming victory in 7 of 11 states.
What in the hell is going on? I heard this a lot from friends and family at this point in the campaign. How could so many people, in all corners of the country, be voting for this egomaniacal demagogue? This was the New York Times that evening:
In interviews, Mr. Trump’s supporters did not appear defined by a common ideology. But they had a unifying motivation — a deep-rooted, pervasive sense of anxiety about the state of the country, and an anger and frustration at those they felt were encroaching on their way of life.
[…]
Those supporting him did not always agree with everything he said, or the way he said it, and they were not even convinced that he would be able to follow through on all of his big, brash promises. But they were willing to give him their conditional support, drawn to him by his tough talk and bravado, as well as their own disappointment and even fatalism about the politicians they were used to seeing on the menu.
“This isn’t about whether he’s going to do a better job or not,” said Ken Magno, 69, leaving his polling place in Everett, Mass., Tuesday morning, wearing a red Donald Trump winter hat. “More or less, it’s the statement: Listen, we’re sick and tired of what you people do. And we’re going to put somebody in there — now that it’s our choice, we’re going to put somebody in there that basically you don’t like.”
But note — Trump won less than a third of all votes cast this day. The vast majority of Republican primary voters chose a different candidate. Once Trump claimed the nomination, though, most Republicans (even those repulsed by him) began a slow process to rationalize their vote come November. Better an oafish, vulgar semi-conservative than Hillary fucking Clinton.
March 8, 2016. Bernie Sanders inches past Hillary Clinton for an upset victory in the Michigan primary.
The pollsters didn’t see this coming. The pundits were shocked. But after the votes had been tallied, Sanders came away with 49.68% of the vote, Clinton with 48.26%. Due to the anti-democratic quirk of superdelegates, Clinton technically came out ahead with more convention delegates, but the people had spoken and in a state epitomizing post-industrial pain, the candidate for free trade was rejected. The message was lost on everybody.
March 15, 2016. Donald Trump triumphs in the Illinois primary.
Trump won several states and hundreds of delegates on this day. But an interesting thing happened in the Land of Lincoln:
In Illinois, 15 delegates are elected statewide, but each of the state’s 18 congressional districts elects three delegates. For the latter group, each candidate files a slate of delegates, whose names are listed on the ballot along with their presidential preferences. The voters make their choices and the highest vote getters in each CD win.
The vast majority of the voters have never heard of any of the delegates, so they just pick three people who support their candidate. Unless they are Trump supporters and the names on the ballot sound foreign. So in IL-13, Trump delegate Doug Hartmann got 31,937 votes but Trump delegate Raja Sadiq got only 24,103. In IL-06, Paul Minch got 35,435 but Nabi Fakroddin got only 30,639, and so on.
This phenomenon was observed in seven districts, costing Trump three delegates. The key takeaway is this: not everyone who voted for Trump is a bigot. Trump had an average drop-off of 11.7% in these seven districts. Extrapolate that out to the 62.9 million votes he received in the general election, and that comes out to a shade over 7 million (this is a potentially terribly flawed statistical analysis, but I’m doing what I can with my liberal arts degree).
Yes, 7 million is still a scary number. If all those people lived in one state, it would the be 14th largest in the country, ranking behind Washington but ahead of Arizona. But that’s not 62.9 million. Overt bigotry certainly fueled Trump’s run but it did not win him the election.
This is where a lot of racial progressives get hung up. How could all these vast multitudes vote on the side of the white supremacists? How could they tacitly endorse all the terrible things Trump said (and implied) about Mexicans and Muslims and blacks? How could they look their demeaned neighbors in the eyes when their votes basically translated to “Hey man, I don’t hate you. I just don’t care about you.”?
It hurts to hear, but when people’s livelihoods — hell, when their very way of life is thought to be under siege, on the verge of becoming an artifact of history — tribalism wins out. Other peoples’ liberties, let alone their feelings, don’t matter. It’s fucked up, but that’s human nature and it’s yet to be overcome.
April 5, 2016. Bernie Sanders wins convincingly in the Wisconsin primary.
13 points. That was Sanders’ margin of victory in the Badger State. He won all but one county. He took in nearly 200,000 votes more than Trump did in the Republican primary. And yet the Democratic establishment continued to peddle their line of unelectability. Hindsight is of course 20/20, and there is no guarantee that Sanders would have defeated Trump, but this much is clear: when there is real suffering taking place, and you deny people the chance to vote for a true populist, they will turn to a strongman like Trump, who taps into their economic insecurities and whips up cultural resentment, every time.
May 3, 2016. Donald Trump crushes the remaining competition in the Indiana primary, effectively ending the race for the nomination.
As we now know, Trump’s original game plan never involved winning the nomination, let alone the election. Here is his former Communications Director in March:
Almost a year ago, recruited for my public relations and public policy expertise, I sat in Trump Tower being told that the goal was to get The Donald to poll in double digits and come in second in delegate count. That was it.
The Trump camp would have been satisfied to see him polling at 12% and taking second place to a candidate who might hold 50%. His candidacy was a protest candidacy.
[…]
What was once Trump’s desire to rank second place to send a message to America and to increase his power as a businessman has nightmarishly morphed into a charade that is poised to do irreparable damage to this country if we do not stop this campaign in its tracks. I’ll say it again: Trump never intended to be the candidate. But his pride is too out of control to stop him now… He doesn’t want the White House. He just wants to be able to say that he could have run the White House.
