A friend sent me a mail pointing at an article by David Greenfield in FrontPage Mag, a conservative magazine. It’s a bit interesting in that it reminds me of a parasite on the flank of an animal – it’s trying to hijack this election’s phenomenon for its own purposes.
This is not an article of close analysis, nor does it pretend to be. Rather, it reaches for lyricism as it attempts to describe the Trump voter bloc. No doubt it gets some things right – but as it goes along, it certainly has an ulterior motive. Here’s a chunk:
It’s midnight in America. The day before fifty million Americans got up and stood in front of the great iron wheel that had been grinding them down. They stood there even though the media told them it was useless. They took their stand even while all the chattering classes laughed and taunted them.
They were fathers who couldn’t feed their families anymore. They were mothers who couldn’t afford health care. They were workers whose jobs had been sold off to foreign countries. They were sons who didn’t see a future for themselves. They were daughters afraid of being murdered by the “unaccompanied minors” flooding into their towns. They took a deep breath and they stood.
They held up their hands and the great iron wheel stopped.
The Great Blue Wall crumbled. The impossible states fell one by one. Ohio. Wisconsin. Pennsylvania. Iowa. The white working class that had been overlooked and trampled on for so long got to its feet. It rose up against its oppressors and the rest of the nation, from coast to coast, rose up with it.
They fought back against their jobs being shipped overseas while their towns filled with migrants that got everything while they got nothing. They fought back against a system in which they could go to jail for a trifle while the elites could violate the law and still stroll through a presidential election. They fought back against being told that they had to watch what they say. They fought back against being held in contempt because they wanted to work for a living and take care of their families.
This is an attempt at co-option, at running to the front of the crowd and pretending to lead, in order to mingle their agenda with that of the crowd, and claim authenticity and priority – regardless of the truth of the claim. How do we know this?
First, there’s the appeal to the tribal instinct. The “… white working class that had been overlooked and trampled on for so long...”, rallying around the color of their skin, of all things.
As if they’re the only ones suffering. He may only see the small towns of white Protestants, drying up as the global economy causes chaos; I see the ghettos, wherein any sort of protest gives you a better than average chance of being shot – if you’re black. I see the American Indian “nations”, driven there by the invaders who could never keep a treaty sacred, who hounded them from their lands and bottled them up, both figuratively and literally.
But, for Mr. Greenfield, it’s all about terrifying the reader into swearing allegiance to his cause.
Illegal immigration? Everyone knew it was here to stay. Black Lives Matter? The new civil rights movement. Manufacturing? As dead as the dodo. Banning Muslims? What kind of bigot even thinks that way? Love wins. Marriage loses. The future belongs to the urban metrosexual and his dot com, not the guy who used to have a good job before it went to China or Mexico.
All of these issues raise the spectre of the Other, while never addressing the issue of us all being in this together. It plays with the problem every older American faces: becoming irrelevant, watching the shared value system become something they don’t approve of. It takes legitimate issues and trashes them, appealing to the simple, wrong solutions which most often sway voters.
Second, there’s the falsehoods. “They were fathers who couldn’t feed their families anymore. They were mothers who couldn’t afford health care,” and soon we see Obamacare blamed – without reference to the objective fact that rates of insured citizens has never been higher, while costs, until this year, had slowed the meteoric rise that characterized the market prior to the ACA. Perhaps Mr. Greenfield has a short memory, but I remember, from the early 1980s onward, how coverage shrank and employees saw more and more of their income going to health costs every year. I recall one older employee snapping at the insurance representative, “This is bob-tailed coverage!” Poor representative didn’t know what to say.
Never quite uttered, but implicit in the article, is the suggestion that they suddenly rose up and voted against the Democrats. No. Statistics indicate that, besides it being a negative whisker of a victory (by which I mean the popular vote was for Clinton), the loss came from a failure of Democrats to show up, for whatever reason. Much to the vexation of the progressives and the rest of the Democrats, their nominee didn’t do nearly as well as the fractious, rebellious Republican nominee.
So at the end, it becomes a divisive taunt, as Mr. Greenfield imitates the very people he disdains:
It’s midnight in America. CNN is weeping. MSNBC is wailing. ABC calls it a tantrum. NBC damns it. It wasn’t supposed to happen. The same machine that crushed the American people for two straight terms, the mass of government, corporations and non-profits that ran the country, was set to win.
Instead the people stood in front of the machine. They blocked it with their bodies. They went to vote even though the polls told them it was useless. They mailed in their absentee ballots even while Hillary Clinton was planning her fireworks victory celebration. They looked at the empty factories and barren farms. They drove through the early cold. They waited in line. They came home to their children to tell them that they had done their best for their future. They bet on America. And they won.
And, of course, the sad part is that a lot of this is right. But the blame goes to the wrong place. Yes, small towns are in trouble. Some farms are dying. But it’s not Washington at the center of the problem.
It’s progress itself.
So, as much as we want to perceive things as static, history teaches otherwise. As fast as things changed in the 19th century, the 20th and 21st centuries have seen far more. No longer do we manually labor in the fields, dying early and crippled. Now machines do much of it, forcing the population to move away in search of jobs – and small towns slowly dry up.
Really, there is no blame to place. No one plans these things, at least not since the Soviet Union went away – and its plans were notorious for their ineffectuality.
But I want to make one more important point. Up above, I referred to things. This was not for lack of a more precise term, but because I meant it precisely – because things are tangibles. It may be a house, it may be a homosexual, it may be corn, it may be a black man.
And, too often, we pay attention to the thing and not the process, or perhaps more specifically, we do not pay attention to the principle. How many people hold sacred the principles of Truth and Justice, vs. how many point at the Bible and use it to condemn homosexuality and abortion? How about the Fire Eaters, and their justification of slavery on the basis of the Bible?
We’re upset because things are changing – but the principles, provided they’re good principles, never do. We want to do things the same way as we did 50 years ago because it’s easier and, honestly, we have that game figured out. But maybe not so much for the guy on the other side of the tracks, who never had a chance because he happened to have the wrong color of skin and, you know, the Bible, it does say that they’re inferior. Somewhere in there. We’ll figure that out later.
I know I’m far afield, but this fixation on the moral value of things is a central pivot for many of the horrible tactics we see today. One hundred years ago, coal-fired power plants were good because they provided power to the citizenry, allowing them to be warm in winter and cool in summer, to light their houses and run their factories.
Think about it. Coal is good. There’s a moral judgment for you. It was true. But then it becomes solidified, ossified, a moral column in our roof that can never be removed, doesn’t it? We heard Mr. Trump allude to this during the debate, in which he talked about the immense riches underground, of burning that coal cleanly – and of the coal mining jobs threatened by regulation.
Coal is good. Hear the whisper? Make an idol of the thing.
Fact of the matter, though, is that now we’re at 7.5 billion people, and burning enough coal to power even half of them is warming up our planet at an alarming rate. Australia’s going through burning summers. Soon enough, I’m expecting Kansas and Nebraska to start burning, if trends continue. The phrase “Great American Interior Desert” rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?
Coal is good. Right? Right?
Stop it. Stop fixating on things. Start thinking it terms of principles. Life is good might be a good place to start. (But only in moderation? Now there’s a good discussion.) Justice applies to everyone.
That lump of coal? Great stuff, years and years ago. Not so much now. Those small towns? Trump won’t save them, not without throwing something else away.
Things change.
