This article from The Week magazine will curl your hair.
The reporter follows up with hardcore Trump supporters in Pennsylvania, mainly in Johnstown (my mother’s hometown). The upshot: they know Trump hasn’t been able to do the stuff he promised (build the wall, repeal/replace Obamacare, defund Planned Parenthood, bring back the steel industry), but they don’t blame him, and they will love him forever, no matter what he says or does. Period.
They HATE the millionaire, ingrate NFL players kneeling at games to protest “lack of equality,” and the article ends with a racial epithet that made me blink.
Why can’t we all just admit Trump’s base are largely motivated by nativism and white nationalism? Why do we have to pretend they are motivated by economics or an indepth understanding of complex domestic and international policy?
As long as Trump hates uppity blacks, latino immigrants and muslims, and he treats women like their only value is their appearance, his base will stand behind him. The fact that Trump is incompetent, a criminal, a sexual abuser, treasonous, unprofessional, etc. doesn’t matter to his base. As long as he supports nativism and white nationalism he will have a huge ground of support.
Why do we have to pretend his base are better people than they actually are? That is a serious question. I’m tired of people pretending these people are motivated by economics because nobody wants to admit how fucked up America and Americans are.
This is something I said before as well. It seems that some people (in the media and elsewhere) will always try to find the most *neutral-sounding *explanation to explain a highly emotionally-charged subject, or find the most non-controversial reason to explain why a controversial thing happened.
When Trump won, such people latched onto things like “economics” or “income inequality” or “wage stagnation” because such explanations are calmer-sounding. Maybe their motive is that they want to “defuse” the emotionally-charged topic. Who knows.
Yeah. I think a lot of Americans aren’t comfortable admitting how tribalistic we are, or how widespread and deep the current of nativism and white nationalism here is.
Either way, whenever people say ‘its economics’ I always bring up (at least) the following two facts.
Why were only white people in support of Trump? Lots of blacks, latinos and asians struggle financially and they didn’t support Trump at all. If it was an economic appeal, why did it only work on white voters?
Why is education so negatively correlated with Trump support? College educated whites are about 30-40 points to the left of high school educated whites in their Trump support. Even when you control for income, college educated whites are far less likely to support Trump than high school educated whites in the same income bracket. Low income, middle income, high income, etc. Doesn’t matter.
I think tribalism is sadly part of being a human. We have a lot of psychological hangups that can come to the surface in an environment that supports them. A thousand years ago the vikings were marauders who’d pillage, rape and kill. Now those countries are among the most peaceful and civilized on earth (if not the most).
But tribalism is built in. And sadly when you throw in the legacy of slavery that just makes it worse because the purveyors of slavery had an incentive to keep poor whites and poor blacks divided so they wouldn’t unite and overthrow the aristocrats.
I really don’t know what the answer is. If anyone has figured out how to reverse tribal divisions on a society wide scale, I’m all ears. In my experience, the divisions only go down when something so horrific happens that people are forced to confront how destructive the tribal divisions are. Genocides, etc. Even then, that doesn’t always work (antisemitism has improved quite a bit in the west after the holocaust, but is still a major issue in the middle east, etc).