This weekend I met up with old college friends.
We don’t see each often, but we communicate via text and social media, get together for birthdays and a summer weekend in the Hamptons, but it was clear that we’ve all drifted slightly apart as we grew older.
All five of my friends whom I were with Saturday night voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. They all voted for Kerry in 2004. That is sort of how we met, in college, where we all supported Howard Dean and marched against the Iraq War.
Over the years, they were staunch progressives; fighting for marriage equality, against climate change, for the ACA. Stood by me when I came out and embraced friends of different backgrounds.
Then something started to change.
The first time I noticed it was around 2012 when my best friend, whom I met protesting the Iraq War in 2002, started talking about how gentrification was “needed” in many communities to “get the filth out.”
And then there were other discussions that came up over the years:
-We should ban Muslims because it’s only Muslims coming here committing terrorist attacks, no other immigrants
-If Latinos didn’t want us to hate them, they’d speak English. What they want is to make us all speak Spanish
-Black athletes who kneel during the National Anthem are just as hateful as bigots (I wrote a diary about this in 2016)
In the end, in 2016, my five friends either reluctantly voted for Hillary, or didn’t vote at all and admitted they were fine with Trump winning. (Which, honestly, I believe means they voted for Trump)
That all led up to last Saturday night, where during a discussion about music, my friend Ann, who works at a university, brought up that the college was asking incoming students their preferred gender pronounced and would no longer allow food service to shout out a student’s name, say when they order food, for fear of outing a trans person.
The rest of my friends decided and this is “insane” and “enough is enough” and “this was liberal intolerance” and “political correctness”
My fried Jim commented on how despite being a Democrat, he loved a Republican he read about who wanted to BAN gender neutral pronouns. “I’m not sure I agree with it, but he was brave to take on the grammar Nazis.”
You see the problem here are those who identify as “no gender” and want you to use “they or them” as their preferred pronoun. This, Jim and my other friend Lena, agreed was “confusing” and “meant to force us to screw up, so they came be victims and we look bad.”
Lena admitted that if she met someone who preferred “they or them,” she just wouldn’t use any pronoun at all and just use the person’s name.
“I don’t want to screw up, so I just won’t,” she said. “My brain can’t process that.”
My friend Sean on the other hand bogged me down in a 10 minute conversation about whether or not one can “identify as a different gender, why not a different race” and then asked if they would put him in a woman’s prison “if I decided I was a woman after I got convicted of murder.”
They concluded that all this “political correctness” was mucking up society, just as “it’s racist to say All Lives Matter or to think Islam is evil when it is.”
Fear of cultural change turned my friends from young progressive visionaries into borderline Trump supporters.
That’s why I consistently defend the point of view that Trump’s election was entirely on white identity and cultural fears and not on any kind of economics. The Atlantic pointed out that phenomenon just this week.
www.theatlantic.com/…
After analyzing in-depth survey data from 2012 and 2016, the University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana C. Mutz argues that it’s the latter. In a new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she added her conclusion to the growing body of evidence that the 2016 election was not about economic hardship.
“Instead,” she writes, “it was about dominant groups that felt threatened by change and a candidate who took advantage of that trend.”
“For the first time since Europeans arrived in this country,” Mutz notes, “white Americans are being told that they will soon be a minority race.” When members of a historically dominant group feel threatened, she explains, they go through some interesting psychological twists and turns to make themselves feel okay again. First, they get nostalgic and try to protect the status quo however they can. They defend their own group (“all lives matter”), they start behaving in more traditional ways, and they start to feel more negatively toward other groups.
Why would Obama voters vote for Trump? Because they didn’t feel culturally threatened in 2008 — indeed Obama knew and we all knew he needed white voters to win — but by 2016, it was clear white voters were less and less important, and the power of minority voters and movements was growing.
White voters were anxious in ways they were not in 2012 and 2008.
This could be why in one study, whites who were presented with evidence of racial progress experienced lower self-esteem afterward. In another study, reminding whites who were high in “ethnic identification” that nonwhite groups will soon outnumber them revved up their support for Trump, their desire for anti-immigrant policies, and their opposition to political correctness.
But what about those who suffered economically? The study discusses that.
Mutz examined voters whose incomes declined, or didn’t increase much, or who lost their jobs, or who were concerned about expenses, or who thought they had been personally hurt by trade. None of those things motivated people to switch from voting for Obama in 2012 to supporting Trump in 2016
Indeed, the more I told my truth to my friends; the more I said that gender dysphoria is a real thing and that it is easy to learn to use gender-neutral pronouns when asked, the more resistance I got from my friends, even confessions that some of them will vote for Trump next time “to shut the hyper liberals up.”
But as Lena (a DREAMER from Eastern Europe btw) said during the discussion about gender neutral pronouns
“Why is it always us who need to change?”
I asked her how should trans people change and she suggested “don’t ask us to call you by the grammatically incorrect pronoun. Stop confusing everybody”
Another words: Adhere to MY wishes, don’t make me adhere to YOURS — my privilege.
But what if we used a more economic-focused message?
It doesn’t work with my friends.
Discussions about fairer education (If blacks are so concerned about education, maybe they should hold more fundraisers like we do) or transportation policy (Why should we spend more money on public transit the they just destroy anyway) or job/income guarantees (they already sit home and collect welfare checks anyway, why should we make it easier) don’t win them over.
And it’s not that my friends are doing well economically. Three of the five still live at home with their parents (we’re all 33 or 34 years old). It’s that they are far more concerned with their cultural status than they are with their economic one, or see the two are intertwined.
They see anything we propose economically, even if they agree with it (i.e. Medicare for All), as something the folks they hate will just “take advantage of,” even if it helps them.
These why-did-people-vote-for-Trump studies are clarifying, but also a little bit unsatisfying, from the point of view of a politician. They dispel the fiction—to use another 2016 meme—that the majority of Trump supporters are disenfranchised victims of capitalism’s cruelties. At the same time, deep-seated psychological resentment is harder for policy makers to address than an overly meager disability check. You can teach out-of-work coal miners to code, but you may not be able to convince them to embrace changing racial and gender norms. You can offer universal basic incomes, but that won’t ameliorate resentment of demographic changes.
They cannot have economic justice without social Injustice.