We’ve concluded the walking pilgrimage portion of our trip to Japan and are soon to head, by train, to the Hiroshima area. For part one, we were a group of 12, six from Australia and six from the U.S. We enjoyed the people in the group and feel a bit sad to have said goodbye to them. Along with our guides, we had bonded.
On our third day together one man in the group asked me about the support for Trump. He confessed himself baffled about the support for such an amoral and indecent person. I think he thought that I, as a minister, might know some Trump supporters, given the support for Trump among many evangelical Christians.
I said, “I’m pretty baffled about that too,” and went on to explain that my part of the Christian world was generally as vehemently anti-Trump as anyone. So I wasn’t much help to my new friend when it came to explaining how so many people could support this dangerous con-man.
But my hunch is that a lot of those who vote for Trump aren’t doing so just because they love him or have bought the con. Sure, there are those who are rabid, all-in Trumpers. But I suspect that many of the people I do know, as least casually, that are likely to vote for Trump (my sample being folks from rural, northeastern Oregon) do so for reasons other than Trump himself. Some may even be holding their noses while they cast their ballot for Trump.
For many their support may have more to do with distrust of the left and of the Democrats who have tilted further left under Biden than they expected. Their tilt to the Republicans has more to do with where they sit in our culture than it does with Trump himself.
Just before Labor Day David Brooks wrote a hypothetical column, dated November 6, on how Trump, pretty much despite himself and despite being a jerk, had managed to win.
In it, Brooks pointed to five “turbines of Trumpism” that powered his victory. It struck me as an insightful piece, perhaps prophetic. It also helped to explain to me, and might to my perplexed fellow traveler, how people could be supporting Trump. I suggest using the link above to read the whole piece. The five “turbines of Trumpism,” deeper causal drivers for GOP support, with a brief synopsis, are:
“People like the red model more than the blue model. The fastest-growing states by population are mostly governed by Republicans, including Florida, Texas, Idaho, and Montana. The fastest-shrinking or -stagnating states are mostly governed by Democrats, including New York, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania, and Hawaii. The red model gives you low housing costs, lower taxes, and business vitality. The blue model gives you high housing costs, high taxes and high inequality.”
“Democrats are the party of the ruling class. The most important divide in American life is the diploma divide. College-educated folks tend to vote for Democrats, and high-school-educated folks tend to vote for Republicans. Thus, the richest places tend to be Democratic. The Democrats dominate the media, the universities, the cultural institutions, and government. Even the big corporations, headquartered in places like New York and San Francisco, are trending blue.”
“Social and moral cohesion. Republicans can be rugged individualists when it comes to economics, but Democrats can be rugged individualists when it comes to morality. They are more likely to hew to a code of moral freedom that holds that individuals should be free to live by their own values. Individuals get to choose their own definition of when human life begins. Any form of family and social life is OK so long as the individuals within it give their consent. This is the privatization of morality.”
“General dissatisfaction. Kamala Harris practiced the politics of joy in this election, running a hope-filled and sunny campaign, as any incumbent party tries to do. But many Americans are not feeling it. As the fall general election campaign got unofficially underway after Labor Day, only 25 percent of Americans were satisfied with the direction of the country, according to Gallup, while 73 percent were dissatisfied. According to Ipsos, 59 percent of Americans said the country was in decline, 60 percent agreed with a series of statements conveying that ‘the system is broken,’ 69 percent agreed that the ‘political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people,’ and 63 percent agreed that ‘experts in this country don’t understand the lives of people like me.’”
“The Blue Bubble problem. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama lived in the shadow of Ronald Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s victories. Clinton and Obama both understood the Blue Bubble problem: If you spend your life listening to what Democrats in the big cities say to one another, then you will misunderstand America. Both Clinton and Obama took tough stances to show that they were not Blue Bubble natives: the crime bill, welfare reform, Obama’s stances on illegal immigration, gay marriage, and fossil fuels. Clinton triangulated and Obama talked about transcending left and right.”
Both my perplexed fellow traveler and I tend to look at and listen to Trump, shake our heads and say, “I don’t get it.” And we don’t. We live in blue bubbles. He in L. A., me in Seattle. And we are both pretty much part of the culture’s elite. As Brooks notes, “If you spend your life listening to what Democrats in the big cities say to one another, then you will misunderstand America.”
There’s also a tendency amongst many to think that because Trump is so appalling that anyone and everyone who supports him is also an appalling human. Probably not a good, or fair, assumption.
I devoutly hope that Brooks’s hypothetical Nov. 6 column is wrong about Trump’s electoral appeal, but I won’t be surprised if it isn’t.
David Brooks makes many valid points in his general theories of who suppports Trump in this replay of the Brooks column.