The man wasn’t even trying. But Trump’s cowardly clown car of rivals — fearful of alienating his supporters, supporters they aimed to claim following his (surely!) eventual exit from the race — refused to denounce his ignorance until the freight train was running at top speed. By that point, it was too late.
July 18–21, 2016. Republican National Convention held in Cleveland.
Most of the coverage of this year’s RNC focused on the coronation of the conquering candidate Trump and the nightmarish portrait of America he painted in his acceptance speech. But that’s not what I remember most. It was this exchange between Newt Gingrich and a CNN reporter. In the clip, the two argue over whether the violent crime rate is up or down in recent times. The reporter cites statistics, while Gingrich appeals to peoples’ perceptions. The kicker comes at the end from Gingrich, when he spits out, “As a political candidate, I’ll go with how people feel and I’ll let you go with the theoreticians.”
This is the face of demagoguery laid bare. To lead justly and wisely, our leaders must deal with the facts of our reality in an open and honest manner — even, and especially, when these facts contradict citizens’ gut feelings. For example, one may feel less safe and believe that crime is up, but we are more safe now than at any time in the last 23 years. True leaders would acknowledge the unfounded fears of their people and explain why they need not feel this way. Instead, our politics has nurtured opportunistic office seekers wielding fear and ignorance as weapons to gain power. Between the acts of these brazen liars and the over-abundance of fake news stories circulating within social media echo chambers, is it any surprise that scaremongering won the election?
July 25–28, 2016. Democratic National Convention held in Philadelphia.
The most memorable moment of the DNC for practically all onlookers, myself included, was the speech given by Khizr Khan, the father of Captain Humayun Khan, a U.S. Army soldier slain in Iraq. Khan’s scorching and righteous criticisms of Trump’s rhetoric and character electrified the crowd. Trump’s contemptuous responses in the coming days seemed to demonstrate his utter lack of decency, compassion, and humility. Perhaps more than any other incident, the Khan feud revealed Trump as a textbook narcissist (Khan challenged Trump to tell us what he had ever sacrificed for his country; Trump’s response: “I’ve created tens of thousands of jobs. Built great structures. I’ve had tremendous success.”).
But, let’s be real. People think most politicians are narcissists. Throughout his campaign, Trump was simply open about how much he loves himself. His supporters knew what they were getting characterwise, and they didn’t find it to be a deal-breaker. Rather, many convinced themselves that this billionaire, having spent decades spectacularly cultivating his own fame and fortune, was now going to harness his ego for the good of the country. Yes, he’s a loud-mouthed asshole. But now he’s going to be our asshole.
September 9, 2016. Hillary Clinton makes her ‘basket of deplorables’ remark.
Clinton made this now infamous comment at the LGBT for Hillary Gala in New York City:
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million…Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
But the other basket … of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
What I, and I imagine many of my friends in the coastal elite heard, was this: there are a lot of shitty people with shitty worldviews out there. Trump has given them permission to climb out of their pits and enter the political discourse of us civilized folk. Good, decent people should not want to associate with them or legitimize their beliefs by voting for a candidate who would draw strength from this crowd.
What many people of the heartland heard was this: Here it is, Hillary, the ultimate big-city elite, admitting what she really thinks about us. I’ve always suspected that she has no respect for my thoughts and feelings. This is confirmation. I know plenty of Trump supporters who aren’t racist or sexist. She knows nothing about who we really are and has never cared to try. She just called me, my family, and my part of the country deplorable. Fuck her.
Following an onslaught of press criticism, Clinton apologized for saying “half” of Trump’s supporters are deplorable. She had no way of knowing what the exact number is and that was her mistake. What a worthless response. A half-way decent rebuttal would have included an exhortation to that ‘other basket’, urging them to stand up for the people being targeted and reject the man campaigning on deplorable rhetoric for the good of the country. But she couldn’t because, with her as the other option, why would they? She’s done nothing to prove she’s on their side.
September 16, 2016. Donald Trump renounces birtherism.
For years, Trump had been the chief proponent of birtherism, the conspiracy theory that President Obama was born in Kenya, not the United States, and thus not eligible to be president. On this day, he finally admitted “ President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.”, while also claiming credit for resolving the controversy, as he had (supposedly) been the one to induce Obama to release his long-form birth certificate in 2011. He then made the demonstrably false assertion that it was actually Clinton who had started the birther speculation, back during her first presidential bid in 2008. One could say this took some gall, but with Trump, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.
Throughout the campaign, Clinton denounced Trump’s rhetoric as reprehensible and disqualifying for the presidency. The birther issue gave her yet another opportunity to condemn him. In each of the first two debates, she called birtherism a “racist lie”. It was powerful and righteous and true — but it did not qualify as a reason to vote for her. Calling out prejudice did not tell us what Clinton would do if elected president. It’s virtue signaling, and that is insufficient cause for electing a lawmaker.
The whole birther episode also highlighted one of the most absurd facets of the campaign: Trump, with startling frequency, told straight-up lies; Clinton, meanwhile, sometimes stretched the truth. And yet poll after poll showed that voters thought Trump to be more trustworthy and honest. When commentators refer to a ‘post-factual democracy’, this is what they mean.
October 7, 2016. The Washington Post releases a tape recording of Donald Trump talking about women with TV personality Billy Bush.
And when you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything… Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.
