Vanity Fair writer Abigail Tracy, in discussing Elizabeth Warren’s impact on Hillary Clinton’s future cabinet picks, includes this incorrect phrase in her very first sentence:
and her ill-advised characterization of Donald Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables,”
That's incorrect because the characterization was not ill-advised, nor did it characterize all of Donald Trump supporters as members of her basket of deplorables. It was only half, and she described the other half (that were not in that basket of deplorables) as:
…people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."
Of course, this is the half of Hillary Clinton’s statement that everyone in the media is ignoring, but it may be the half of her statement that actually is wrong, because Donald Trump’s supporters are doing pretty well for themselves. Clinton’s statement about “the people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down,” is reminiscent of candidate Barack Obama’s comments in 2008:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Both appear to be nods toward Thomas Frank’s argument in his 2004 book, What’s the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. But, do the points that he made in 2004 still apply to our current political scene?
Are the current conservatives open to being won over by anything a Democratic candidate could say or do? Are the Republicans in Kansas and elsewhere finally feeling betrayed by their government, which has still not outlawed abortion or imprisoned the gays? Has the economy left them in poverty and willing to turn to a reality television star?
A Washington Post/NBC News poll of Republicans was done during this year’s primary race.
In the results of the poll, there was no correlation between incomes and support for Trump among Republican and GOP-inclined independent voters, 34 percent of whom supported the front-runner. That was no surprise, given the data from exit polls. Based on those findings, Five Thirty Eight's Nate Silver has estimated that the average household income among Trump supporters is $72,000 a year, well above the national median.
An analysis by Max Ehrenfreund of the Post’s Wonkblog points out that salaries for white males, while still much higher than those of women and minorities, have not increased as much as the salaries of women and minorities since 1973. Perhaps this has left many of those white males with the belief that our economy presents a zero sum game: If women and minorities are gaining, then white men must be losing.
There is another, newer paper on Trump supporters which makes it clear that they are not poor whites who feel that they have been left behind. Using the large dataset of Gallup’s regular surveys of voters, Jonathan Rothwell has presented a closer look at the nativist supporters of Donald Trump. Among other conclusions, he found that Trump’s supporters are doing well financially, and tend to be found in the whitest of white areas, having little exposure to racial diversity. They also appear to be in areas unaffected by any influx of immigrants.
His supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations, but they earn relatively high household incomes, and living in areas more exposed to trade or immigration does not increase Trump support. On the other hand, living in zip-codes more reliant on social security income, or with high mortgage to income ratios, or less reliance on capital income, predicts Trump support. There is stronger evidence that racial isolation and less strictly economic measures of social status, namely health and intergenerational mobility, are robustly predictive of more favorable views toward Trump, and these factors predict support for him but not other Republican presidential candidates.
I clearly remember a time when our political process was not hyper-partisan. I remember the era when politics stopped at the water’s edge and when political opponents could still work together to govern this nation. That has been changing, from the days of Richard Nixon’s silent majority to the slow but steady takeover of the Republican Party by the right wing. It got a huge boost in 1994, when Newt Gingrich introduced his Contract With America. It has only gotten worse since then.
But Newt Gingrich’s co-signers were not the only new players on the political scene in the mid-’90s. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel (FNC) headed by Republican political operative and sexual harasser Roger Ailes, began broadcasting in 1996. And this is the elephant that no one seems to notice. The favorite channel of conservatives, especially older conservatives, Fox has always been about moving the Republican Party, as well as the rest of the nation, far to the right.
Initially, FNC paid content providers to include the channel in their offerings, instead of charging them for the right to carry it. Little surprise that it spread to so many households so quickly—it was part of most basic cable packages. During George W Bush’s administration, every television set in every waiting room at the U.S. Navy Hospital on our local Marine Corps base was tuned to Fox News. (On January 21, 2009, the channel selection became optional and CNN, MSNBC, and even ESPN would appear in waiting rooms.)
For conservatives, there is no other trusted source for news. They have been conditioned by Fox to suspect a liberal bias from the mainstream media. This conditioning is re-enforced through hate talk radio, led by Rush Limbaugh and his wannabes,, which has been around even longer. While liberals tend to get news from multiple sources, conservatives don’t. They mostly rely on Fox News to confirm the world view of hate radio.
The damage that Fox has done may be irredeemable. For years, Fox News has been peddling lies about climate change. From the Guardian, here’s a 2013 report on a study published by Public Understanding of Science:
The study also examined previous research on this issue and concluded that the conservative media creates distrust in scientists through five main methods:
1) Presenting contrarian scientists as "objective" experts while presenting mainstream scientists as self-interested or biased.
2) Denigrating scientific institutions and peer-reviewed journals.
3) Equating peer-reviewed research with a politically liberal opinion.
4) Accusing climate scientists of manipulating data to fund research projects.
5) Characterizing climate science as a religion.
The article goes on to quote Media Matters as confirming that Fox News has engaged in every one of those tactics to discredit the science of climate change. As shown by this Pew Research graph, if you consume enough propaganda it distorts your view of reality.
Watching Fox News leads to ignorance
We are now rapidly approaching the point where immediate action is required to prevent destruction, and we can’t even get a discussion of the environment in a debate or candidate forum.
There is an apparent link between higher education and liberal views:
The more educated you are, the more liberal your views and the less likely you are to be taken in by the propaganda peddled at Fox. Conversely, the less educated you are, the more likely you are to be a conservative who finds your views affirmed by Fox News. From the Rothwell study quoted above:
His [Trump’s] supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations, but they earn relatively high household incomes,
Trump’s supporters were also found to be more conservative than those Republicans who do not support Trump, which makes them more likely to be consuming a steady diet of Fox propaganda.
FNC has done an incredible disservice to this country. From peddling lies about climate change to calling feminism a national security threat, they have fed their viewers a steady diet of ignorance and hate for twenty years—with colorful graphics and long-legged blondes.
It is within the realm of the possible that we would have seen the growth of this group of hard core nativists without Fox News. After all, hate radio was broadcasting before Fox and the internet opened up all kinds of conversations that used to be held in swastika-bedecked basements. But Fox News’ reach into the living rooms of millions of Americans has certainly provided space for it to grow quickly.
Last month, John Cassidy of the New Yorker suggested, strictly as a conspiracy theory, that Trump has already decided that rather than become president he would like to own a network to rival Fox News. From the right.
With only one conservative network, we have already seen the results of its propaganda in the dumbing down of America (have you ever tried to discuss facts with a Fox News viewer?). The thought of two conservative networks is almost as disturbing as the thought of the self-aggrandizing, blowhard opportunist also known as Trump in the Oval Office. It’s frightening to ponder whether we could survive either one.
