Handling the "Deplorables"
Those of us who would like to think we are intelligent, sane, kind and democratically-oriented continue to throw shade at Donald Trump, who is none of these things, and who, in a less fascistically-inclined country, couldn’t be elected dogcatcher, much less president. (Voters might worry that he would put Kristi Noem in charge of the pound.) But as I have insisted since Trump’s 2016 election, he is not the real source of our dread. The real source are the Americans, nearly half the voting public, who support him, who cheer his racism, his nativism, his misogyny, his homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and amorality, who believe he won an election he lost because he says he won, who buy his bloviation and lies, his spite, his grandiosity (“I will be your retribution!’) and pomposity, who encourage his destruction of our political norms and cheer his anti-democratic tirades, and who worship him as a god come to save them from the changes they so despise in the country they so claim to love. They are the ones who keep me up at night. They are the toxin in the body politic. Trump is their avatar – their fulfillment. He fuels their animus, but they fuel his too. For fifty years, Republicans have been promising a retreat from social and racial progress that their cohort desired but on which Republicans did not deliver. Trump answered. Trump milked their resentments. He is the monster. But they created him.
This is not easy to say because while Trump will eventually vanish from the political scene – leaving awful destruction in his wake – these fellow Americans of ours will not. This is not easy to say because saying so condemns a significant portion of the country, though, thankfully, I believe, not the majority. This is not easy to say because it cements in place a huge and possibly unbridgeable divide in the nation that only contributes to a dangerous sense of hopelessness – a permanent civil war. This is not easy to say because that division is not essentially political or even cultural, though it is both; essentially, however, it is moral – a country cleaved into two radically different moral systems: one that embraces a thief, a cheat, a liar, a rapist, a criminal, a divider, a narcissist and psychopath, a Hitler admirer, a would-be dictator and a hater; and one that is dedicated to decency, compassion, community, kindness and virtue.
This is not easy to say because virtue may lose.
And this is not easy to say because those in politics and in the media are well-schooled not to lay blame on these celebrants of hate and authoritarianism for fear of offending those folks and, I suppose, if one were being more charitable, of further widening the national gap. Barack Obama ventured that way in 2008, saying of residents of small towns that “they get bitter, they cling to guns and religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” though he prefaced this, sympathetically, by saying that they felt this way because so many promises made to them had been broken. Hillary Clinton made similar comments, less sympathetically, during the 2016 campaign, when she told a fundraiser, “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, Islamaphobic—you name it. And, unfortunately, there are people like that. And he [Trump] has lifted them up.” But she was only talking about half his supporters. She made a point of saying, as Obama had, that the other half felt “let down” and that “we have to understand and empathize with [them] as well.” Nevertheless, she drew a cascade of criticism. “Deplorables” was branded on her – a scarlet D, along with a scarlet E for elitism.
It is one thing for a politician appealing for votes to deride those supporting his or her opponent. Clinton’s description may very well have been on the money, but her saying so was foolish if she hoped to win even a smattering of those Trump supporters to her side, which seems to be part of the job. Those of us who are regular citizens, however, are in a different position. We aren’t appealing for votes. We don’t need to soft-peddle our distaste for those who kneel at Trump’s altar. We don’t need to see them as good folks with just another way of looking at things. We can see them as the threat they are. But unless we intend to relocate to another country, we will be living with these people who detest us – and, for many of us, we them – and lest we continue that civil war by cutting them off or shaming them, we either attempt to change their minds, or share their pain, or effect a truce, or learn some other modus vivendi for dealing with people who hold a dagger at democracy’s throat. And that’s a problem. How do we live with people we fear and at whom we cannot help but feel anger because they imperil everything good about this country? How do we?
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Faced with roughly the same conundrum, we know how the liberal press has responded to them. The lesson we have learned over the past eight years is that you can bash Trump all you want, but woe unto anyone who dares bash his crazed supporters – even though they, not just Republican lackeys, are, as I said, his real facilitators and our real terror. Indeed, the mainstream media are at pains to express their sympathy for those supporters – to buy into their self-pity and overwrought sense of victimization (in one poll, 55% of whites thought they were discriminated against), their pain at seeing white supremacy finally being eroded by demographic change, their alleged economic hardship, their grievance that the government seems indifferent toward them, and, perhaps most of all, their feeling of being condescended to by a group other Americans whom they label “liberal,” which is their highest form of derision. They return the alleged derision with as much hate as I think we have ever seen in American politics. They want to “own” us.
