It’s become conventional wisdom that Donald Trump is riding a wave of support from open and closet racists and otherwise know-nothings who either cynically or naively subscribe to his BS about taking back the country and making it great again.
No doubt, Trump has a lock on the votes of people in those categories. But there may be a significant base of support for him among people who are not racists, who are educated, and...here’s what’s scary...who are so disillusioned with our political system that they don’t care what happens when Trump becomes president. They don’t want to make America great again — for now, they want to, at least figuratively, blow the country up.
This article in The Guardian (US edition) was eye-opening for me. It is a collection of emails sent to the newspaper, most of them from educated and seemingly intelligent people about why they are supporting Trump. Most of the writers don’t like Trump, his rhetoric, or his policies. A couple of them even acknowledge he might govern a lot like Hitler. But they’re going to vote for him anyway. As one wrote:
His (Trump’s) candidacy is a happy accident that is currently ripping the soul of America apart, which is something that I think we desperately need (and deserve) at this time in our history, for better or for worse. I support whatever strange gods happen to be behind his candidacy, for, as Martin Heidegger proclaimed in his famous Der Speigel interview, although for slightly different reasons, “Only a God can save us.”
What is motivating these seemingly unlikely Trump voters? For some, it is the belief that the nation’s political and financial policies have fallen under the complete control of Wall Street. Those emailers would ironically support either Trump or Sanders.
For one “liberal left college professor,” it is the perception of a new wave of political correctness that has swept through the media and college campuses:
I’m angry at forced diversity and constant, frequently unjustified complaints about racism/sexism/homophobia/lack of trans rights. I’m particularly angry at social justice warriors and my main reason to vote Trump is to see the looks on your faces when he wins.
And then there’s the 62-year-old licensed attorney with a PhD, who is currently unemployed because he has found it impossible to get a job at his age:
The tension between my liberal politics and the real world has become too much to live with. Your publication and others have endlessly described the demographics of a Trump supporter; people look at me and assume I think a certain way. I am tired of being looked at with these assumptions in mind. I may as well join the Trump bandwagon simply because that is how I look and am treated.
Trump is a wake up call. A president Trump could be as bad as Hitler, but if he shocks some good people in both the Republican and Democratic parties into realizing that they are ignoring legitimate concerns of a seizable minority, then let him have his four years.
All of this is scary to me, maybe because I can identify with the viewpoints of some of these people. At the same time, I haven’t given up hope in this country as they have, and I am concerned that it would be extremely dangerous to elect Trump president.
I used to think Ted Cruz was the nation's most mentally unstable political figure because he brought us to the brink of defaulting on our debt in order to score a political point. But Trump’s delusional positions on foreign policy pose a threat to our national security, which makes him ten times more unstable.
Yet it appears that there are many sane, educated, and reasonable people in this country who are ready to put a man into office who has apparent clinical symptoms of mental illness.
Nevermind guns; Trump as president will have access to nuclear weapons. Yet there are a lot of people out there who are so angry with the political system, they don’t care.
All of this is why I think it is pointless and ultimately self-defeating to accuse and chastise Trump supporters for being racists. It’s an overly simplistic assessment of his support.