I was surprised when Donald
Trump was elected President. I thought his personal weaknesses were so
outrageous that it would never be close.
I hadn’t tried to understand
his appeal, because he was such a colossal jerk. I forgot that the American
public is often mesmerized by powerful jerks, people who are bad and show it
off. Millions of TV viewers paid to see the mobsters on “The Sopranos”, continuing a public fascination
with showy criminals, real and imagined, from Al Capone to Bonnie and Clyde to
the Godfather.
I didn’t see the importance
of the Trump persona. Trump was rich, white and free. He could do whatever he
wanted without apology, and get richer doing it. People like the Clintons fawned all over him and acted as if his constantly shifting, remarkably ignorant political
ideas were just fine with them.
His magnetism for people who
venerate celebrity gave his ideas some credibility. That’s all he needed.
His message was simple: I can
do the economy better than anyone else. He had been saying that for decades,
but in the years after the worst depression since the Great Depression millions
of Americans wanted to believe him.
The experts of capitalism,
moving smoothly among Democrats and Republicans and politicians all over the
world, had brought us to a terrible place. Just like they said it would, the
world economy had been booming for decades. After each unpredicted temporary
implosion, the engine started up again. Unprecedented wealth has been created
and shared around among the already rich, the experts themselves, politicians
of all stripes, and quite a few people of modest means who found ways to
succeed by being lucky and working hard.
I was one of those modest
people. My father the refugee and my mother the secretary and the whole country
told me that I could succeed. I could go to college, get a good job, keep it,
make a better living. It’s all come true for me, and for many others I know.
But most Americans were going
nowhere. Hourly wages for the typical worker have stagnated for 40 years. Those without a college degree did even worse. The
median household income of a high school graduate fell by 25%
from 1973 to 2013, as over 7 million manufacturing jobs disappeared. Instead of
making automobiles, workers were serving hamburgers.
The hope for success, the
so-called American dream, decayed, as the number of permanently underemployed,
paycheck-to-paycheck survivors has grown.
Why not believe the promises
of a larger-than-life businessman, whose wealth is beyond spending, who not
only says he feels your pain, but who has a simple answer. I can fix
everything, because I am great at whatever I’ve done. I understand now how many
Americans, especially in the American places that the experts have forgotten,
would see hope in the big man’s message.
From thousands of
conversations with voters since the election, analyzed in countless reports, it
is clear that other parts of Trump’s message resonated widely, finding a bigger
audience than I had believed or wished. Trump’s adoption of the
birther myth told us everything about that side of his appeal. Seeking an ever
bigger stage to present himself as master of the universe, the rich man found a
nasty idea to make his own. The former Democrat could easily take the whole
stupid story away from the few crazies who had been promoting it and put his
face on it.
The birther fantasy was
always going to fail. No matter how many stories Trump made up about
investigators and discoveries, his quest was a failure. Except that so many
Americans wanted to believe that Barack Obama really didn’t deserve to be
President.
Facts didn’t matter. Race
mattered. For Trump, success didn’t matter, just trying was enough.
So Donald Trump was elected
by a combination of the economic hopes and the racial resentments of white
America.
I get that now. What I don’t
get is that after 9 months of accomplishing nothing but alienating people
across the world, creating a cabinet where the most important question is “Will
he resign?”, reneging on promises to offer better health care for most
Americans, not getting Mexico to pay for a wall, sucking up to the Russian
hackers into our elections, draining no swamp and improving nothing for
anybody, and lying, lying, lying, those white Americans are sending money
to the billionaire Trump’s campaign fund.
Almost everybody who believes
that white people have no social or economic advantages over black people supports Trump.
Nearly half of Trump supporters think that whites face the most discrimination
in America today. 70% of Trump voters agree that “white people are currently under attack in this country”.
So it doesn’t matter if Trump
tries to take away their health insurance or give giant tax breaks to the rich.
It doesn’t matter that he can’t deliver on any of his campaign promises. It
doesn’t matter that he displays dangerous ignorance about every issue he steps
into.
Is anything better for anyone
in America because of what he has done?
No. What matters is that he
has made American racism respectable.
Steve Hochstadt
Springbrook WI
Published in the Jacksonville
Journal-Courier, October 10, 2017
No comments:
Post a Comment