Many people, including several leaders in the Republican Party, thought Trump’s candidacy would be irrevocably sunk by these words. But like with the dozens of other heinous statements, ignorant tweets, and scandalous revelations, the Trump train kept on rolling. That’s how powerful his message was, and how much antipathy was felt toward Clinton. It is sad to admit, but this is the America we live in: a man can be elected president even after the nation discovers him bragging about committing sexual assault on tape.
October 19, 2016. Final presidential debate held in Las Vegas.
Out on the stump in the days leading up to the debate, Trump started to make noise about the election being rigged. He could not possibly lose, the people love him, he would say, so if he did not win, it would be because his opponents stole the election from him. This talk was unnerving enough. But then, during the debate itself, Trump revealed himself as a threat to the Republic:
Chris Wallace: You’ve been warning at rallies recently that this election is rigged and that Hillary Clinton is in the process of trying to steal it from you. Your running mate Governor Pence pledged on Sunday that he and you, his words, will absolutely accept the result of this election. Today your daughter Ivanka said the same thing. I want to ask you here on the stage tonight, do you make the same commitment that you’ll absolutely accept the result of the election?
Donald Trump: I will look at it at the time. I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time. What I’ve seen, what I’ve seen, is so bad.
Wallace: But, sir, there is a tradition in this country, in fact, one of the prides of this country is the peaceful transition of power and no matter how hard fought a campaign is that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?
Trump: What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?
No evidence, then or now, surfaced to support Trump’s claims of a rigged election. Many on both sides of the aisle lambasted him for these remarks. Indeed, it downright scared many people. How could a man running for president even think to say something like this? How could people be backing this man and be willing to give him such awesome power?
As is turns out, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter warned of this very problem four years ago:
I think some of the aspects of current American government that people on both sides find frustrating are in part a function of the inability of people to understand how government can and should function. It is a product of civic ignorance…What I worry about is, that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible, and when the problems get bad enough…some one person will come forward and say give me total power and I will solve this problem. That is how the Roman Republic fell…That is the way democracy dies. And if something is not done to improve the level of civic knowledge, that is what you should worry about at night.
It really is fairly simple. People throughout the country recognize they are getting a raw deal. They intuitively know that our government is not functioning as it ought to. But they don’t know why. They don’t know how our government works, how a bill becomes a law, how many justices are on the Supreme Court, etc. Our schools have failed to adequately teach civics for generations, and now this is the result. When the intelligentsia talks about how Trump would have been unable to win if our citizenry were better educated, this is what they mean.
One further exchange worth noting from the debate dealt with Vladimir Putin and his preferred candidate:
Donald Trump: Putin from everything I see has no respect for [Hillary Clinton].
Hillary Clinton: Well, that’s because he would rather have a puppet as president of the United States.
Trump: No puppet. You’re the puppet!
Yes, we really did elect a man as infantile as Trump. But aside from that, let us address the issue at hand. Russia meddled in our elections. This was clear then and now. When WikiLeaks released emails damaging to the Clinton campaign, their source was Russian hackers. When fake news spread like wildfire across social media networks, it was Russian intelligence fanning the flames.
To be sure, Clinton lost the election for many reasons. The Kremlin’s actions did not hand Trump the presidency. But democracy can not long survive in our country if the espionage of foreign nations continues to have such a perverting influence on our internal politics.
October 28, 2016. FBI Director James Comey informs Congress that the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server has been reopened.
Clinton and her team have evidently ascribed blame for their electoral defeat to this moment right here. I’m of the opinion that, while it certainly played a role in motivating some fence sitters to either vote Trump or abstain, it is fantasy to think Comey’s announcement shifted hundreds of thousands of votes in the Rust Belt out of the blue column. This supposition also fails to explain how Clinton was still able to win the swing states of Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia. Did voters there not care about her (mis)handling of classified information? Or could it be that the economic reality in these states differed from that in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin? It must then be said: if the Democratic establishment settles on this line of reasoning, they are delusional and true progressives should abandon the party en masse for something new and pure.
November 6, 2016. The establishment’s rejection of Donald Trump confirmed.
Our institutions (both liberal and conservative) collectively recognized that Trump was dangerously unqualified for the presidency. In March, a cohort of Republican foreign policy figures, over 100 strong, signed an open letter denouncing Trump. In August, fifty former national security officials released a similar statement. In September, a cadre of 375 scientists followed suit; in October, it was 100 scholars; in November, 370 economists chimed in. And just 2 days before the election, the final tally of major newspaper endorsements was unveiled: 57 for Clinton vs. 2 for Trump. Even former President Bush (both of them) declined to back his party’s nominee.
But here’s the thing: Americans no longer trust our institutions. Because our media, our politicians, our policy experts, they are the ones who keep saying ‘trust us, we got this, we’re qualified’. So, we keep electing ‘qualified’ people as our leaders, and for many Americans, things keep getting worse. It’s not hard to put 2 and 2 together: if people had good, well-paying jobs; if our leaders didn’t lie to us; if the wealthy and powerful did not enable the slow death of the American middle class, we would not be in this mess right now. Trump would have no platform to run on.
So Mitt Romney can call Trump a fraud all he wants. The myopic greed and pretentious air of the elite has left them with no moral high ground to sermonize from. In our society, Trump has more credence with nearly 63 million Americans than all of the ‘qualified’ people combined.
November 8, 2016. Election Day.
