I wouldn't have voted for Trump with a gun to my head.
Civil rights are important.
Women's rights are important.
Gay rights are important.
But in the end, so what? You can make all the pious, self-congratulatory, high-minded statements about empathy and social justice you want. Many Democrats like to posture like that almost by reflex, like it's their damned security blanket or something. Self-important palaver doesn't mean fuck-all to a working-class family trying to claw their way from paycheck to paycheck. Some college kid at Dartmouth or NYU mouthing off about trans rights isn't going to sway some furloughed autoworker with a mortgage, not much in savings, and not a lot of hope.
The Democratic Party's bread and butter used to be the working class of this country. Yet, beginning with NAFTA and accelerated by China's entry into the WTO, the number of manufacturing jobs in this country cratered due to globalism. And the brand of Neoliberalism embraced by the Democrats in the 1990s was fully complicit. Democrats started trying to win elections by stapling together coalitions of special interest groups rather than sticking to their fundamental message.
Used to be, every small town in America had a mill, a mine, or a factory. And those began to evaporate. Don't believe me? Go to the Federal Reserve's fantastic FRED site, with every economic statistic you can possibly imagine. Now, look up the statistics on how many employed persons there are in individual rural counties in your state. You'll find that the job destruction has been shocking over the past 30 years.
So, if you're just looking at the overall GDP growth and the job numbers, what you're not paying attention to is that the economic growth has been concentrated in the cities.
I knew in April 2016 that Hillary Clinton would lose. Why? In some town hall meeting, when talking about Global Warming, she made the off-hand comment 'We'll have to shut the coal mines down.' Now, she wasn't wrong, and her remarks were mostly taken out of context. But the cavalier way she said it was straight out of the technocratic playbook, essentially crystallizing in a single phrase the entire problem with the Democratic and Republican approach to the fate of the working class. These voters were sold out by the policy wonks, and they knew it.
When she said that, I thought, "There goes West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky."
Or let's look at illegal immigration. That's a term I use intentionally, not the euphemism of 'undocumented workers.' Like all euphemisms, it's dishonest to its core, as if the only problem is that the paperwork wasn't filled out in the right way.
Ever notice that the people who shrug at the issue of illegal immigration aren't the people who are actually affected by illegal immigration? The lawyers, the professors, the clergy, and all the other usual suspects will never be displaced by an illegal. Yet if you're a working-class guy who used to do drywall or basic labor for $17-$25 an hour, and a bunch of illegals are now doing the job for $10-$12, well, that's food off their table.
Donald Trump, like it or not, was the only guy really talking to the working class of this country. It doesn't matter if he's actually going to do squat for them. The simple fact that he noticed them is why those people will go to the mat for him. It's why the head of the Teamsters delivered a major address at the RNC convention. That carried a lot more weight than George Clooney flying in from Beverly Hills to knock on some doors in Allentown.
In fact, if I were the DNC, I would politely tell singers, television personalities, and actors to not campaign on behalf of our next candidate. Instead, just send in a check and shut the fuck up. Because when someone living in the fantasy world of Hollywood deigns to give their opinion on the country, I know that's someone not sharing my reality. Their opinion isn't worth a shit.
So, let's not wallow in the conceit that Trump voters are all a bunch of knuckle-dragging racists. It's not only condescension and stereotyping, its not just copium for self-righteous, but it also ignores the real issues that are important to them.
After all, an estimated 9,000,000 people voted for Obama in 2012, then turned around and voted for Trump in 2016. And likely, those same people voted for him in 2020 and 2024.
Donald Trump is their brick through your window. And they are asking, "Are you assholes listening now?"
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