Going through this morning’s campus mail, I found
a hand-addressed envelope among the usual clutch of publisher’s circulars and club
announcements.
This is unusual. I rarely get personal mail through the
college. The missive was formally addressed
to “Mr. Unassuming Scholar” at my college’s main campus where I’d taught during
summer session. That explained the delay
between the day it was mailed and my receiving it at the satellite campus where
I normally work. I surmised it was from
one of the students in that class, but there was no return address.
I’d hoped it was good news about the sender’s transfer
to a prestigious four-year uni, or an award or scholarship won. No such luck.
Instead, the envelope’s only contents were a clipping from the Wall Street Journal. It was an editorial by David Gerlenter
published last week. Its heading: “The Real Reason They Hate Trump.”
Evidently the sender considered me to be one of
the titular they. The gist of the
article is that those in the “Left” (i.e., mainstream centrist Democrats who
oppose the president’s policies) do not have any program aside from attacking
him. More to the point, “they” hate
Donald Trump because he’s a larger than life version of the average American. The sender highlighted what he (presumably it
was a he) believed were the most important passages in case I missed it in my
liberal cluelessness.
In a week which witnessed such horrors as the
Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and the mailing of pipe bombs to
Democratic politicians and the murder of two African Americans by a white
supremacist in Louisville, receiving a clipping from an anonymous critic is beneath
trivial. But in one sense it’s all of a
piece, reflections of the sea change in an already poisonous social climate which
existed well before the 2016 election.
Incivility has become an accepted social norm. We choose our “enemies” and proceed to
dehumanize them. For a few of the less
balanced among us, it is a short leap to violence.
Most of what we experience is petty nastiness
from the people we disagree with or have chosen to dislike us for who we
are. Unreasonableness festers on both
sides of the divide. Among some of my colleagues,
political discussions that don’t categorically vilify Trump are met with
knee-jerk hostility. Early on in the
Mueller investigation, a friend asked when (not if, when) the president would
be impeached. I said that as far as I
could tell The Donald’s misdeeds did not rise to treason or bribery or high crimes and
misdemeanors. Her expression hardened,
her eyes narrowed slightly, and she asked in a strained voice why I was taking
his side. I wasn’t defending him by any means;
I was simply reading the tea leaves of the news and offering an opinion of what
was politically feasible.
The Gerlenter article gets one thing right in
that Democratic leaders have been tone deaf when discussing the very working
people the party has historically championed.
Barack Obama saying that they needed to let go of religion and guns and
Hillary Clinton describing Trump supporters as “deplorables” are the most cited
examples of this. Such attitudes
percolate through affluent liberal social circles, an implicit criticism which
is as much of working class culture and tastes as it is of their political
preferences.
This trend cuts both ways, and again it’s often
a matter of style. While affluent liberals
take a condescending approach, some of the symbolic blows struck by the Trump
crowd verge on the childish. Sometimes
it’s merely offensive bumper stickers and T-shirt slogans. Other times it’s less benign such as the
practice of diesel pickup owners disabling emissions controls so as to produce
sootier exhaust while passing Priuses, a pastime called “rolling coal.” Sometimes it takes a dark turn in the form of
racist, anti-immigrant, or homophobic websites and social media posts.
The White House’s protestations that the
president is not responsible for the uptick in hate crimes are factually
correct on their face, but it is a disingenuous argument nonetheless. Donald Trump has benefited enormously from the
bottled-up anger of poor whites. Gerlenter’s
thesis that Trump is what half of America sees in the mirror as their idealized
self is spot on. As another commenter
said (and I don’t remember who), Donald Trump is a poor American’s idea of a
rich person. He’s the product of mass
frustration over the perceived loss of an American dream.
What’s left unsaid, or more accurately unacknowledged,
is that even in the era of our nation’s “greatness” many of those sporting MAGA
hats still would not have thrived. The
myth of equality in America is that it’s myth.
Always has been. Consequently, the
only thing propping up the self-image of many Trump supporters is the prospect
of preserving white male dominance.
Conservatism is all about hierarchy, and the
only arena in which working class whites historically benefited from hierarchy
was through racial and gender dominance.
That’s what’s driving the PC backlash; it’s an assertion of the supposed
right of straight white men to dominate.
Trump’s antics with women, his xenophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric,
his insensitivity to the rights of others, his bluster, his substitution of his
own judgments for the actual expertise of others, and his gaudy, shameless
persona are all a figment of their collective id.
As for the assertion that liberals are devoid
of solutions or a viable political program, I pretty much agree. For three decades the Democrats have merely tread
water; instead of offering an alternative to the Republican program it instead swung
to the right so as to hold on to any kind of base.
Like my unnamed correspondent who sent the clipping, like Mr. Gerlenter,
I can plainly see that the Democratic Party is adrift and rudderless. That said, my unnamed correspondent misjudges
my political stance. I am not a
liberal. I am a progressive.
Republican candidates have muddied the
ideological waters in the run-up to next week’s election by tarring centrist
Democrats as dangerous radicals. Whereas
I once inwardly bristled when a professor in graduate school described the
public of being politically unsophisticated, I’m beginning to think she was on
to something.
What were simple ideological descriptors have
become epithetic projectiles. Most
progressives are not dangerous radicals, and the typical liberal certainly is not. And yet half the voting public is being gradually
convinced this is the case if they aren’t there already. And although the mainstream Dems are short of
new ideas, my fellow progressives, particularly those who espouse the idea of
participatory democracy, are not only forging new ideas but organizing on the
street as well. Maybe their efforts
will ultimately stem the tide of political climate change for the better…if they’re
given half a chance.