The oddity over this grievance of condescension is that no group in America may be more valorized and even romanticized by the press, including and especially the liberal press, than working-class white males, more so if they live in rural areas where they may be valorized and romanticized as farmers and men of the earth. Their hardships are amplified, their complaints are analyzed and verified (if they vent about inflation, then the press challenges the statistics that show inflation abating and insist the data do not capture the on-the-ground agony of these folks), their racism and sexism and nativism and anti-democratic impulses all excused. When a recent book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, described how white males in rural America held some of the most heinous anti-democratic opinions and were even willing to act upon them violently – the book called them the greatest threat to democracy - The Atlantic, no less, leapt to their defense in a head-scratching article the gist of which was that the authors had misidentified some areas as rural, while the critique largely ignored the book’s fundamental argument: that in rural areas (and, yes, in many suburban and urban areas) white men pose real dangers to our democracy because they have forsaken basic democratic beliefs. The Atlantic did not, could not, refute that nearly every rural county in America voted overwhelmingly for Trump and that people there believe his lies, to the nation’s detriment.
Still, the media will keep descending on small-town diners, invariably Midwestern or Southern, to get the pulse of real Americans, one of the truly lazy acts of political journalism, and one that will continue to normalize Trumpistas. We – I – talk a lot about how the media normalize Trump. We talk less about how they normalize his supporters, who are no more in the American mainstream than he is.
This process of excusing the extremism of Trump supporters and normalizing their hatreds is even more malignant because it comes at the expense of Americans who are no less real than rural white males and probably a lot more real, and of whom there are a whole lot more. And many of them are democracy’s defenders. It apparently has yet to occur to Republicans or to journalists that this is not a white, blue-collar, conservative, rural, Trump-loving nation. It is predominantly a white-collar, moderate, urban, Trump-skeptical nation – 80% urban – though you would never know it from our political coverage. And even the “white” label is in decline, which is one reason why white men are so exercised about the nation’s direction. In any case, the media’s efforts at appeasement haven’t reformed the Trumpistas or made them any less hostile to the media. It only encourages them. For all the media’s obsequiousness to real people, the press is still their enemy.
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It would be easier for the rest of us if we didn’t see those Trumpistas as deplorable, but simply as misguided – good people who lost their way and whom we might redirect. (My own neighbor hoisted a huge Trump flag and only recently took it down, and though we never had any words about it, that was only because we generally don’t speak about most things. Frankly, I am afraid to.) We know from survey data that most Trump supporters live within the right-wing echo chamber of Fox News and conservative talk radio and that, in a New York Times poll, 100% of Republicans who got their news primarily from Fox News intended to vote for Trump. We know that they are badly misinformed. (Polling found that conservatives are much more likely to fall for false news, and don’t forget those 17% of swing state voters who believe that Joe Biden is responsible for the Dobbs decision.) We know that they are masochistic – that they hate the government, even though they receive vastly more in federal funds than they pay in taxes; that they live in red states where education is underfunded and health outcomes are poorer than in blue states and where governors refused to accept Medicaid expansion, even though, under the Affordable Care Act, the expansion is largely funded by the federal government; we know that when Hillary Clinton in 2016 announced a program specifically to help rural America, they still preferred Trump, who did absolutely nothing for them; and that while Joe Biden has boosted manufacturing jobs and has poured money into Republican rural areas, he will receive no benefit from those voters; and we know that Democrats are anathema to them. These aren’t necessarily signs of evil, only stupidity that Republicans have encouraged for decades.
But there is a point when ignorance and misinformation and masochism and even mental derangement, all of which we can abide without making accusations of deplorability, interface with cruelty, which is deplorable. In his book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, Jonathan Metzl tells the story of a 41 year-old cabbie named Trevor, living outside Nashville, who could no longer work after a life of drugs and drinking and now is suffering from jaundice and forced to use a walker. But Trevor didn’t hold it against Tennessee Republicans for blocking the ACA in his state, which would have provided insurance for him. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it,” he said. “We don’t need any more government in our lives.” That was his prerogative, of course. But then he added this: “And in any case, I don’t want my tax dollars [he wasn’t working so there were no tax dollars] paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.” In short, he was willing to forego his own health in order to deny other people who might be ill their health care. There is a name for this: cruelty. In political terms, there is another name: conservatism.
