Earlier this week, while chatting with online “friends” through Twitter and other social mediaI, I shared an observation about Donald Trump’s feud with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the Pakistani-American parents of a United States Army officer who was killed in Iraq in 2004. In response to my calling out how Donald Trump has, once again, shown that he is a contemptible and pathetic human being, a Twitter friend replied something akin to, “maybe this will finally force the decent Republicans to finally get off the fence.” I responded, “No decent Republican would have supported Donald Trump in the first place.”
I have been thinking about that reply during these last few days. It was flippant.
What does it mean to be a “decent” person in the context of discussing political choices? Of course, I/we/us have our own personal criteria and definitions that incorporate (or not) a set of normative values about the world and our relationship to it. As a function of personal temperament, upbringing, intellectual training, schooling, brain chemistry, and my experience as a member of the black American working class, the personal is intensely political for me. Consequently, by my decision-rule(s), if someone supports Donald Trump they are endorsing his values. By implication his bigotry, racism, nativism, and other social sins are now their sins.
What of the more difficult question and conclusion? Why would an ostensibly “decent” person support the Republican Party and their candidate, the American Il Duce and Immortan Joe Donald Trump?
Political elites will often choose party over personal principles. They crave power more than anything else and Trump (or any other nominee) is a means to an end.
Many American voters vote for a particular party simply out of habit or upbringing —regardless of the candidate.
Political psychologists and other researchers have repeatedly demonstrated how the brain structures of conservative-authoritarians are very different from those of liberal-progressives. The former values order and is fear-centered in his or her decision-making. The compulsion to support Trump because he is a “strong father figure” who promises “safety” and “security” and “protection” against harm done by some type of scary Other may be driven on a deep subconscious and instinctive level.
As I have written about extensively here at Daily Kos, my own site, and elsewhere, American conservatives exist in an alternate reality created by a powerful disinformation news entertainment media machine. This bubble of epistemic closure has anointed Trump a political godhead. The cultists in the political religion that is modern conservatism worship him eagerly. Heretics are to be condemned and exiled.
How “decent” Republicans (or independents) could support Donald Trump is also a function of extreme political polarization and sorting, which results in ideologically homogeneous interpersonal networks and communities. As new data reported in The Washington Post suggests, if we live in “political silos” where those who disagree with us are a type of caricature and “enemy,” it becomes very difficult to reach consensus on matters of important public concern. Moreover, the phenomenon known as “information backfire” is amplified as we do not know trusted informants with whom we may disagree—but still respect as human beings—about politics.
But as I struggle with the role of “decent” Republicans in the rise of Trumpmania, I cannot explain away the bigotry and racism of his supporters, and those who are complicit with and thus enable them.
I have spoken with Jared Yates Sexton who has written extensively for The New Republic, The New York Times, and other publications about his experiences at Donald Trump rallies. He describes a mass spectacle driven by racism and misogyny, where the American Swastika (i.e. the Confederate flag) is common, “Sieg Heil!” and its contemporary equivalent “All Lives Matter” are all too commonly used, and white rage is the motor driving the Trump movement. Yates’ experiences are almost identical to my own at Trump’s no-show rally here in Chicago earlier this year.
This week, The New York Times released a special online video report on the racism, bigotry, nativism, and other ugly behavior exhibited by Donald Trump’s supporters at his rallies and other events.
The Guardian also featured an excellent profile on a rust belt community in Ohio where Donald Trump is finding support among angry white men who feel “disenfranchised” and “left behind” by Obama’s America and the post-civil rights era.
An article in The Guardian, titled “What do Donald Trump voters really crave? Respect” highlights how:
Most others, especially the Trump supporters, are unabashed in their views, celebratory, giddy to have someone addressing their concerns, and talking their language. Two guys, just off work, come in and yell to their friends, “Fuck yeah, dicks! The Polacks for Trump are here!”
That everyone else hates Trump makes them all the more confidant he is their man, further cements the feeling they are, finally, members of an exclusive club. As one guy yelled when the TV showed a controversy over something Trump said: “You get them Donald! They been getting us forever.”
Most of all, Trump voters want respect. They want respect for their long hours of work that risks their bodies, for the hands caught in vices, backs wrenched by weights, and knees torn. They want respect because they are doing dangerous work, but their pay has been flat for decades.
They want respect because they haven’t just lost economically, but also socially. When they turn on the TV, they see their way of life being mocked and made fun of as nothing but uneducated white trash.
With Trump, they are finding someone who gives them respect. He talks their language, addresses their concerns. Sometimes it is celebrating what defines their neighborhood, what they in Parma have in common: being white. They and Trump are playing in dangerous territory, with the need for respect tipping into misplaced revenge.
In another all-white working-class neighborhood not far away, a collection of retired workers, all Trump voters, gather in the mornings at McDonald’s. When the talk turned to politics the N-word is thrown around with ease, and racial jokes are par for the course.
The New York Post, drawing from J.D. Vance’s excellent new book Hillbilly Elegy, offers this profile:
There are decaying post-industrial Middletowns all over the map. In 1970, Vance notes, 25 percent of white children lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates above 10 percent. By 2000 the figure had risen to 40 percent, and Vance believes it is higher today. The life expectancy for Vance’s people is declining.
Trump’s promises to stand up to the Chinese are resonating, as is his message that “the system is rigged” against a proud group of Americans, Americans who built the postwar glory but now feel they’re being ignored or outright mocked. White trash is the one ethnic group it is still OK to make fun of.
But, as always, I am needled by how race and class are intimates in America. The hope is to have a real “we the people” democracy, that finding common ground in pursuit of common interests in the service of the Common Good should be our first and best goal. To do anything less is to surrender to the plutocrats and the neoliberal order.
In an interview with Slate magazine, Glenn Greenwald warns:
Yes, exactly, I agree with that. But this gets back to the point I was trying to make earlier, which is, if you are someone who wants to stop Trump or Brexit, your goal should be to communicate effectively with the people who believe it is in their interest to support Trump or Brexit. I think in general there is no effort on the part of media elites to communicate with those people and do anything other than tell them that they are primitive, racist, and stupid. And if the message being sent is that you are primitive, racist, and stupid, and not that you have been fucked over in ways that are really bad and need to be rectified, of course those people are not going to be receptive to the message coming from the people who view them with contempt and scorn. I think that is why Brexit won, and I think that is the real danger of Trump winning.
Are Donald Trump’s supporters “decent” people in general? Or are they “decent” people who just happen to be Donald Trump supporters? Are they something else? How are we to make that determination? Does it even matter?
Those answers will help to determine how American politics continue to fissure and fracture, both up to and after Election Day in November. They will also determine what happens next, when Trump’s minions (hopefully) have to confront the fact that their hero was vanquished.