I’m still seeing a lot of handwringing in liberal circles, to the tune of how the Democrats screwed up and didn’t reach out to the working-class voter (specifically the white working-class voter, hereinafter “WWC voter”). How we didn’t listen to their concerns. How we ignored what they needed for fifteen or twenty years and left them in the dust. How we used them without giving back. How we need to reconcile with this group of Drumpf voters and bring them back into the liberal fold if we ever want to win another election.
So let’s get this out of the way right now: That’s not going to happen.
Let’s take the issue of their jobs, first. One of the main hand-wringing points is that their jobs are going away, and they’re economically fragile and frightened.
The problem is that globalization, and maybe more importantly automation, is not going to go away. Drumpf ran on a platform of lies about that, and we all know it. He can’t just wave a magic wand and bring back the factories and the mills and the coal mines. They voted him in believing he would, but the facts are that this is not going to happen.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s platform had tons of suggestions for jobs and economic development that would have dragged the small towns of the Rust Belt and the South out of this swamp they’re mired down in. The WWC voter didn’t care, because she was a) a woman (and they don’t trust women), and b) it wasn’t the solution they wanted, so they rejected it.
The fact is that they’re only willing to accept the solutions they want: factory and fossil-fuel jobs returned to prominence, the end of automation, and whites getting preference in hiring. They only want the solutions that they like (bringing back manufacturing and their 1950s way of life in their small towns) not solutions that work (training displaced workers in 21st-century technology). No number of solar-installation jobs or desk work in knowledge-economy jobs is going to satisfy their demand for jobs that shore up their WWC, small-town identities — the kind of jobs that require getting your hands and neck dirty and sweaty, that require demonstration of brute strength and physical prowess. They are not interested in modern-economy jobs. They want the jobs that Grandpa and Daddy had.
We have to realize that.
Second, there’s this issue that they’ve been left behind or ignored by most of the country over the last twenty years. Well, it’s true. In many ways they have been, and would have been, even if we could have solved the globalization problem, because all the progress we’ve made over the last fifty-plus years - let’s say since the New Deal - has had the effect of slowly stripping the WWC voter of their identity. That was inevitable, of course, but it doesn’t change the fact that their identities now are seen as outdated, non-essential, and even vaguely distasteful to most of the nation. Of course they’re angry. Of course their vote for Drumpf was a big “F*ck You” to the liberals, the educated, the coastal voters, the “elites.” They can’t change what’s happening, but they’re damned if they’re going to go down without throwing wrenches into the works every chance they get, to at least slow the process.
We have to realize that, too.
It should come as no surprise that they’re not interested in the solutions we’re offering. What we want (national unity towards progressive causes and values, based in reality and facts) will not happen until we regain power, because the WWC voters do not and will not see the value of a reality-based system. It’s not even on their radar, because it requires seeing and understanding facts that are invisible to them in their talk-radio bubbles. The solutions we’re proposing to them - which would work! - fall on deaf ears, because they’re not the solutions that the WWC voter wants. We will not be able to convince them otherwise, because facts do not convince them. They live in a fact-free bubble where the economy is in free fall and the unemployment and crime rates are staggering, while in reality, the facts are that the economy is recovering, unemployment is down to 4.6%, and the crime rate is the lowest it’s been in years.
For many liberals, who live firmly in the reality- and fact-based world, this is insanely frustrating. It frustrates me, too. It seems so obvious to me (and, I assume, to most other progressives) that we can provide good jobs that provide good incomes, if they will just look at the facts. But that’s not going to change anything.
We can’t talk them out of their beliefs or their rejection of facts, because it’s about their identity. It’s about their perception of reality, and their perceptions of themselves. We can throw facts at them until they’re buried and they will still insist that all their (perceived) problems are coming from the nonwhites, the women, the queers, the immigrants. If their kids find out about gay people, they might decide to be gay, and that means no grandkids. Climate change will deprive them of their livelihoods, so it must be a liberal conspiracy. Women leaving the home led to all kinds of costly programs that could be reversed if women would just get back into the kitchen as God intended. The influx of non-white people into their neighborhoods must mean that the non-white people are taking all the good jobs, even though the average paycheck of the WWC voter is a comfortable five- to six-figure income.
And so on. These are their perceptions of reality, as wrong and fact-free as they are, because their identities are tied to those perceptions and to give up their perceptions is to give up who they are. That’s why they’re so responsive to the siren call of “Make America great again.” It helps them hold on to their identities — people who are valued parts of a great, powerful nation.
Those identities are being stripped away by the irresistible tide of social change that’s been sweeping the nation. They’re clinging to those identities as their life preservers, with white-knuckled fists. Is it any wonder that they’re susceptible to white nationalism or the Men’s Rights movement? Is it really so hard to understand why they listen to Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh and all that crowd? Of course they think that Drumpf will help them and that he’s picking great leaders. He talks like they do. He thinks like they do (or at least has the ability to convince them that he does). He represents their identity as a powerful leader, rather than a downtrodden, left-behind, unemployed worker.
We have to realize that as well.
Finally, here’s why I’m saying we have to give up on reconciliation. They don’t want our solutions, and we can’t change their perceptions, so we must move on without them. I’m going to keep saying this for the next two or four (or God help us, eight) years: with their votes for Drumpf, they declared a culture war, and they declared that the endgame would be zero-sum. Their reasons for doing this are perfectly understandable — they see our way of life and our solutions to their problems as a condescending, elitist attack on their identities — but the hard part for us is that we now have no choice but to pursue a zero-sum game where they will (hopefully) be the losers. Abstaining from the fight is not an option. They see this as a war for their survival and their identities, and they feel empowered to attack the ones they see threatening it — namely, us.
Does this mean imposing our value system on them? Yes. It does. Does this mean looking intolerant and shutting them down when they spout racist, sexist, or homophobic views? Yes. It does. Does this mean finally declaring that if a story has two sides, both of those sides must be backed up by facts, not just paranoia and beliefs that have no basis in reality? Yes. It does.
As liberals we may find those truths distasteful, because we’d much rather live and let live, and let people live the way they want to, as long as they don’t harm us with their lifestyle. So here’s a dash of cold water over that distaste: the alternative to fighting back and doing our best to make our value systems the way everyone must live is for our way of life to disappear completely. And our way of life is demonstrably better for people, for the planet, for the liberties we say are so important to us in this nation, and for our economy. Those are the facts.
I know that the WWC voters don’t want to give up their way of life. I know it must be shattering to realize that the way their fathers and grandfathers lived and prospered is no longer possible (although many of them have resisted that realization like anything, and Drumpf enabled them in their resistance). But the facts are still the facts, and they don’t change just because they’re not popular. The WWC way of life is racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, xenophobic. It harms both people and the planet. It does not provide good outcomes for the majority, and it makes those in power even more powerful because of its backbone beliefs about the powerful. It’s their way of life vs. our very lives.
And I’m not willing to give up my life on the altar of their fact-free perceptions.