Mourning in America

[mia]

http://harpers.org/archive/2017/01/mourning-in-america/3/

The other thing that happened was an eruption of populist rage, which Trump didn’t create but was canny enough to channel. In his recent book The Populist Explosion, John B. Judis draws a distinction between left-wing populism, which usually pits the masses against a ruling elite, and right-wing populism, which adds a third element to the mix: a scapegoat. The movement that put our next president in the White House belongs in the second category. Indeed, Trump manufactured scapegoats almost as avidly as he cranked out those make america great again hats. He inveighed against the Mexicans, the Muslims, the media — and, toward the close of his campaign, the Jews, a strange move for this protégé of Roy Cohn, albeit one who enjoyed dipping into Hitler’s speeches during his salad days....

The theory, at least among the Democratic establishment, was that these very voters would be repelled by Trump’s billionaire plumage. He was too wealthy, too showy, too vulgar to be president. But as Joan C. Williams suggests in a recent essay, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class,” voters in the heart of the heart of the country tend to admire the truly rich. These people strike them as self-made and independent. What these voters don’t like are the professionals, the doctors and lawyers and accountants, who occupy roughly the same terrain of county roads and strip malls and gas stations but have been mysteriously deputized to patronize them, push them around, and (worst of all) pity them. And what was Hillary Clinton if not the Ultimate Professional? Her wealth, gleaned from a thousand speaking engagements, was incidental — indeed, it was shoved under the rug whenever possible. What mattered, or was supposed to matter, was her résumé, the professional’s patent of nobility. And so some of those Michigan voters who had gone for Bernie Sanders’s rumpled idealism melted away, because they wanted to bring down the temple, and if Bernie wouldn’t or couldn’t, Trump surely would.

This explanation, which certainly sentimentalizes the white working class, omits a crucial factor. That would be race — still the American dilemma, even when both candidates are white, since one of them was consciously presenting herself as the torchbearer of Obama’s legacy, while the other was picking out fugitive melodies on the xenophobic Wurlitzer. There is no doubt that a sizable number of Trump supporters responded to his wretched appeals. The cretins spray-painting vote trump on the smoke-blackened walls of a burned church in Greenville, Mississippi, are worse than deplorable. They bring to mind Auden’s line about standard-issue evil and its practitioners, those blurry malefactors who “lost their pride / And died as men before their bodies died.”

That said, it would be a fatal mistake to assume that every Trump supporter is a closet Klansman. Their motives are mixed, and we can see what is ugly and awkward and uncomprehending while recognizing that there are human hearts beating in there. “Monsters exist,” as Primo Levi once observed, “but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous.” What we really have to fear, he added, was the common man, the common woman — and how right he was, even at a moment when the monsters are multiplying far too quickly, and flocking to Washington in search of a sinecure. Let’s be clear: I am not letting the bigots and misogynists and hate-clogged troglodytes off the hook. But if Democrats clamber up onto the higher ground of moral superiority, from which vantage point their opponents are bound to appear very small, and no more worth addressing than an ant colony, they will keep losing elections for a long time.

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