How great is their aversion to anything Democratic, even if it is in their own self-interest? Very great. In a Kaiser Family Foundation survey of Republicans on health care cited in White Rural Rage, they supported every plank of the Affordable Care Act but one. . .until those planks were identified as “Obamacare.” Then support vanished. In another poll issued earlier this month, a left-wing consortium called the Rural Democracy Initiative challenged the White Rural Rage thesis that most rural voters were right-wing extremists. They found that rural voters were overwhelmingly in favor of a “pro-worker, inside-out” economic approach like the one that Democrats support, but if “Democrat” was attached to these policies, they demurred. And when it came to asking for their voting preferences, they were even more overwhelmingly pro-Trump than overwhelmingly pro-worker.
This would just be another example of tribal politics were Democrats not identified so closely with minorities and immigrants and women and other marginalized groups. What converts these positions into moral issues is that Democrats are closely identified with helping those who need help. It is practically the definition of modern liberalism. When you add the blatant racism of Trump’s supporters (racism, as we know, is one of the greatest indicators of Trump support), their naked nativism (polls show they want deportations and detention camps), their homophobia and transphobia, their attitude towards women, their giddy trashing of all moral decency, there doesn’t seem any space for a truce or a bond or a modus vivendi. Trump himself celebrated Memorial Day last weekend by calling his opponents “human scum.”
And this is where the argument about “good-hearted” Trump voters fails, in my mind. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni recently counseled that we reach out to Trumpistas, that we respect them, that we show humility toward them, and he quotes Evan Wolfson, the founder of an advocacy group for gay marriage, “People don’t like being accused, people don’t like being condemned, people don’t like being alienated.” Granted. And I wouldn’t necessarily counsel otherwise. But what if they deserve to be accused, condemned, alienated, and even shamed? Do we really want to indulge them?
By this point, anyone who is sentient knows who Donald Trump is, what Donald Trump believes, what Donald Trump promises to do, which means that anyone who votes for him is a confederate of his. If, as political historian and strategist Kevin Phillips said, the “whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who [sic],” we know exactly who Donald Trump hates, and it is not only Blacks and women and immigrants and Muslims and gays and a host of others who may have done something to offend his majesty; it is also us. Let me be blunt, perhaps overly blunt for some of you: Good-hearted people do not support bad-hearted men. If you support Donald Trump, who threatens our democracy more than any single figure in our history, you are deplorable, plain and simple. Nothing else his supporters can say or do negates that.
So, no, I am not inclined to reach out to Trumpistas in the hope that we might find some common ground. Our moralities are too different. But that is not because I feel morally superior to them, though most of us, the majority of us, are. It is largely because it would be futile anyway. As Times guest columnist Thomas Edsall reported recently, study after study shows that there really is no common political ground between sides in America because “partisan antipathy has become too deeply entrenched and increasingly resistant to amelioration.” Interventions proved ineffective. One political scientist told Edsall, “You can correct a lie told by Donald Trump and people will believe the new correct information, but that won’t change their feelings about Trump at all.” In other words, it won’t change their hearts, which is the real source of our politics. Another told Edsall that even when you achieved some result in reducing polarization, the “positive effects are almost immediately nullified by the hostile language in contemporary politics,” meaning, of course, Donald Trump.
And where does that leave us, exactly? It leaves us taking every opportunity that avails itself to talk to those opponents of ours and of democracy, even empathize when one can, without being foolish enough to think that it will have much effect on them. It leaves us talking to the “persuadables,” people who are not in thrall to Trump but have not yet opted to vote for Biden, and convincing them that democracy and morality are both on the ballot this November, and that they must choose for them or against them. And it leaves us girded with these small comforts: that we have morality on our side and that there are more of us than there are of them. Virtue has saved this nation in the past. We are now the bearers of that virtue, and we must fight like hell.
Notes
https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2008/04/obama-on-small-town-pa-clinging-to-religion-guns-xenophobia-007737
https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/
Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. NY: Random House, 2024.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/white-rural-rage-criticisml/677967/
https://time.com/4996106/discrimination-white-people-survey-poll/talk
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/08/five-facts-about-fox-news/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/upshot/abortion-biden-trump-blame.html
Jonathan Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. NY: Basic Books, 2019.
Schaller and Waldman, 49-50.
https://ruraldemocracyinitiative.org/news/rural-poll-results/
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/racist-republicans-donald-trump/
https://www.wpr.org/news/voter-opinions-immigration-deportation-republicans-marquette-poll
Frank Bruni, “The Most Important Thing I Teach My Students Isn’t on the Syllabus,” NYT, April 20, 2024.
Thomas Edsall, “Why Losing Political Power Feels Like `Losing Your Country,” NYT, April 24, 2024.
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