(Jon Margolis writes political columns for VTDigger. His opinions are his own.)
[W]hat on earth happened?
Quite a lot. And it’s already been examined and explained, both wisely and not, from several perspectives.
For obvious reasons, here let’s start with the perspective of Vermont, where more than 70 percent of voters did not go for Donald Trump, and where, not surprisingly, many are unhappy about his victory.
Or as Burlington Police Chief Brandon del Pozo said Saturday at an anti-Trump demonstration, “People’s emotions are running very high.” One need not go far in Vermont to find one of those #notmypresident hashtags.
Yes, he is. Or will be.
Nor is it difficult in Vermont to find agreement with the sentiment of Chloe Bennet, an actress who seems to have almost half a million Twitter followers, to whom she proclaimed, “We did not underestimate Trump. We overestimated the sexist, racist, homophobic, incredibly ignorant American voters.”
Or with the substantially more credentialed commentator Neal Gabler, who wrote that “America died on Nov. 8, 2016,” thanks to “the hatefulness of the electorate.”
This analysis can be refuted and rejected, less because it is depressing (though it is) than because most of the empirically testable evidence does not support it.
Most but not all. The “America is a rotten country” interpretation of Election Day can be rejected. But those of us who reject it have to admit that it cannot be dismissed out of hand. There were all those pro-Trump college students — college students! And even at one Ivy League campus (the University of Pennsylvania)! — celebrating with Confederate flags, blackface and crude racial slurs.
“We are still the country that produced George Wallace,” wrote the columnist Jamielle Bouie. “We are still the country that killed Emmett Till.”
Also debatable. But clearly the part of the country that produced Wallace and murdered Till has not entirely disappeared. And its remnants helped elect a president.
A little historical context, though. There’s nothing new about having a sliver of the intelligentsia convinced that it is surrounded by fools and knaves. It was not yesterday that W.S. Gilbert took note of “the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone/All centuries but this and every country but his own.” It was 1885.
And there is ample evidence that Trump’s victory depended less on the remnants of the country that murdered Emmett Till than on the votes of millions of decent people who had voted for Barack Obama four years ago.
They switched to Trump not out of bigotry but because the quality of their lives has deteriorated over the last few decades. There is neither the need nor the space here to repeat all the data, and data is always open to interpretation. But any reasonable interpretation indicates that millions of white people who did not go to college have less (or at least no more) money, poorer retirement prospects, and shorter life spans than their parents did at a comparable age.
Though the direction it took was conservative, what happened Nov. 8 was out of the leftist radical’s playbook: an uprising of the common people (OK, the white, non-Hispanic common people) against what they perceived as an elite establishment that had first impoverished them and then proceeded to belittle them.
The belittling part has been grotesquely exaggerated. There never was a “war on Christmas.” It was a fraud perpetrated by some TV snake-oil salesmen to rile up a targeted niche audience.
But the impoverished part is true enough, and it is time to face what did it.
Trade did it — so-called free trade (though there isn’t much free about it), the wonderfulness of which was embraced by that entire elite establishment, from the right to the center-left, convinced by mainstream economists who “proved” that more trade made a society richer.
They were right. In the aggregate, America is richer because of trade. But many million American households are poorer because of it, or at least because of the way it was arranged. Their neighborhoods have decayed because of it. Their spirits have been suffocated because of it.
And remember: It was selective “free trade.” Doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants and professors were not thrust into competition from lower-paid foreigners.
Neither, come to think of it, were journalists.
All those professionals got the advantages of more trade — cheap clothing, computers, smartphones and sound systems — while their reasonably (or unreasonably) comfortable salaries remained unthreatened from someone in Mexico who’d do the job for less.
And because that elite establishment impoverished these folks, their sense of being belittled is legitimate, if sometimes overblown. People in the Midwest have heard the term “flyover country.” They know they are the object of derision on late-night talk shows. They understand that in a society that honors education and all but worships wealth, those who lack both are going to be scorned.
People don’t like being scorned, or those who scorn them. These days, many people especially don’t like being scorned as racists, which they are convinced they are not.
These are, by and large, hardworking people who think they and their families have played by the rules and that these days some folks are breaking those rules, getting by without working hard, abusing the welfare system.
Because a disproportionate share of welfare recipients are racial minorities, it’s tempting to dismiss those who complain about welfare abuse as bigots, as no doubt some are.
But go to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where working people and small business owners regularly complain about neighbors who could hold down regular jobs but seem to prefer making their living by cobbling together a few public assistance programs. Everyone involved is white.
If among the least attractive habits of some conservatives is to make fun of the poor, one of the most foolish impulses of many liberals is to deny that folks game the welfare system. Some folks will game any system. Complaining that people are abusing the system does not make one a racist.
Neither does doubting that the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 was murder (the Justice Department doesn’t think it was), or that some of the statements in the name of Black Lives Matter are sophomoric. In some circles, though, saying so has become unacceptable.
Racial bigotry has always been and remains America’s great flaw. Even today, too many institutions and policies are designed to preserve white supremacy (or at least they serve that purpose, no matter how they were designed). “White privilege” is real if only because white people never have to think about their race, a luxury not available to nonwhites.
But it is a counterproductive political slogan because most whites do not consider themselves privileged. Certainly the guy who is earning half as much as he did some years ago before his factory job moved to Mexico does not consider himself privileged and is likely to resent being told that he is.
That helps explain what happened last week.
(Correction: An earlier version of this column misattributed the Neal Gabler quote.)
