This is not a rebuke of a story that’s generating a lot of heat on Daily Kos. This is my attempt to have a conversation, and reveal a new angle in this discussion.
First of all, I CAN RELATE. I woke up the day after election day, 2016 sick to my stomach. I was disoriented. Trump, the most loathsome man in America? A man with no virtues? Yes, he lost the popular vote but he played the Electoral College game perfectly, and millions of my fellow Americans chose him over Hillary Clinton.
The big question is “why?” And that question was answered for me by Thomas Frank in his book, “The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism.”
You want to know why Trump won, and repugnant scumbags like Marjorie Trailer Park Greene keep getting elected? Let’s start with a line from that anguished, impassioned post that inspired this response:
“Weren’t we celebrating Obama’s election a minute and a half ago? What the fuck happened?”
We know what happened. What happened was that Obama spent his first year in office making sure that the “Too Big To Fail” banks who almost brought down our entire economy were made whole...while ignoring the crisis of nine million people underwater on their bogus mortgages, and let them lose their homes.
I donated a LOT of money to the Obama campaign. I sent him a lot of impassioned emails. Rahm Fucking Emanuel made sure I wasn’t heard, going so far as to dismantle Obama’s astonishing electoral majority-maker.
Then Obama spent the next year struggling to pass a healthcare plan crafted from Heritage Foundation talking points, that didn’t disturb the health insurance industry and Big Pharma. And then he failed to defend his plan in the 2010 midterms, causing a Tea Party Red Tsunami we have yet to recover from.
So you’re that Obama voter in Ohio and Michigan. You’ve lost your house as you’ve watched the bankers who caused this debacle made whole. Trust the Democrats to have your back?
I’m not here to bash Obama. I’m here to echo what Thomas Frank says in his history of anti-populism. Trump voters — white, blue collar Midwesterners — were once Roosevelt Democrats. Why? Because FDR listened to them. He fought hard for the right of blue collar workers to join labor unions, creating a prosperity boom that echoed into the 1950s and 60s. He spent money to put millions of people to work. He created an old-age insurance program that everyone except right wing Republicans loves. A key chapter in Frank’s book is the Republicans trying to do to FDR in 1936 what the Republicans did to populist hero William Jennings Bryan in 1896 — that is, muster a full-frontal, multi-millioon dollar, multi-faceted assault on him from Big Business and Big Media (Hearst, the Chicago Trib, etc.) to scare voters into believing hordes of Bolsheviks had hijacked the country.
And ya know what? None of it worked this time. FDR was delivering for the grandparents of those Trump voters, and they delivered him a landslide.
Here’s my point: I get the visceral rage of progressives at Trumpistas. I feel it too. But we’re going to be, at best, a 50-50 party unless we have the guts to go deeper, feel the rage they feel and do the hard work of winning them back. They look at the Democrats and see a party that has betrayed them over and over again: sending jobs overseas, caving on raising taxes on the super-rich, and voting for a pork-laden Defense bill that gives billions more than the Pentagon asks for while waffling on programs that would help people who need it.
So let’s think like a populist circa 1932: what needs doing? 1) Universal affordable health insurance: nobody left behind. 2) Affordable pharma drugs, no more record profits while people suffer 3) End billion dollar Big Oil subsidies, put all that money to creating MILLIONS of U.S. gov’t clean energy jobs. 4) Guaranteed national income — everyone who wants a job gets one. (Think of the amount of work that needs doing in this country...) 5) Universal Free Lunch Program — no more “food insecurity.” Everyone who needs a meal gets one, no exceptions (ESPECIALLY children). 6) Everyone has the right to join a Union, and no one joining a Union can be fired or penalized.
Kossacks, those Trump voters we keep slagging can be Democrats. They were once, because we heard them and delivered for them. They want to feel happy about their lives, proud of their work and proud of their country. They felt that way under FDR. They gave Obama a shot.
We can do this. And it begins with listening.
