I've been trying for some time now to understand the
reaction of Hillary Clinton’s supporters to her defeat in last week’s election.
At first, I simply dismissed it as another round of the amateur theatrics both
parties indulge in whenever they lose the White House. Back in 2008, as most of
my readers will doubtless recall, Barack Obama’s victory was followed by months
of shrieking from Republicans, who insisted—just as a good many Democrats are
insisting today—that the election of the other guy meant that democracy had
failed, the United States and the world were doomed, and the supporters of the
losing party would be rounded up and sent to concentration camps any day now.
That sort of histrionic nonsense has been going on for decades.
In 2000, Democrats chewed the scenery in the grand style when George W. Bush
was elected president. In 1992, it was the GOP’s turn—I still have somewhere a
pamphlet that was circulated by Republicans after the election containing
helpful phrases in Russian, so that American citizens would have at least a
little preparation when Bill Clinton ran the country into the ground and handed
the remains over to the Soviet Union. American politics and popular culture
being what it is, this kind of collective hissy fit is probably unavoidable.
Fans of irony have much to savor. You’ve got people who were
talking eagerly about how to game the electoral college two weeks ago, who now
are denouncing the electoral college root and branch; you’ve got people who
insisted that Trump, once he lost, should concede and shut up, who are
demonstrating a distinct unwillingness to follow their own advice. You’ve got
people in the bluest of blue left coast cities marching in protest as though
that’s going to change a single blessed thing—as I’ve pointed out in
previous posts here, protest marches that aren’t backed up with
effective grassroots political organization are simply a somewhat noisy form of
aerobic exercise.
Still, there’s more going on here than that. I know some
fairly thoughtful people whose reaction to the election’s outcome wasn’t
histrionic at all—it consisted of various degrees of shock, disorientation, and
fear. They felt, if the ones I read are typical, that the people who voted for
Trump were deliberately rejecting and threatening them personally. That’s
something we ought to talk about.
To some extent, to be sure, this was a reflection of the
political culture of personal demonization I discussed in last week’s post.
Many of Clinton’s supporters convinced themselves, with the help of a great
deal of propaganda from the Democratic Party and its bedfellows in the
mainstream media, that Donald Trump is a monster of depravity thirsting for
their destruction, and anyone who supports him must hate everything good. Now
they’re cringing before the bogeyman they imagined, certain that it’s going to
act out the role they assigned it and gobble them up.
Another factor at work here is the very strong tendency of
people on the leftward end of American politics to believe in what I’ve
elsewhere called the religion of progress—the faith that history has an
inherent tilt toward improvement, and more to the point, toward the particular kinds
of improvement they prefer. Hillary Clinton, in an impromptu response to a
heckler at one of her campaign appearances, phrased the central tenet of that
religion concisely: “We’re not going to go back. We’re going to go forward.”
Like Clinton herself, a great many of her followers saw their cause as another
step forward in the direction of progress, and to find themselves “going back”
is profoundly disorienting—even though those labels “forward” and “back” are
entirely arbitrary when they aren’t the most crassly manipulative sort of
propaganda.
That said, there’s another factor driving the reaction of
Clinton’s supporters, and the best way I can find to approach it is to consider
one of the more thoughtful responses from that side of the political landscape,
an incisive essay posted to Livejournal last week by someone who goes by the
nom de Web “Ferrett Steinmetz.” The essay’s titled The Cold, Cold Math We’ll Need to Survive the Next Twenty Years, and it comes
so close to understanding what happened last Tuesday that the remaining gap
offers an unsparing glimpse straight to the heart of the failure of the Left to
make its case to the rest of the American people.
At the heart of the essay are two indisputable points. The
first is that the core constituencies of the Democratic Party are not large
enough by themselves to decide who gets to be president. That’s just as true of
the Republican party, by the way, and with few exceptions it’s true in every
democratic society. Each party large
enough to matter has a set of core constituencies who can be counted on to vote
for it under most circumstances, and then has to figure out how to appeal to
enough people outside its own base to win elections. That’s something that both
parties in the US tend to forget from time to time, and when they do so, they
lose.
The second indisputable point is that if Democrats want to
win an election in today’s America, they have to find ways to reach out to
people who don’t share the values and interests of the Left. It’s the way that
Ferrett Steinmetz frames that second point, though, that shows why the
Democratic Party failed to accomplish that necessary task this time. “We have
to reach out to people who hate us,” Steinmetz says, and admits that he has no
idea at all how to do that.
Let’s take those two assertions one at a time. First, do the
people who voted for Donald Trump in this election actually hate Ferrett
Steinmetz and his readers—or for that matter, women, people of color, sexual
minorities, and so on? Second, how can Steinmetz and his readers reach out to
these supposedly hateful people and get them to vote for Democratic candidates?
