Frank Freeman writes: I want to say to Trump supporters: ‘I’m sorry, but I won’t vote for a man who mocks handicapped people, who calls dead veterans “suckers and losers”, who says if you’re rich and famous you can sexually assault women and they won’t do anything about it, who sleeps with a porn star the night his wife is giving birth to their son, who incites violence at his rallies, who threatens to lock up his political opponents for the crime of opposing him, who is a big crybaby, whiner and sore loser, so fragile and such a wimp that he can’t admit losing, who sucks up to dictators and admires “Hitler’s generals” (presumably not the ones who tried to assassinate him), who brags about not paying taxes and who wants to bring back the concentration camp.’
But his supporters know all this: they know these things and yet support him. I suppose some of them believe it’s all slander, that the Deep State is out to get him and the liberal media makes this stuff up. Some (30 per cent) are true believers. They really believe all this, hook, line, and sinker. You can’t argue with them. They are all feeling and emotion, the main feeling being one of grievance, but also a lot of fear and a lot of racism and a desire to go back to the 1950s (when, in fact, corporate tax rates were way higher than now and helped pay for the Interstate Highway System). They really do want to make America white again. They believe all the conspiracy theories and that terrible things will happen if Harris is elected.
These are the ‘True Believer(s)’, as Eric Hoffer called them. I just retrieved my copy of his book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements: there are so many underlined passages I don’t know where to start. His argument is that these people are bored/poor/frustrated, and a ‘mass movement’, which Trumpism is, provides them with community and meaning. George Saunders described (in a New Yorker essay) a man he was standing beside at a Trump rally bowing his head, clenching his fists and pumping them up and down and saying, yes, yes, yes over and over again. This is atavistic, primal, raw emotion.
Here’s Hoffer on page 44 of True Believer: ‘A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole’ (italics mine).
In other words, the mass movement does nothing to help them, it just pretends to. They don’t have adequate manufacturing jobs or adequate healthcare or affordable housing, but they get to hate the others causing all this trouble and be together.
These are the people who the Democratic Party left behind with trade agreements such as NAFTA, which caused a reverse migration of businesses across the border to Mexico. Men (mostly) who were used to having well-paid manufacturing jobs lost them; their wages had been going down (in real inflation-adjusted terms) since the 1970s. Clinton and the Democrats decided young professionals were their new base and neo-liberalism was born. As a husband of a successful businesswoman and a bookkeeper of said business, I have to say it seems to me we have to have the freedom to do our business, to make our daily bread, but we also have to regulate our way to level playing fields. And, as Thomas Piketty said, tax billionaires out of existence.
My wife, when I or the kids suggest some social programme often says, ‘Who’s going to pay for it?’ I think it was in that spirit that Clinton and the Democrats wooed business and young professionals. They dropped the ball, however, on the other side of the equation: your capitalism needs to pay for your socialism. The Democrats, content with their success and riches, forgot about the poor and the working class. And to the latter it always seems that everybody else is getting a piece of the pie. On radio and TV they hear support for gay marriage, for trans rights, for abortion rights, the cultural issues which they are ridiculed for opposing. The ridicule is what gets their goat.
Being from Texas and my family having migrated westward from South Carolina through the deep south, I have often felt that the last type of person you could mock on TV or radio was the poor white southerner. The lampoons of John Oliver and Stephen Colbert, though accurate factually, alienate my people only deeper into Trump’s la-la land. Making fun of the Appalachian kid wearing nothing but overalls is not decent nor a winning political strategy.
I’m not saying I am as my paternal grandfather was. Elmore Franklin Freeman was a redneck welder who hated all shades of people not white. (But he was my grandpa and bought me corn dogs and animal crackers and I loved him.) But, the thing is, he had a good job at Brown and Root in Houston. If he had been younger, he might have been one of those left behind by the Democrats. The hatred and racism were still there though, and a lot of that was class-driven.
About the cultural issues, I am not sure what to say. I have come around to supporting gay marriage, trans rights, abortion rights, the rights of migrants. I have written in the Dublin Review of Books about my disillusionment with conservatism. Now I am a Democrat, something I never thought I’d be. Trump did it. I was an Independent (or Undeclared as they say here in Maine) but quickly declared Democrat when Trump got on his crazy train. I, who had been a William F Buckley, Russell Kirk conservative, said this is ludicrous and dangerous; I can’t be a part of this. And now I wonder if the recent book It Was All a Lie is true, and the movement I supported because of moral reasons (pro-life, law and order, fiscal restraint, discipline, integrity), was really racist and nationalist at its core, that all this concern about keeping traditional values was really, all along, a racist project just decked out in the robes of Greece and Rome (not to mention the liturgical robes of various churches). Where is the party I used to belong to? Where has it gone? Perhaps it was never there.
With Trump the scales fell from my eyes and I saw thinkers/politicians I had once respected (Roger Kimball, editor, founder of The New Criterion, Victor Davis Hanson, Rick Santorum, Marco Rubio) suddenly kowtowing to Fearless Leader Trump. What? The party of traditional values hitching their wagon to such an obvious charlatan, snake-oil salesman, bully and grifter? I don’t get it.