- 7:30 pm EST. AP calls West Virginia for Donald Trump. The Mountain State has gone Republican every year since 2000 and only provides 5 Electoral Votes. Trump’s triumph was neither an unexpected nor consequential outcome. His margin of victory, however, should not be overlooked. In 2008, Obama lost West Virginia by only 13 points; Clinton lost by 41 points! I make mention of this because West Virginia’s electoral history is deeply instructive in understanding why working class whites have abandoned Democrats — and why so many Obama voters have jumped ship for Trump. In an extensive piece detailing how the white working class vote can be won over by factors other than racism, Connor Kilpatrick writes,
Let’s look at McDowell County, West Virginia. The Guardian zeroed in on McDowell due to Trump winning 91.5 percent of the Republican primary vote…McDowell County will likely go for Trump in November. Just as it did for Romney in 2012.
And yet in 2008, Barack Obama won McDowell handily with 53 percent of the vote. Recent studies have shown that Obama won across the country in 2008 with far more white working-class voters than commonly thought. Even though he lost many of them four years later in 2012 — they either stayed home or went with Romney. Trump’s strength in the Midwest this year appears to stem in part from white working-class ex-Obama voters. As one older, ex-mine worker in McDowell says to the Guardian, “I voted for that black guy two times.” He’s now with Trump.
How does a liberal pundit explain this? If these voters are such obstinate racists who’ll always choose upholding “white supremacy” over their pocketbooks, why did they give Obama a shot in the first place? Why didn’t they vote in 2008 like they did in 2012 and plan to in 2016?
[P]erhaps, in the wake of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Obama and his party simply failed to make the lives of voters in McDowell County substantially better. Since Obama, the Democrats have campaigned in every subsequent election under the galvanizing cry of “Hey, it could’ve been worse.” Maybe these McDowell voters question how it was that the wealthiest Americans recovered so quickly from the crash while they and their families and neighbors were worse off than ever.
Kilpatrick is right. This lazy tendency to paint working class white people as inherently motivated by race is bullshit. These men and women can be mobilized to vote based on class or race. Neither is set in stone. Kilpatrick continues:
Racism can be fought, defeated, or overruled by working-class politics. Or it can be brought front and center. As Ackerman pointed out in his article, West Virginia in the 1920s was a bastion of reaction — the KKK and coal operators ran the state. In the 1930s and up through the 1970s, it was a hotbed of labor unions, class struggle, and a hell of a lot of Democratic Party votes. Hubert Humphrey, who rose to prominence for his commitment to both civil rights and the welfare state, crushed Richard Nixon and George Wallace in West Virginia with 49.6 percent of the vote. Was this because the whites of West Virginia were simply less racist than the whites of Georgia, who helped Wallace carry their state? Or was it because West Virginia was the site of class struggle and labor politics in a way that Georgia at that time was not?
Chew on that. West Virginia voted for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, a year in which the Democrats lost (excepting Texas) the entire former Confederacy.
Democrats can still win elections here — they just elected a Democratic governor while simultaneously soundly rejecting Clinton. And he didn’t arouse racial resentment— he promised to save coal mining, the lifeblood of the state’s economy. Of course, in order to stop global warming, we have to stop digging coal out of the earth, like, yesterday. But the moment we stop, we must also have jobs lined up for all the men and women who rely on the industry for their livelihoods. Why, after enduring years of false promises on this issue, would white working class voters trust a Democratic president to be their champion?
- 10:36 pm EST. AP calls Ohio for Donald Trump. Clinton got crushed in Ohio. She lost by 8 points in a state Obama won twice. Compared to 2012, Clinton bled nearly 450,000 votes, while Trump picked up almost 180,000 votes. But it wasn’t like she wasn’t warned:
In May, after thousands of Democrats had switched parties to vote for Trump in the primary, Mahoning County Democratic Party Chairman David Betras circulated a memo cautioning that Trump was making headway in his Rust Belt region and urging the Clinton campaign to take the threat seriously.
[…]
[The memo read in part]: Talk about policies that will incentivize companies to repatriate manufacturing jobs. Talk about infrastructure — digging ditches, paving roads, building buildings and producing the materials needed to do it all. The workers we’re talking about don’t want to run computers, they want to run back hoes, dig ditches, sling concrete block. They’re not embarrassed about the fact that they get their hands dirty doing backbreaking work. They love it and they want to be respected and honored for it. And they’ll react positively if they believe HRC will give them and their kids the opportunity to break their backs for another ten or twenty or thirty years. Somewhere along the line we forgot that not everyone wants to be white collar, we stopped recognizing the intrinsic value of hard work.
So, why did Trump win union Democrats in Ohio? Betras again: “It was people who want a job and want to be able to work and want a job, and they would accept an imperfect messenger because at least he was saying that.”
Come Election Day, Mahoning County did go for Clinton. By less than 4,000 votes. Obama took the county in 2012 by a margin of over 30,000 votes.
- 10:50 pm EST. AP calls Florida for Donald Trump. Turnout was off the charts in Florida this election, with both candidates gobbling up votes. But Trump’s gains blew by Clinton’s: ~450,000 vs. ~250,000. All that talk about ‘demographic inevitability’ and everyone forgot that white people are still the majority in the state. A river of Latinos came out for Clinton, but a torrent of whites came out for Trump.
- 11:11 pm EST. AP calls North Carolina for Donald Trump. This is a state that keeps trying to suppress the vote with a despicably dogged determination. So, are we really surprised that the nativist and white nationalist elements of Trump’s appeal resonated here? And that black people — the largest Democratic voting bloc in the state — were less jacked up for Clinton than Obama? I always thought this was the one swing state destined to back Trump. Obama bested McCain in 2008 by less than 20,000 votes; he fell to Romney in 2012 by fewer than 100,000 votes. Trump’s margin of victory outpaced both of them.