I have no idea whether Ferrett Steinmetz knows anybody who
voted for Donald Trump. I suspect he
doesn’t—or at least, given the number of people I’ve heard from who’ve
privately admitted that they voted for Trump but would never let their friends
know this, I suspect he doesn’t know anyone who he knows voted for Trump. Here
I have a certain advantage. Living in a down-at-the-heels mill town in the
north central Appalachians, I know quite a few people who supported Trump; I’ve
also heard from a very large number of Trump supporters by way of this blog,
and through a variety of other sources.
Are there people among the pro-Trump crowd who are in fact
racists, sexists, homophobes, and so on? Of course. I know a couple of
thoroughly bigoted racists who cast their votes for him, for example, including
at least one bona fide member of the Ku Klux Klan. The point I think the Left
tends to miss is that not everyone in flyover country is like
that. A few years back, in fact, a bunch of Klansmen came to the town
where I live to hold a recruitment rally, and the churches in town—white as
well as black—held a counter-rally, stood on the other side of the street, and
drowned the Klansmen out, singing hymns at the top of their lungs until the
guys in the white robes got back in their cars and drove away. Surprising? Not at all; in a great deal of
middle America, that’s par for the course these days.
To understand why a town that ran off the Klan was a forest
of Trump signs in the recent election, it’s necessary to get past the
stereotypes and ask a simple question: why did people vote for Trump? I don’t
claim to have done a scientific survey, but these are the things I heard Trump
voters talking about in the months and weeks leading up to the election:
1. The Risk of War. This was the most common point at
issue, especially among women—nearly all the women I know who voted for Trump,
in fact, cited it as either the decisive reason for their vote or one of the
top two or three. They listened to Hillary Clinton talk about imposing a no-fly
zone over Syria in the face of a heavily armed and determined Russian military
presence, and looked at the reckless enthusiasm for overthrowing governments
she’d displayed during her time as Secretary of State. They compared this to
Donald Trump’s advocacy of a less confrontational relationship with Russia, and
they decided that Trump was less likely to get the United States into a
shooting war.
War isn’t an abstraction here in flyover country. Joining
the military is very nearly the only option young people here have if they want
a decent income, job training, and the prospect of a college education, and so
most families have at least one relative or close friend on active duty. People here respect the military, but the
last two decades of wars of choice in the Middle East have done a remarkably
good job of curing middle America of any fondness for military adventurism it
might have had. While affluent feminists
swooned over the prospect of a woman taking on another traditionally masculine
role, and didn’t seem to care in the least that the role in question was
“warmonger,” a great many people in flyover country weighed the other issues
against the prospect of having a family member come home in a body bag. Since
the Clinton campaign did precisely nothing to reassure them on this point, they
voted for Trump.
2. The Obamacare Disaster. This was nearly as
influential as Clinton’s reckless militarism. Most of the people I know who
voted for Trump make too much money to qualify for a significant federal
subsidy, and too little to be able to cover the endlessly rising cost of
insurance under the absurdly misnamed “Affordable Care Act.” They recalled,
rather too clearly for the electoral prospects of the Democrats, how Obama
assured them that the price of health insurance would go down, that they would
be able to keep their existing plans and doctors, and so on through all the
other broken promises that surrounded Obamacare before it took effect.
It was bad enough that so few of those promises were kept.
The real deal-breaker, though, was the last round of double- or triple-digit
annual increase in premiums announced this November, on top of increases nearly
as drastic a year previously. Even among those who could still afford the new
premiums, the writing was on the wall: sooner or later, unless something changed,
a lot of people were going to have to choose between losing their health care
and being driven into destitution—and then there were the pundits who insisted
that everything would be fine, if only the penalties for not getting insurance
were raised to equal the cost of insurance! Faced with that, it’s not
surprising that a great many people went out and voted for the one candidate
who said he’d get rid of Obamacare.
3. Bringing Back Jobs. This is the most difficult one
for a lot of people on the Left to grasp, but that’s a measure of the gap
between the bicoastal enclaves where the Left’s policies are formed and the
hard realities of flyover country. Globalization and open borders sound great
when you don’t have to grapple with the economic consequences of shipping tens
of millions of manufacturing jobs overseas, on the one hand, and federal
policies that flood the labor market with illegal immigrants to drive down
wages, on the other. Those two policies, backed by both parties and surrounded
by a smokescreen of empty rhetoric about new jobs that somehow never managed to
show up, brought about the economic collapse of rural and small town America,
driving a vast number of Americans into destitution and misery.
Clinton’s campaign did a really inspired job of rehashing
every detail of the empty rhetoric just mentioned, and so gave people out here
in flyover country no reason to expect anything but more of the same downward
pressure on their incomes, their access to jobs, and the survival of their
communities. Trump, by contrast, promised to scrap or renegotiate the trade
agreements that played so large a role in encouraging offshoring of jobs, and
also promised to put an end to the tacit Federal encouragement of mass illegal
immigration that’s driven down wages. That was enough to get a good many voters
whose economic survival was on the line to cast their votes for Trump.
