Everybody has an opinion on what the heck just happened. Libertarian Reason Magazine says Trump won because “Leftist Political Correctness” created a backlash favoring an obnoxious man. Former Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann says it was “God Almighty. He is the one who did this for us.” Others fear our nation is on the same path that Germany found itself in the Thirties.
Calm down, everyone.
Last Summer filmmaker Michael Moore shocked Liberals by predicting a Trump victory. He warned Democrats that for all of Trump’s Twitter antics, his narcissism, his unseemly and undisciplined behavior, no matter how he failed to stack up against smarter people who spoke in coherent sentences – none of this mattered. It wasn’t even important that a diverse electorate hated Trump with such passion. Moore pointed to “Exhibit A” – the fact that sixteen GOP candidates had already fallen at Trump’s feet – and that it didn’t take rocket science to see why.
Besides a whiff of white male bromance for an Alpha Male, there was Clinton herself – horrible foreign policy blunders, paid speeches, a private email server, the $2 billion family business. Tim Kaine was no prize either – once anti-abortion and anti-labor – and unappealing to younger voters.
But, most importantly, people in the Great Lakes and Greater Applachia were hurting economically and they resented Clinton’s support of NAFTA and TPP. They were hurting so badly, in fact, that a Princeton study showed mortality rates for whites had been rising.
To make things really interesting, there was also the X-Factor. American voters, Moore pointed out, have a perverse, anarchistic side. “Shaking things up” is often reason enough to cast a vote. Combine voter apathy for Clinton with a high level of motivation by Trump supporters – and you can guess the outcome. Moore called it exactly, even identifying the crucial states. Trump’s win was what ProPublica termed the “revenge of the forgotten class.”
The Los Angeles Times wrote that Clinton lost Pennsylvania by 100,000 votes – which translated into twenty electoral college votes – all because Democrats did not come out in sufficient numbers. The Daily Kos published statistics from Rust Belt states showing that huge numbers of Democratic voters simply stayed home. “In Wisconsin alone, a quarter of a million voters … didn’t.” And it didn’t help that Clinton never once set foot in their state.
Nate Silver, the wunderkind statistician who aggregated polling probabilities several times a day using computer models, also failed to see the train coming. After the election Silver wrote: “Trump was stronger where the economy was weaker.” And it was economic suffering that made those voters rush in record numbers to the polls. Although the typical Trump voter was originally thought to be an economically secure white male, Silver writes that he was actually more likely than average to be unemployed. A Trump voter was also at greater risk of replacement by robots or outsourcing because his job was less skilled. The Democratic Party’s stock answer to a man who may have had multiple careers already: go back to school.
While Trump’s personality and his xenophobia suggest a new era of authoritarianism and intolerance (which could also be true) Liberal Democrats should not underestimate how conflicted many Trump voters were in casting a vote for him. No one should say (as Clinton famously did) that these were all Deplorables. Mormons and Evangelicals who supported Trump, for example, didn’t like his language or his behavior, but when someone holds out a lifeline (real or imagined), you take it.
Robert Parry summed it up pretty well: “Hillary Clinton’s stunning defeat reflected a gross misjudgment by the Democratic Party about the depth of populist anger against self-serving elites who have treated much of the country with disdain.” Which is what both Trump and Bernie Sanders (and the progressive half of the Democratic Party) said about Neoliberalism during the primaries.
So while things may not be all that rosy at the moment for Democrats, prospects for Republicans are also cloudy. In the next four years will anyone really expect the GOP to fund infrastructure repairs that could employ a substantial number of their angry voters? Or will the money go – as usual – to defense contractors?
Like James Faulkner’s angry white man, Abner Snopes, the Trump voter just torched the genteel (Chappaqua) manor of the rich folks who looked down on him. It’s safe to say: when this same voter finds out Trump lied to him, Trump Tower will be next.
The Huffington Post recently published a piece: “The Democratic Party Deserved to Die.” But rather than dying or crying, for Liberals and Progressives this should be a time to realize what went wrong and to get busy fixing it.
This was published in the Standard Times on November 16, 2016
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/opinion/20161115/your-view-trump-victory-was-no-surprise-to-some
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