“Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here’s why”
“It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.
Trump embellished this vision with another favorite leftwing idea: under his leadership, the government would “start competitive bidding in the drug industry”…I have no special reason to doubt the suspicion that Donald Trump is a racist. Either he is one, or (as the comedian John Oliver puts it) he is pretending to be one, which amounts to the same thing.But there is another way to interpret the Trump phenomenon. A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington’s free-market consensus have brought the rest of America…
Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.”
In the early part of his campaign, I resolved not to click on — and definitely not to share — articles about Trump, because I didn’t believe in his candidacy and I thought he was just hijacking the election coverage to gain publicity for himself. And there has been a lot of conversation about whether or not the huge free publicity from new coverage did end up ballooning his campaign.
But now, this is obviously a story of our times, this is about way way more than Donald Trump, this is something that needs to be paid attention to and understood.
This is my urban-coastalism (which I don’t think was dented by my time living in Chicago) being brought into relief as I watch groups of people that don’t traditionally hold power finally find this powerful mainstream voice.
I am reading these kinds of articles on “who are these people?” and I feel shame because all of my news sources are suddenly realizing that they exist, and I am suddenly realizing that they exist, and they have been suffering from American policy decisions and unequal distributions of power and invisibilization and they were not on my radar.