November 9, 2016.
- 1:36 am EST. AP calls Pennsylvania for Donald Trump. The Keystone State was part of the vaunted ‘blue wall’, supposedly beyond the reach of any and all Republican presidential contenders. But the cracks were there for all to see. Several years back, as part of a cross-country road trip, I had a stop over in Erie. As I wrote back then,
We spent the night in Erie, another town in the process of being fucked over by GE. Our motel clerk told us they’re about to close down a major factory, to the tune of 3,000 lost jobs. GE of course isn’t the first to abandon Erie, and with the death of industry in the area people have been forced into lower paying service sector jobs, characteristic of a Rust Belt town. But the most telling sign of Erie’s tough times came when we drove through the next morning. Run down buildings lined the city streets and we could even see straight down a major thoroughfare for several blocks — a fleet of green lights was eerily visible as there was no traffic to obstruct our view.
That GE plant still stands somehow, but it employs fewer and fewer workers each year. Erie resides in Erie County, which went for Obama (like a generation of Democrats before him) by 16 points. Trump won Erie County, the first time a Republican has done so since 1984.
But that’s not all. To the southwest of Pittsburgh is Washington County. Traditionally Democratic, it’s been trending Republican for years — residents feel alienated from a national party that prioritizes environmental protection while paying no heed to the jobs lost in its wake. If the jobs go, these communities will start to die like so many others dotted across post-industrial Pennsylvania. Trump broke records, garnering 60% of the county vote. As one man said this summer, “I think that is what people not from around here don’t understand — we are voting for our lives”.
All told, nearly 300,000 more Pennsylvanians voted for Trump than Romney.
- 2:30 am EST. AP calls Wisconsin for Donald Trump. With the state’s 10 Electoral Votes, he clears 270, thus winning the election. Here, it is interesting to note: Trump won the Badger State with almost the exact same vote total with which Romney lost in 2012. Both earned just north of 1.4 million votes. But nearly 240,000 Obama voters didn’t show up for Clinton. A few things are going on here. There is no guarantee the same 1.4 million people voted for Trump and Romney. Gary Johnson, for instance, bested his 2012 performance by almost 100,000 votes. But for every Wisconsinite turned off by Trump’s boorishness or lack of qualifications or demagoguery, another one was galvanized by his promised commitment to resurrect the prosperity of their forefathers. On the other side of things, Jill Stein netted a notch above 30,000 votes — nowhere near enough to play spoiler. That leaves a hefty quantity of voters who seemingly abstained (turnout was down 3.6% compared to 2012). This is what happens when a campaign takes support for granted — Clinton never even stepped foot in the state. Deeming her unworthy of their vote, some Wisconsinites broke for Trump, a few padded Stein’s total, and many didn’t vote for president at all. For this result, blame the candidate (and the party that nominated her), not the voter. ~ N.B. We would be remiss if we did not mention that Wisconsin has a strict Voter ID law and it potentially depressed turnout in heavily black Milwaukee.
- 11:14 am EST. AP calls Minnesota for Hillary Clinton. When Minnesota appeared too close to call on election night, I was floored. The state, you may have heard, has a bit of a liberal reputation. Last time it voted Republican in a presidential race? 1972. Additionally, I moved here a few months back and so I was watching the results trickle in with friends in a suburb of Minneapolis. These lifelong Minnesotans confirmed that while there were conservative bastions in the countryside, this is a state with a strong liberal bent. And yet, when Clinton finally emerged the victor, it was by less than 2 points. What had happened? The same as what happened in Wisconsin. Trump essentially matched Romney’s vote total even though Johnson posted strong numbers; Clinton amassed nearly 180,000 votes fewer than Obama; and a very blue state from four years ago suddenly seemed rather red. If looking for the deep dissatisfaction with Clinton’s candidacy, search no further than perhaps the most progressive state in the nation.
- 4:41 pm EST. Widespread disgust with presidential candidates confirmed. Throughout the campaign, it was painfully apparent that many Americans loathed both Trump and Clinton. Well, come Election Day, in 15 states, “down-ballot candidates received more votes than presidential candidates — even when you factor in third-party candidates.” That translates to hundreds of thousands of Americans who voted for governor or senator, but punted on the presidency. From North Carolina to Vermont, for the first time in a generation, large swathes of the voting public gave the middle finger to the farcical choices presented to them.
November 10, 2016. Donald Trump edges Hillary Clinton in Michigan by a fingernail according to the final unofficial count.
None of our country’s self-professed mages (pollsters) and sages (pundits) saw this result coming. Except, as far as I can tell, one: Michael Moore. The liberal filmmaker, a native of Flint, Michigan, penned a list of 5 reasons Trump would win back in July. Number 1 on that list? “Midwest Math, or Welcome to Our Rust Belt Brexit”:
From Green Bay to Pittsburgh, this, my friends, is the middle of England — broken, depressed, struggling, the smokestacks strewn across the countryside with the carcass of what we use to call the Middle Class. Angry, embittered working (and nonworking) people who were lied to by the trickle-down of Reagan and abandoned by Democrats who still try to talk a good line but are really just looking forward to rub one out with a lobbyist from Goldman Sachs who’ll write them [a] nice big check before leaving the room. What happened in the UK with Brexit is going to happen here.
