America’s Reality Climate Change Issue
As we plunge into a Donald Trump presidency — and compassion grows so paramount — one of the most important Two America Stories will (continue to) be Abstract America versus Immediate America. Ubiquitous connectivity smashes these two apertures together leaving either believing the other “doesn’t get it,” that “they’re living in a bubble.” Would stricter gun laws make your community safer or take away a basic freedom? Is a factory closing a consequence of globalization or the reason you don’t have a job? Does the idea of higher taxes feel like an enlightened way to achieve equality or really stressful? Why does one legal police shooting cause you to ignore the rest? How do you know someone “doesn’t want that job anyway”? All of us oscillate between Abstract and Immediate and of course everyone’s living in some sort of bubble. That’s how reality works.
But we shouldn’t mistake “not relevant to my life” for stupidity or arrogance. Chalking this election up to racists, or that in the Age of Digital Narcissism of course the top autofellatiator became boss — that’s fitting a convenient narrative. So many now-stunned progressives — myself 💯 included — couldn’t draw a line on a graph simply because it felt cognitively-impossible to vote for Trump. Even with the last two decades of ever-increasing vocalizations from a disillusioned white working class, the interpretation was usually compassionless: America’s overall tide is rising and only a racist asshole could feel otherwise.
But sixty-two million people didn’t vote for Trump because they don’t like not-white people. I had a long conversation with an excited heavily-accented Indian cab driver about how Trump would get us out of deals abroad where the United States is giving but not receiving. Messages resonate differently with people. Some racists do love Trump of course. They’re acting out now and those of us perched in white privilege — especially if you check male hetero — should always step in and remind someone that of-fucking-course they belong here. The darkest places in hell…. But applying bigot-misogynist brushstrokes across sixty-two million people––as much as it may feel accurate, cathartic even––will only widen the gap between Two Americas further.
“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression” sure sounds catchy — but you don’t know me.
As J.D. Vance points out, the only 100%-acceptable racist slur in the United States is “white trash.” But that dismissal — and The Institution of Thinking behind it — festers with the same implications as any other racial epithet. I don’t know you but you’re the worst. And people will often deploy an egregious act of cognitive dissonance when they tell someone to be PC. Watch yourself, yokel. Note how many Trump supporters added “deplorables” to their Twitter bios in solidarity. Combine that with Democrats abandoning unions and embracing global trade full-throat — the Clintons most especially — and it starts to make sense how someone who genuinely does have plenty of not-white friends could pull the lever for Trump.
I voted for the guy who made me feel important and you’re calling me a racist?
Stories about promised jobs that never materialize or gutted towns can feel like abstractions without obvious cause in the same way climate deniers may shrug about another vanishing iceberg––Plenty more––or believe the planet’s not getting hotter because today was cold. It doesn’t feel like a problem even if makes another immediate point on an unsettling but abstract graph. The Decimated Factory Town headline doesn’t generate clicks — What more can you say? — and if you’re thinking white people’s problems have had enough press over the last two hundred years, that’s obviously not wrong but that’s moving the discussion to Abstract America. Well, actually. Education and perspective can form a sort of listening kryptonite, leaving people discussing The Water Cycle not the person drowning in the flood.
I didn’t cause history. This is just me.
Sure, stopping economic tides is like trying to stop the actual tides, education is imperative in These Changing Times — but that’s basking in Abstract America. Talking to feel smart, or repeating what you already know, as a wise dude once noted. Not only can education become listening kryptonite but it also creates a genuine opiate of smugness. Let me sit back until I get proved right. Trump’s alienated all but the dregs of his own party to the point Ted Nugent could be Secretary of State. There hasn’t been a picture since the election where Trump doesn’t appear, and I mean this in the base-neurological sense, stunned. From day one he’s obviously — and in a roundabout way, proudly — never had An Actual Plan to make anyone’s version of America great again. (But his own. Trump TV’s sounding pretty great right now.)
Wait until these people realize they’ve been conned.
Enter: nausea. Say a couple years go by and life in hard-times America hasn’t actually improved, Trump didn’t “double America’s output” as he Typical Politician Promised during his acceptance speech. His supporters start saying WTF. When Trump feels squeezed, what’s he do? Blame everyone else. Stokes fires about The Other and assures everyone he’s the Iron Fist, his bread and butter. Would it even be slightly out of character for him to tweetstorm that Congress can’t get good deals done and America would be better off leaving progress to his whim? Everyone agrees Congress is the worst. The Donald will fix things. With zero evidence he inflamed fear about the legitimacy of the democratic process. What’s to say he doesn’t start doing the same with the lawmaking process? Everyone loves the Constitution until it feels annoying.
Operating the coming years under the premise that the United States has a bulletproof system of government is to say it’s the first in the history of Earth. Laws are only agreements. And as Andrew Sullivan laid out earlier this year with such prescient detail that by the end of the piece you’ll feel like there’s a murderer in your house, democracies are the best breeding ground for dictatorships. Plato saw it and accordingly the founding fathers instituted buffers like the electoral college and staggered terms for senators and house members.
“What mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness.” Or: Immediate versus the Abstract.
Maybe Trump will preside over a suddenly-flourishing rural America, the bottom drops out of The Other and everyone’s happy again. Maybe the prosperity of the last seven years will naturally diffuse to the heartland in ways we didn’t expect — let’s really hope so. And maybe heartland America doesn’t flourish under Trump, he can’t strongarm jobs back into small towns and he gets voted out of office. In four years we’re going to have a larger, more angry and disillusioned group of people looking for help from DC. With 320 million versions of American life, using history and statistics to define any of them will only heat things up further.
