Trump and the Poisonous Carrot
From The Atlantic: “Of all the overlapping generational, racial, and educational divides that explained Trump’s stunning upset over Hillary Clinton last week, none proved more powerful than the distance between the Democrats’ continued dominance of the largest metropolitan areas, and the stampede toward the GOP almost everywhere else.
Trump’s victory was an empire-strikes-back moment for all the places and voters that feel left behind in an increasingly diverse, post-industrial, and urbanized America.”
I go to the Pew Research Center from time to time, for, y’know, research data — but also just because I’m low-key into trending. I’m also into the unsaid (or little said) things, and why we don’t like to say them when there’s supporting data.
From the Pew Research Center:
“In the 2016 election, a wide gap in presidential preferences emerged between those with and without a college degree. College graduates backed Clinton by a 9-point margin (52%-43%), while those without a college degree backed Trump 52%-44%. This is by far the widest gap in support among college graduates and non-college graduates in exit polls dating back to 1980. For example, in 2012, there was hardly any difference between the two groups: College graduates backed Obama over Romney by 50%-48%, and those without a college degree also supported Obama 51%-47%.
Among whites, Trump won an overwhelming share of those without a college degree; and among white college graduates — a group that many identified as key for a potential Clinton victory — Trump outperformed Clinton by a narrow 4-point margin.
Trump’s margin among whites without a college degree is the largest among any candidate in exit polls since 1980. Two-thirds (67%) of non-college whites backed Trump, compared with just 28% who supported Clinton, resulting in a 39-point advantage for Trump among this group.
[Due] largely to the dramatic movement among whites with no college degree, the gap between college and non-college whites is wider in 2016 than in any past election dating to 1980.”
This isn’t at all to bash white men without degrees or directly question their intelligence — many of them are wildly successful. (Although I’m trying to finish school myself, I’ve fashioned a pretty interesting life, traveled extensively, and I’m in the course of this, my second career as an improving hack.) This said, the targeted voter discussed here, and in a multitude of “we should’ve seen the signs” and “I told you so” think pieces, these particular rural whites without college degrees without pedigree or world-shifting tech ideas, are in dire need — of economic opportunity, and apparently respect. As previously noted above, whites with degrees, especially white males, also provided Trump with a slight edge over Clinton.
The problem, relating to rural voters, is that barring some breakthrough to wartime effort, suddenly requiring millions in raw man power, the economic opportunities aren’t coming. Trump’s sales pitch contained racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic rhetoric. Poor and middle class rural (even some city living) whites have been voting conservative, predictably against their own interests for decades — to the point where its almost a running joke. Given that even educated whites chose Trump, basically excusing deep character flaws, for political abstraction, it’s clear economics and policy placed below supremacy in the hierarchy of needs. With Trump (again) predictably walking back his program right into the cronyism he campaigned against and supposedly despised, only a fool would’ve taken him for his word — or a desperate person.
In Donald Glover’s amazing FX show, Atlanta, his character, Earn, needs the money from selling his cell phone, and would like even more. After going through hoops to increase the payout, he tells his friend (paraphrasing) that poor people are just trying to not be poor. In more existential terms, poor people are always trying to shake “poor” off of them. These rural whites know jobs aren’t coming back, that there’s virtually no way forward for positive economic prospectives, with automation, new educational requirements, and jobs being shipped overseas. In other words, capitalism is working, and for the first time — at least as a collective voice — they are signaling acknowledgment that there is no need for the rural white, that their privilege is losing value, and that this new-ish world order has squeezed them with a vice grip of diversity they don’t understand.
Moreover, Trump dog-whistled their demise into an emotional and psychological appeal to a white restoration that isn’t coming. This white poor and middle class isn’t just shrinking, the world in and around it is darkening. In just a few decades, non-white Hispanics/Latinos will be the dominant ethnic group, with hyper-growth in those identifying as mixed race, and Middle East migration up 20% in North America (from 2005–2015.) For all intents and purposes, the rest of the world is closing in on their own. Even more, they can feel it — which is where the veritable data gets converted into irrational fear via the likes of Trump and Steven Bannon. People of color, especially blacks and Hispanics/Latinos (specifically Mexicans/Central Americans) are being told they have to work for everything, no handouts, etcetera. Now, a number of these name-callers (in all classes) want their leaders to provide things that are never coming back — like industrial and farming — while blaming everyone other than wealthy white people — one of which they’ve just elected — who have sucked their livelihoods dry.
There’s a reason many whites (but not all) were able to accept overt racism and misogyny. There’s also something lying just below the surface, subtext that dates back to America’s inception that catered directly to the wishes of wealthy white men. Throughout America’s rise — directly attributed to America’s insidious brand of chattel slavery — these middle and poor white males where America’s middle men, buffering pawns for wealthy white males to utilize for social and economic control. Along with these fluid privileges, came an iron-clad condition: the requirement of solidarity in whiteness with the wealthy, regardless of their own well-being, regardless of the fact they have more in common with the disenfranchised. Never of the first order in their wealthy rulers eyes, these white males have acted as slave-plus, the controlled controllers. This off-balance exchange presented these particular white males (and the women that love them) with a perceived racial inheritance, a rotten, poisonous carrot Trump dangled in front of his needy electorate.
For this inheritance, many whites have wholly mortgaged their futures and those of the most vulnerable, ripping the needles from their moral compasses because “we need a change.” There’s an attached arrogance that’s sort of floating around, that suggests rural Americans deserve something, as if they’ve been discriminated against — though this could be some whites in all areas/tax brackets, some of which do believe this. There’s a deafness all around, by us and them, for which no one wants to speak, regarding this perceived inheritance. Look around, here, Europe and Russia — endangerment of the white male (and his voting, self-hating sympathizers) literally means endangerment for mankind and its environment.
As Michael Moore (and some others, like Van Jones) foretold: “There were warning signs, but we ignored them. Nixon, the gender traitor, imposing Title IX on us, the rule that said girls in school should get an equal chance at playing sports. Then, they let them fly commercial jets. Before we knew it, Beyoncé stormed on the field at this year’s Super Bowl (our game!) with an army of Black Women, fists raised, declaring that our domination was hereby terminated! Oh, the humanity!
That’s a small peek into the mind of the Endangered White Male. There is a sense that the power has slipped out of their hands, that their way of doing things is no longer how things are done. This monster, the “Feminazi,”the thing that as Trump says, “bleeds through her eyes or wherever she bleeds,” has conquered us — and now, after having had to endure eight years of a black man telling us what to do, we’re supposed to just sit back and take eight years of a woman bossing us around? After that it’ll be eight years of the gays in the White House! Then the transgenders! You can see where this is going. By then animals will have been granted human rights and a fuckin’ hamster is going to be running the country. This has to stop!”
Except it’s not, and there’s not much four (likely hellacious) years of a dysfunctional, racist, gay and woman hating administration is going to be able to do about that.— K.S.