[…]
And this is where the math comes in. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost by 64 electoral votes. Add up the electoral votes cast by Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It’s 64. All Trump needs to do to win is to carry, as he’s expected to do, the swath of traditional red states… and then he just needs these four rust belt states.
With wins in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan — the other swing state successes being merely icing on the cake — Trump took the White House. You can only push people so far.
December 19, 2016. The Electoral College confirms Donald Trump as president-elect, while Hillary Clinton’s lead in the popular vote holds firm at 2 points.
As of this writing, the national popular vote stacks up to the 2012 results like so:
Hillary Clinton 65,844,610— —Barack Obama 65,918,507
Donald Trump 62,979,636— — Mitt Romney 60,934,407
Gary Johnson 4,488,912— — — — — — — 1,275,923
Jill Stein 1,457,038— — — — — — — — — — 469,015
That’s a slight dip of almost 75,000 votes for Clinton and a significant uptick of over 2 million votes for Trump. Johnson and Stein, meanwhile, saw monumental gains. Based on these numbers and the several individual states examined above, we can draw these conclusions:
- Millions of Romney voters couldn’t stomach the idea of a Trump presidency but refused to vote for the liberal boogeyman Clinton to stop it, opting to go for the Libertarian Johnson.
- Trump actually exceeded Romney’s total, suggesting that some combination of Obama voters and previously non-voting citizens propelled him to victory.
- Clinton failed to accrue votes where it counts. Nearly matching Obama’s popular vote tally but losing decisively in the Electoral College indicates a serious failure of strategy.
- We have such an odd way of electing our president. 3.8 million Clinton votes in Texas? They count for nothing. 4.4 million Trump votes in California? Worth bupkus. But the decisions of a few thousand voters in Michigan and Wisconsin? They make nearly all the difference.
Appendix A: A Look at the Exit Polls.
- Trump garnered 43% of the union vote. This is the sort of statistic that seems absurd on first glance but makes perfect sense once fully digested. Imagine this internal monologue running through the mind of a former factory worker in Michigan: Yeah, Trump has been anti-union throughout his entire business career, and it’s rich guys like him that have shipped our jobs overseas, but the unions have proven they can’t help us anymore. And why vote for the Democrat? The party claims to be pro-labor, but I still don’t have a good, well-paying job after decades of voting for these jackasses. Trump talks about and recognizes how much my situation sucks. Maybe he’ll actually do something to help…
- 81% of evangelicals voted for Trump. This looks for all the world like an anti-Hillary vote. Since coming onto the national political stage, Clinton — by virtue of her personal refusal to countenance social conservatism — has been marked as uniquely antithetical to the Religious Right’s politicized strain of Christianity. Plus, with an open Supreme Court seat on the line, evangelicals had extra motivational brimstone to deny Clinton the presidency. So, in consideration of the real struggle seen within the evangelical community (at places like Liberty University, no less!) during the campaign, it is hard to conceive of Trump — a thrice-married, womanizing, irreligious casino magnate — performing this well with this demographic against any other opponent.
- Breakdown of vote by income. Some commentators have made the observation that Clinton won the poor and working class vote while Trump won the richer voting cohorts, thus seemingly refuting the claim that we have undergone a populist rebellion. In their view, it was just a failing on the Democrats to turn out the vote. To them I say, you are misreading the numbers and drawing the wrong conclusion. To wit:
In 2012, Obama won the <30k income bracket by 28 points and the 30k-50k income bracket by 15 points. Clinton, however, won those demographics by only 12 and 9 points, respectively. The only caveat is some voters rejected both candidates on their ballots — Trump & Clinton took 94% of the vote vs. 98% for Obama & Romney in the <30k bracket. But that still adds up to a lot of people flipping to Trump.
On the other end of the wealth ladder, Clinton made real gains in the upper income brackets (Trump won the 100–200k income bracket by only 1 point; Romney won it by 10 points), which is in line with the expansive chasm between college educated and non-college educated voters in the polls (college grads broke for Clinton by 10 points; non-college grads for Trump by 7 points). Many well-educated people with money rejected Trump and yet he won. He made up for these lost votes on the other side of the income spectrum.
This all supports the supposition that the Democrats — and Clinton in particular — have failed to convince working class people they represent their interests. And, I would argue, they’re fucking right. Battle lines are being drawn around class, especially in White America. A new political age may now be upon us.
Appendix B: A Few Concluding Thoughts.
- Donald Trump was more than Build the Wall and Ban the Muslims and the hundred other vulgarities he issued forth. The more liberal minded and civil among us could not get past these sentiments, dismissed Trump out of hand, and so failed to grasp the power and thrust of Trump’s speeches:
At almost every turn the liberal pundits misunderstood, or did not hear, what Trump was saying. After his win in the Nevada caucus Trump said: “We won with highly educated, we won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated! We’re the smartest people, we’re the most loyal people.” Liberals lampooned him, assuming that he had insulted part of his base.
A different interpretation translates those comments as: “Trump understands that it’s not all my fault that I couldn’t get an education. He understands that even people who don’t have advanced degrees can make good decisions and are worthy of respect.”
One of the few coastal elites to have cracked the Trump discursive code is the otherwise odious Peter Thiel, who told the National Press Club, “the media is always taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally.” Voters on the other hand, said Thiel, “take Trump seriously but not literally.”