More instructive are the recent post VP debate interviews with “focus groups” of undecided voters. They were undecided going in but they had leanings. There were no true believers going in and none coming out. The notable and instructive result was that no leanings had changed. The Trump leaners all noted the candidates bad personality, his lying, and his abhorrent behavior. And yet they maintained their view of him as a better candidate because his policies, noting (and buying) “a better economy under Trump, and his tax cuts.
The absorptive depth of misinformation, even among “average” Americans is deeper than the center or the left often understand, much less the ability to explain to foreigners how so many Americans can support a flawed candidate.
This blue bubble resident appreciates and shares your position.
It is simpler than that Anthony. Bill Clinton was president during the 1990s when the Washington consensus was neo-liberalism, i.e. using the market forces to promote overall economic good. Neo-liberalism favored free-flow of capital and open markets for trade. We had NAFTA and other trade pacts.
And like the economists predicted, the overall wealth on society grew on average. What they got wrong though is that free-markets create winners and losers. Those who were fortunate to live in a place that benefited from neo-liberalism, primarily the coastal states saw their lives improve measurably.
The losers though were those mired in time and place that were not able to benefit because they didn’t have the skills or ability to move. The furniture factory in North Carolina. Cotton mill workers in Georgia. The myriad of small family owned manufacturers across the mid-West in places like Elkhart Indiana.
The financial crisis hits in 2008, and no one is punished. No banker, no politician. No one. People lost houses, lost savings, lost jobs. Logically, who do you expect voters to blame when the cause of the crisis is identified as people who were “foolish enough to buy homes that they couldn’t afford” and the bankers ended up pocketing all the wealth that they got through financial shenanigans.
Finance reigns supreme as main street slowly shutters due to Amazon, Walmart, and FedEx. Farmers are placed under more financial pressure as conglomerates impose standardization and consolidate.
At the same time, the ills and sins of how we have treated Black Americans and other people of color were being addressed. Black Lives Matter.
Hillary Clinton’s and Democratic policy is “free college” for everyone.
And there is a large cohort of trades people and hourly workers who say, “What about me? My kid is never going to go to college. Why is no one talking about my problems?”
Democrats forgot about working people. And so when working people feel left out, it creates an opportunity for the nativists to fill the vacuum.
And then you get ubiquitous talk radio that echos the refrain, “They aren’t like us. They don’t understand us. All the Democrats want to do is give things to those people to get their votes.” Throw in some invectives like “Femi-Nazis” or “environmental wackos” to further create a feeling of “us” versus “them”.
The stage is set for a populist outsider to appeal to our base tribal instincts. If it wasn’t Trump, it would have been someone just like Trump. An outsider. Someone who says “Only I can fix it.”
Kamala Harris is a poseur! A careful review of her application for the position indicts that she is not qualified for the job.
1) her resume lacks breadth and depth of experience*
2) her temperament is uneven
3) lastly, she does not possess the requisite mental circuitry
* her extensive background in law enforcement would only be useful in the case where building a police state is the desired objective.
Really Ms Bienne? O hope your comment was a satire. But just in case.
1. Resume lacks breath and depth of experience. Four years as VP is the only job the US has that gives a person experience in becoming a President. Harry Truman in the shadow of FDR had an even thinner resume and turned out to be one of the best presidents.
2. Uneven temperament? Isn’t it the obvious. If anything her even temperament is gaining criticism for lack of passion and fighting spirit.
3. Mental circuitry? Beats me what that means. She’s been Attorney General of San Francisco, Attorney General of California, and a US Senator. All that lacking “mental circuitry”. Neat trick.
It’s simpler than that, too.
“The absorptive depth of misinformation, even among “average” Americans is deeper than the center or the left often understand”. That’s the story right there.
You can’t draw useful insights from people who have been fundamentally deceived.
Those are hypotheses for sure, but what you left out is if Kamala doesn’t win in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, it will show a disconnect between her and blue collar voters.
I searched this article for one word about abortion rights, an issue that has galvanized women. Nothing. I dumped it all into a Word doc and did a search on the word abortion. Nothing. Contraception. Nothing. Men repeatedly ignore the fact that this is an issue that has outraged women, of both parties. Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama championed women’s rights to have an abortion….including untenable ectopic pregnancies that would put the lives of women in danger.
I can’t understand why men commentators.. both .left and right-leaning…. try to pretend this issue doesn’t matter. It does. So when you repeat the trope that Democrats are the party of the elite ruling class, I wonder if you have any idea how insulting it is to women of all ages, ethnicities, and incomes who determined to hold onto their basic human rights.
Hopefully, women will swamp the polls, like in 1996, especially in battle ground states. We can hopefully keep the White House and gain a majority in the House.