4. Punishing the Democratic Party. This one is a bit
of an outlier, because the people I know who cast votes for Trump for this
reason mostly represented a different demographic from the norm out here:
young, politically liberal, and incensed by the way that the Democratic
National Committee rigged the nomination process to favor Clinton and shut out
Bernie Sanders. They believed that if the campaign for the Democratic
nomination had been conducted fairly, Sanders would have been the nominee, and
they also believe that Sanders would have stomped Trump in the general
election. For what it’s worth, I think
they’re right on both counts.
These voters pointed out to me, often with some heat, that
the policies Hillary Clinton supported in her time as senator and secretary of
state were all but indistinguishable from those of George W. Bush—you know, the
policies Democrats denounced so forcefully a little more than eight years
ago. They argued that voting for Clinton
in the general election when she’d been rammed down the throats of the
Democratic rank and file by the party’s oligarchy would have signaled the final
collapse of the party’s progressive wing into irrelevance. They were willing to
accept four years of a Republican in the White House to make it brutally clear
to the party hierarchy that the shenanigans that handed the nomination to
Clinton were more than they were willing to tolerate.
Those were the reasons I heard people mention when they
talked in my hearing about why they were voting for Donald Trump. They didn’t
talk about the issues that the media considered important—the email server
business, the on-again-off-again FBI investigation, and so on. Again, this
isn’t a scientific survey, but I found it interesting that not one Trump voter
I knew mentioned those.
What’s more, hatred toward women, people of color, sexual
minorities, and the like weren’t among the reasons that people cited for voting
for Trump, either. Do a fair number of the people I’m discussing hold attitudes
that the Left considers racist, sexist, homophobic, or what have you? No
doubt—but the mere fact that such attitudes exist does not prove that those
attitudes, rather than the issues just listed, guided their votes.
When I’ve pointed this out to people on the leftward side of
the political spectrum, the usual response has been to insist that, well, yes,
maybe Trump did address the issues that matter to people in flyover country,
but even so, it was utterly wrong of them to vote for a racist, sexist
homophobe! We’ll set aside for the moment the question of how far these labels
actually apply to Trump, and how much they’re the product of demonizing
rhetoric on the part of his political enemies on both sides of the partisan
divide. Even accepting the truth of these accusations, what the line of
argument just cited claims is that people in the flyover states should have
ignored the issues that affect their own lives, and should have voted instead
for the issues that liberals think are important.
In some idyllic Utopian world, maybe. In the real world, that’s not going to
happen. People are not going to embrace the current agenda of the American Left
if doing so means that they can expect their medical insurance to double in
price every couple of years, their wages to continue lurching downward, their
communities to sink further in a death spiral of economic collapse, and their
kids to come home in body bags from yet another pointless war in the Middle
East.
Thus there’s a straightforward answer to both of Ferrett
Steinmetz’ baffled questions. Do the people who voted for Trump hate Steinmetz,
his readers, or the various groups—women, people of color, sexual minorities—whose
concerns are central to the politics of today’s American Left? In many cases,
not at all, and in most others, not to any degree that matters politically.
They simply don’t care that much about the concerns that the Left considers
central—especially when those are weighed against the issues that directly
affect their own lives.
As for what Ferrett Steinmetz’s side of the political
landscape can offer the people who voted for Trump, that’s at least as simple
to answer: listen to those voters, and they’ll tell you. To judge by what I’ve
heard them say, they want a less monomaniacally interventionist foreign policy
and an end to the endless spiral of wars of choice in the Middle East; they
want health insurance that provides reasonable benefits at a price they can
afford; they want an end to trade agreements that ship American jobs overseas,
and changes to immigration policy that stop the systematic importation of
illegal immigrants by big corporate interests to drive down wages and benefits;
and they want a means of choosing candidates that actually reflects the will of
the people.
The fascinating thing is, of course, that these are things
the Democratic Party used to offer. It wasn’t that long ago, in fact, that the
Democratic Party made exactly these issues—opposition to reckless military
adventurism, government programs that improved the standard of living of
working class Americans, and a politics of transparency and integrity—central
not only to its platform but to the legislation its congresspeople fought to
get passed and its presidents signed into law. Back when that was the case, by
the way, the Democratic Party was the majority party in this country, not only
in Congress but also in terms of state governorships and legislatures. As the
party backed away from offering those things, it lost its majority position.
While correlation doesn’t prove causation, I think that in this case a definite
case can be made.
More generally, if the Left wants to get the people who voted for Trump to vote for them instead, they’re going to have to address the issues that convinced those voters to cast their ballots the way they did. Oh, and by the way, listening to what the voters in question have to say, rather than loudly insisting that they can only be motivated by hatred, would also help quite a bit. That may be a lot to ask, but once the shouting stops, I hope it’s a possibility.