Being sealed within an elitist bubble — a bubble forged by comfortable living circumstances and partisan news-getting choices — has kept the privileged classes oblivious to the lived reality of literally millions of Americans, and so many of us wound up listening to a caricature of a caricature, unable to understand how Trump could elicit such mammoth support from our fellow countrymen.
2. Donald Trump played the role of Julius Caesar and Hillary Clinton let him get away with it:
The central fact of American economic life is the “40-Year Slump.” Since 1974, American wages stopped rising in tandem with productivity. From 1947 through 1974, broad union membership, little international manufacturing competition, and low unemployment kept labor’s bargaining power strong enough to maintain its share of economic output. In an era of off-shoring, automation, and a coordinated corporate assault on union organizing, worker power has declined, and galloping inequality has become the dominant reality. Donald Trump obliquely addressed this phenomenon. He blamed illegal immigrants and unfair trade deals for workers’ plights. Hillary Clinton failed to marshal a response and instead exclusively highlighted his obvious bigotry and personal grotesqueness. This was foolish.
Donald Trump offers workers only the solutions in keeping with the boss’s logic — he thinks the solution is to slash wages, which are “too high” in America. He thinks Detroit’s automakers should evade union wages by fleeing into right-to-work Southern states. If his business practices are any indication of his governing philosophy, he thinks that labor regulations should be weakened to empower the boss. Donald Trump intends to weaken the American worker’s bargaining power and make his position more precarious, more dangerous, and less lucrative.
Hillary Clinton never made any of this clear.
Donald Trump is a rich man who has spent his entire adult life advancing the cause of the rich man. His working-class hero persona is a fraud and his populist campaign a con job. And yet Clinton let him off the hook, her campaign almost solely animated by this premise:
Ugh, hear all the ignorant shit that comes out of that asshole’s mouth? Vote for me — I know you are suffering and I haven’t made it clear how I will actually help you. But, hey, at least I don’t talk like that asshole over there.
3. Our anger should be most directed at the Democratic Party.
That’s how I felt on election night, and that’s how I still feel today. It’s easy to be mad at the Republican Party. After all, they’re the party that has been inculcating white resentment in their voter base for the last 50 years and acting as the unapologetic advocate of Big Business since the days of Harding. And it’s easy to be mad at Trump. After all, he just blew up the American political landscape to satisfy his ego.
But the Democrats, historically, represented something else — racial justice, rights of the working man, opposition to concentrated wealth and power. They have utterly abandoned the fight against the latter, and now cynically campaign on their implicit less worseness than the GOP on racial and labor issues:
Hey, black and brown people: you can vote for us…or you can vote for the Republicans, throwing your lot in with people who use racial slurs and want you out of the country. Hey you, working stiff: you can vote for us…or you can vote for the Republicans, who are actively trying to destroy unions.
Vote for us, vast majority of Americans: not cause we’re for you, but cause we’re not against you.
This strategy no longer works. The Democrats have been revealed as frauds. They have cultivated the racist carceral state and are bankrolled by the 1% just like their opponents. They are no longer the champion of the oppressed and working classes. They represent socially liberal graduates of prestigious universities and multinational corporations. The shorthand for this would be the coastal elite.
And while this transformation was taking place, as the party’s vote share plummeted in states like Missouri (once a presidential bellwether) and West Virginia (once a Democratic stronghold) — not to mention in small towns and rural counties across the country — what was the response of the party of the common man? Write the heartland off as ignorant rubes. What is wrong with these morons? Don’t they understand our policies would make life better for them? God, they’re so easily tricked by the GOP, voting against their economic interests cause all they care about is guns, gays, and abortion.
What the Democrats have failed to understand for years is that these people are not stupid. It’s not like they are simply choosing their gut feelings over facts and figures. Rather, they are suspicious of large, distant bureaucracies; they don’t assume their interests and the interests of metropolises align; and they want leaders who talk with them, not at them. Put another way, liberalism has conflated anti-intellectualism with anti-elitism. Both are present in our society, but it is the latter that has been motivating public opinion and shifting the political culture — and has now delivered Donald Trump the White House.
Democrats, hear me: it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. That is more than half the battle right there. Then, when you once again have these people listening to your message, go beyond mere lip service. Act.
4. For nearly all of American history, landed white men ran the show. In the past few generations, that social hierarchy has begun to unravel, as a multicultural meritocracy has risen to take its place. So, of course this election represents a ‘whitelash’ against these changes. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive. But on a more fundamental level, it represents a populist uprising against the economic and political elite who have ignored and fostered legitimate suffering among millions of people. This is from a Medium post by John Osborne in March:
In 2012, The U.S. Census reported that one-third of all U.S. counties were ‘dying.’ According to the census, dying counties mean there are a fewer births than deaths.
[…]
According to Public Citizens Trade Watch, one out of every four manufacturing jobs have been lost due to trade agreements. Nearly five million manufacturing jobs have been lost since NAFTA.
Once thriving communities are shriveling, jobs are evaporating, and now, middle aged white people are actually starting to die younger. Desperation has taken hold across our country — but our leaders have been indifferent. Why?
The elites in our country cannot understand life as one of the working class. The Democratic and Republican parties, our corporate media, the Fortune 500, college students raised in economically-segregated suburbs, urban professionals gentrifying city neighborhoods nationwide, households earning over $109,918/year (the top income quintile as of 2016) — all are unmindful to the lived experiences of the masses and thus all fail to promote the general Welfare. I’ve alluded to this throughout, but it bears explicit rendering at this point: there are those in the meritocracy, and there are those stuck in neutral or going in reverse. And those taking part in the climb to the top almost cannot fathom what the struggle is like — and how painful the status quo — for those left stranded on the bottom rungs.