What happened was that Trump instinctively tapped into the simmering anger of poor uneducated whites who felt left behind (and sometimes ridiculed) by Democrats, and the others, (educated wealthy and/or under-the-surface racist whites) jumped on for the ride. Cardinal George Pell said Trump was a barbarian, ‘but he’s our barbarian’. Well said. Now what is anybody going to do about it? There is no Republican Party any more; it’s just Trump, the Boss, Big Brother, Fearless Leader etc. Whatever he says goes. The party of traditional values and civilisation has morphed into the party of barbarism and cruelty. What I can’t figure out is the thinking of those who support Trump but are not True Believers. The ones who are educated, have lucrative jobs, are upwardly mobile and the rest of it, who live in the suburbs and send their kids to university. What are they thinking? Don’t they have eyes to see? To me it seems they have struck a deal with the devil. We will support this barbarian because he will help us get what we want: the repeal of Roe v. Wade, prayer in schools, lower taxes, a border wall (to keep out all the Mexicans who mow our lawns and pick our fields and roof our houses?). They are saying something which, when I was a conservative, I thought was anathema, that the ends justifies the means.
I used to be what we called ‘pro-life’. I walked in a ‘pro-life’ rally and the only hatred I saw was from the people screaming at us from the Boston sidewalks. I prayed the rosary once or twice outside abortion clinics. But even then I would never have been able to approach a woman and tell her what to do. Could not, like the man I heard on the radio, yell out to a woman ‘Please don’t kill your baby!’ Now I think it’s simply none of my business. It’s between a woman and her doctor. My brother, an obstetrician/gynaecologist, believes abortion should be legal up to viability He asked me once ‘Should you let a baby be born whose heart is outside its chest?’
For me this is all very confusing and displacing, personally and politically. It feels like living in two different worlds: the world of everyday going to work, going to the grocery store, going to the pub, etc. the quotidian; and the world in our heads which consists of what we watch and read and listen to online. My neighbour is a Trump supporter. He is an avid hunter, which is not unusual in Maine, and we get along fine. We talk about work and family, and what’s going on in the neighborhood. But when we venture into politics, it’s as if we are from two different planets. He shoots down my arguments with his YouTube videos, which I see as bullshit conspiracy thinking; whatever I say is to him fake news or deep state bullshit, what ‘they’ want me to believe.
Why is this the case? Apart, that is, from the obvious fact of the omnipresence of the Internet and that algorithms drive our news feeds in the way we’re already leaning? It all changed in 2016. Before that year, whether I was conservative or independent, I got in plenty of political discussions and sometimes things got heated but there was not the same rancour and venom as now, not the sense of an unbridgeable gulf between the two sides. Everything changed here, in America at least, because of one man, Donald Trump. He sows division and hatred, he polarises. I told a family member this (a family member who supports Trump but is not a True Believer) and he hemmed and hawed but did not outright deny it. Trump is the reason, that in America when you’re at a party everyone will refrain from talking politics until it’s clear, by various conversational clues, what the person you’re talking to thinks.
If Trump has any positive qualities one might be that despite the continuous stream of lies he tells, he does once in a while tell a home truth, something obvious but which no one else will say. The one I remember was in a Republican primary debate when he said because he was rich he didn’t have to suck up to the drug companies like Jeb Bush did because Jeb had taken big donations from pharmaceutical companies – which left Jeb sputtering.
But as we’ve seen recently with the abortion issue, he is protean: he has no principles except the lust for power. Whether this makes him more or less dangerous, I don’t know. He does not seem to want to use non-Aryan races as slave labourers, for instance. However, he appears to want to herd millions of immigrants into detention camps. But will he really? Who would pay for it? Is he just saying this to, in John McCain’s phrase, to ‘fire up the crazies’?
Sometimes, thinking about our politics, I wonder: didn’t these Trump supporters watch those old movies about World War Two? Don’t they remember the part about the Nazis being the bad guys? Don’t they see the similarities between their ideology and that of the Nazis? Perhaps we have let our guard down. Perhaps we thought (I know I did) it could never happen here. Because this was America. I remember fondly a scene from the movie The Americanization of Emily when Englishwoman Emily makes a snide remark to her American lover and he responds: ‘You Europeans think you are superior to us Americans but here we are fighting for you (World War Two) and we never came up with a Stalin, a Hitler or a Mussolini. Well, we can’t quite say that anymore, though Trump reminds me more of Mussolini than Hitler.
I remember the feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach when I turned on my car radio on the afternoon of January 6th, 2021 and heard news of the riot at the Capitol. It was so hard to believe. To take in. I kept shaking my head and saying, ‘What?’ What was the matter with these people? Bill Barr, whom I’m not very fond of, who says Trump is unfit to hold office, but will nevertheless vote for him (because Democrats are so evil? Because more gay people will marry? Because more women be able to make their own healthcare choices? Because more drag queens will read stories at the local library?), even Bill Barr said there was not enough fraud to change the election outcome and that Trump’s lawyers were ‘clowns’. Bye bye Bill.
I want to tell Trump supporters that if he wins, the economy will tank. Which will be bad for all of us. Our economy runs on our immigrant population. I am hoping that Harris will win and that Trump won’t be able to get into power through the connivance of the House of Representatives and/or the Supreme Court. And if I’m disappointed in that hope I hope that President Trump will not do half of what he promises to do because of the courts or societal revolt – I, for one, will be ready to man the barricades – or because he over-promised and did not mean half of it.
I do not like living in ‘interesting times’.
2/11/2024