This prediction is absolutely chilling. Thanks for your comments Peter and Trish. Let’s hope this grim scenario from Brooks motivates voters to turn out in droves for Vice President Harris and Governor Walz and other Democrats for the future of our fragile democracy, of the rule of law, and of policies for the common good. The normalization of Trump’s candidacy by much of the media has been heartbreaking in the face of the obvious danger presented by the demented, corrupt, sadistic, mendacious, treasonous, abusive, felonious GOP candidate. Completely unfit. Not normal. I may be wrong on this history, but wasn’t there a time when most Americans reviled brutal jerks, bullies, oily con men, sleazy predators, Nazis, pathological liars, whiny adults, and those of their ilk?
These explanations are interesting, but I think a simpler answer will work. People who support Trump are either stupid, crazy, evil or foolish. Some are all four.
Maybe they’re just loyal. It’s the virtuous alternative to thinking.
While Mr. Utevsky may be correct from his point of view, it is a mistake to believe that anyu of the Trump supporters, from those who have rationale explanations for their choice to the blind lyalists would agree. The challenge is not only to defeat Trump but to explain what his support from a meaningful percentage of voters says about the United States.
To quote Han Solo, “Who’s scruffy?” You know that half the citizens, about 80 million voters, are not stupid, crazy, evil, and foolish. However, Mencken might agree with you.
Lot’s of voters do not personally like the many faceted Donald Trump. However, anyone wonder about the financial dealings between Biden and other governments going through his son Hunter? The media kept the knowledge of Hunter’s laptop from the voters before the last election. Anyone wonder why Nancy Pelosi did not request the National Guard to help keep the D.C. Capitol safe after the previous presidential election? A riot of a 100 or so people could have been handled firmly, but was turned into something that didn’t need to happen. The media didn’t discuss Biden’s obvious mental deterioration. Who is really running the White House? Biden didn’t have cabinet meetings for almost a year! Yikes! Anyone who questions them is gas-lighted. People are scared. You wonder why many do not trust the press? Now a woman who doesn’t give press interviews unless they are manipulated, has been substituted into the role of Democratic presidential candidate. Anyone wonder about the unsecured southern border, who they kept saying was secure, as well as the northern border where millions of untraceable people have come over? Why did the U.S. government fly them into the country unvetted? How many of them are terrorists and criminals involved in the drug trade and human trafficking? Every state, county and city coffer is now overburdened with the costs of feeding, housing and educating these millions of migrants. Meanwhile, we have local seniors, veterans and fentanyl addicts dying on our streets. Many city budgets are broke. Taxes will need to be raised to pay for the services of all the migrants. More inflation coming. People are scared! Many criminals are repeat offenders who judges keep releasing back on the streets or granting no bail. They keep talking about social justice. Where is the justice for the victims? Who cares about them? How many of you have actually run a small business and are aware of all the taxes, regulations and other hurdles that must be overcome to stay in business? How many of you have to worry about grocery costs or can’t afford the $5.50+ gallon of gas in the State of Washington? When those in power call you a basketful of deplorables or stupid, or evil, or foolish and stop talking to you because you have a different opinion, you aren’t going to vote for them. Do you know what it feels like to be shunned when you think differently and don’t follow the party line? When those people in media, as well as coming from the Ivory League campuses look down on the traditional blue-collar workers or try to tell everyone else how to think, of course people are going to look for someone that values them and listens to them. Anyone support Israel and are disgusted by the destruction of property on campuses and universities across the U.S.A. and of national monuments, even Abraham Lincoln? Many parents in the State of Washington are afraid that a government official will take away their minor child if you don’t let them take hormones of the opposite sex or possibly have non-reversible surgery. How many of you have raised children and are aware that kids change their minds weekly on what is important to them? Parents are afraid to send their young children into a bathroom without them because a sex offender pretending to to be a transgender person could be waiting for them. I’M NOT TRANSPHOBIC! I’m talking about minor chidren. People who would do children or women harm, hide among the transgender population. Girls don’t want to get hurt by a male athlete or lose an unfair athletic competition. Let males and females compete in debate, mock trial, trivia contest or a spelling bee. That is a level playing field. There are many conservative Democrats and Pro-Choice moderate Republicans who are very worried about all of these issues. It’s the economy and public safety that they think about when they try to go to sleep at night. Many voters do not personally like Trump, but they are going to vote for him. If you live in a blue bubble, you are not knowlingly going to come in contact with these people. They keep a low profile, for good reason. Go ahead and keep calling them stupid.
When you start out with false statements, nobody’s going to read the rest.
The Speaker of the House has no power to call out the National Guard. Period.
Well, all I can say is how the white male commentators (looking at you David Brooks) love to overly analyze the reasons people vote for DJT. In reality, it is quite simple: racism and misogyny. The misogyny didn’t apply to Biden (although the “alpha male schtick that has attached to MAGA likened Biden to a “weak man”) it sure applies now. Sorry to be blunt and I bet people will pile on, but those are the reasons. Add hate of anything “other” and there you have it. It saddens me, this country.