My generation is particularly prone to this sociocivic illiteracy. I grew up in a well-off New Jersey suburb and attended Boston University. My former high school and college classmates were dumbstruck at Trump’s rise (one Facebook post following Trump’s victory in the Massachusetts primary: “If you are one of the 310,993 people in Massachusetts who voted for Trump yesterday… explain?”). But think of the messages getting through to people not living in those realms.
You tell working class white guys in small-town Michigan or Pennsylvania that they have ‘privilege’ and they need to surrender it to allow others to succeed. And they look around at their dying communities, and how they are struggling to find decent, dignified work in a town they’ve lived all their lives and they say fuck you. So, instead of empathizing with the plight of our fellow citizens, like supporting a legislative agenda that would have a material impact on their lives (while simultaneously explaining how it’s not people of color but the rich who are responsible for their problems), you adopt the same position as the liberally-minded of the preceding generation: you call them ignorant rubes and laugh at them for allowing the world to pass them by (You’re smart, you didn’t let the world pass you by. You went to college and got a nice job with a digital marketing firm. Is it so hard for them to do the same?) and try to shame them for even considering a vote for Trump, cause c’mon, he’s a sick joke of a candidate. His words, his actions — they are deplorable. And you completely miss the point.
This is not to excuse bigotry or to forget that White America has denied non-whites equal rights and equal opportunities for generations. It is to recognize that you’re not going to convince the average white man from small-town Ohio that it’s his fault black and brown people are being oppressed. You might convince his daughter if she goes to a liberal arts school and learns about the historical reality, but you’ll never be able to make that argument and win with her parents. And the reason is simple: while the American socioeconomic system screws over black and brown people, it also increasingly screws over working class white people. Obviously not as much as people of color (traffic stops involving white people almost never end in a summary execution), but that relative difference doesn’t mean shit to the former factory worker now working in McDonalds or Walmart. And guess what? If our leaders actually were to take steps to redress the economic grievances of suffering white citizens, the latent cultural grievances wouldn’t matter. You don’t vote for the guy vowing to deport 11 million people if you have a good, well-paying job in a town that is flourishing.
Emma Lindsey had this to say in a Medium piece back in March:
We must find ways for the working class to maintain its dignity, we must find a way for them to have jobs that are satisfying to them, we must find a way for them to contribute to culture. We must find a way for them to feel heard. Which, by the way, are the exact same goals we need to have for oppressed races. We all need the same thing, and until we find a way to give it to more people, we will fight each other for it.
The left cannot win elections without first yielding to this truth.
5. People are rejecting the underlying logic of a global establishment and the interests of accommodating elites worldwide.
First there were the rising fortunes of nationalist anti-immigrant parties throughout Europe. In May, the Philippines elected “the Trump of the East”. Then came Brexit. Now, it is our turn. What we are witnessing is a populist revolt against globalization and the neoliberal world order — a world order crafted and curated by the powers that be since the end of World War II.
Globalism, if done right, is a beautiful thing, as well as a necessity if we want to prevent humanity from destroying itself. Indeed, the world today is more peaceful, more prosperous, more free than it was in 1945. But it is still, first and foremost, a world ruled in the interests of multinational conglomerates with the backing of colluding intranational and international institutions that tout the benefits of unbridled free trade and cosmopolitanism. So as globalism marches forward, millions of people are being left behind. And those people are fed up with a declining standard of living and erosion of national identity.
Alongside this revolutionary upheaval, the last century has seen Western capitalism carry out the slow but steady delegitimization of left-wing populism (in any shape or form) as communistic, and thus anathema to economic growth and liberal democracy and the promise of modernity. In such a political climate, what options do the disaffected and the dispossessed then have? Populism stemming from the right. We thus may be seeing the beginning of the end of the neoliberal world order, as people lose faith in internationalism and retreat back into tribalism. Each nation, each people now out for themselves. Distrust of The Other will multiply as authoritarians sprout up around the globe promising to resurrect and protect some essential dying thing.
Even, and especially, in the United States of America, where we foolishly believed our society had evolved beyond such backwards notions. Where no one would ever seriously propose we maintain a database to monitor citizens based on their religion.
To many, myself included, this is tragic. The hysterical astonishment felt by many in response to this turn of events, though, is pitifully nescient. I understand the reaction, but I nonetheless condemn it, because it is the product of a presumptuous self-deception: the world was destined to be like it now is and all are happy with this. We have forgotten that in America, every extension of rights to the second-class citizen, every expanding definition of the American identity, every addition of ingredients to the melting pot, came about through struggle. And now, in our own enlightened and benighted age, the struggle continues. We must thus sober up and take the long view, perhaps best found in the post-election words of Jon Stewart:
What many would say, what makes us great is America is an anomaly in the world. There are a lot of people, and I think [Trump’s] candidacy has animated that thought, that a multi-ethnic democracy, a multicultural democracy is impossible. And that is what America by its founding and constitutionally is.
[…]
This is the fight we wage against ourselves and each other. Because America is not natural. Natural is tribal. We’re fighting against thousands of years of human behavior and history to create something that no one’s ever done. That’s what’s exceptional about America. [Nobody else has done this]. This ain’t easy.
Appendix C: Further Reading.
Below are a handful of articles that, while not quoted directly in this piece, informed its composition.
