White Trump Voters – Through the Eyes of a Southern White Guy

by Moe White –

To focus Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992, James Carville wrote, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Lately, it’s just been the stupidity.

For generations the American left has assumed that we are a “classless” society. We don’t (officially) support an aristocracy of birth, we don’t have a House of Lords, a monarchy, inherited titles. Rather, the American Dream promises that anyone, regardless of birth or background, can rise to the top.

The reality is quite different. Long before the 2016 election, before 1980’s “Reagan Democrats,” before Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” before the Know-nothings of the mid-1800s, even before the election of the boorish Andrew Jackson in 1828, the founders understood that the ignorance and biases of “the great unwashed” would make them terrible stewards of democracy.

The franchise was originally limited to property owners and “gentlemen,” but even in America’s early years, liberal Enlightenment thinkers understood that “elevating” working people required educating them. They believed that anyone able to learn would be able to lead—as brilliant, self-taught leaders such as Alexander Hamilton, Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, and Harry Truman, among many others—have long demonstrated.

This same understanding led the African American community to value learning, even at the risk of their lives in southern slave states, where black literacy was punishable by death. The virtue of education has been the lodestar of African American aspiration and achievement for generations.

But education is different from intelligence. America includes the “poorly educated” whom Donald Trump loves, but also the simply stupid (who love him). We have always had a “lower class” who worked as coal miners, laborers, and farm hands, generation after generation, many of them exhibiting no interest or ability in raising themselves; however accessible and affordable education may be, some people are simply incapable of benefiting.

True, some coal miners’ daughters (and sons) became lawyers, some factory workers sent their children to college to be doctors, and some farm children became scientists, writers, and intellectuals. But for every miner whose son or daughter became an executive or college professor, there were 10 or 20 or 50 whose sons followed their fathers, uncles, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers into the mines. The cream rose to the top, and the curds stayed below.

Even when liberals offered opportunities to stand together, improved their wages and benefits and healthcare, opened doors to high school and college, when those same workers became the great white middle class that drove the American GNP to undreamed-of heights, and shared in the wealth—they then turned around in 1968, 1980, 2000, and 2016 to support political leaders who openly promised to undermine all their gains.

Why? Because in tandem with making the American Dream available to them, liberals insisted that it should also be available to everyone else: blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, anyone who no longer wanted to stay “in their place.”

Whatever satisfaction the working class gained from having better houses, cars, RVs, and vacation trips (to give their money to billionaires in Las Vegas!), they were susceptible to any politician who threatened that if “others” got the same opportunities, it would be at their expense. They swallowed the fear-mongering of Wall Street moguls and populist racists and religious fanatics, and enthusiastically voted against the very people who had elevated them in the first place.

Once in power—haltingly in 1969, more aggressively from 1981-88, arrogantly from 2001-08, and with an absolute vengeance beginning in January 2011, after Republicans won mid-term elections based on their ability to manipulate resentment and racial hatred of a black president—the mogul-ocracy has worked tirelessly to undermine the programs liberals have enacted over the past century to help miners, farmworkers, and factory laborers.

In 2016, those dimwitted, resentful, frustrated, fearful, poorly educated people, swallowing false claims that the left was responsible for the problems the right had created—came out in droves to vote for a man who would think nothing of shooting them on Fifth Avenue if they got in his way. They elected a Congress that explicitly promised to destroy all the programs they rely on and benefit from—Obamacare, federal support for public education, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare—while giving trillion-dollar tax cuts to the one percent.

Why are they so gullible, so susceptible to the blandishments of the right? It’s not because they’re “the poorly educated”; it’s because they are, fundamentally, stupid.

They don’t think; they feel. They don’t reason; they react. They don’t analyze information; they respond to stimuli. They are people whose “thinking” was described by David Brooks as “fireflies flashing in a bottle: random, disconnected, meaningless.”

They cannot differentiate between proven facts and false narratives or distinguish actual evidence from an easily disproven claim; they cannot separate their dreams, fears, hopes, and beliefs from the reality around them. It’s not that they’re intellectually lazy, or ignorant of the facts; it’s simply that they are stupid.

That’s why progressives’ attempts to reach out to them invariably fail. Explaining that they are voting against their own interests falls on deaf ears. No matter how earnestly they try, liberals cannot, and will not, convince them to rethink their political positions: their convictions are based on faith, not facts. That’s why they vote for someone just like them: a stupid man who thinks he’s a victim.

The left must write them off. Educate the ignorant, teach the uneducated, persuade the persuadable, but don’t waste time trying to smarten up the stupid. It can’t be done.

Facts From The Front is a monthly column by copy editor Moe White in which America’s Constitutional democracy is defended against ongoing assaults by those who prefer less palatable alternatives: oligarchy, autocracy, theocracy, feudalism, fascism, and other nondemocratic methods of government. Among the qualifications for White’s commentary and ridicule are hypocrisy, dishonesty, corruption, unbridled greed, flat-out lies, and sheer idiocy on the part of public figures.

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in “Facts from the Front” are those of the author. They do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of The Urban News.