What's Tony Thinking

I Don’t Get It (And Neither Do You)

We’ve concluded the walking pilgrimage portion of our trip and are soon to head, by train, to the Hiroshima area. For part one, we were a group of 12. Six from Australia and six from the U.S. We enjoyed the people in the group and feel a bit sad to have said goodbye to them. Along with our guides, we had bonded.

On our third day together one man in the group asked me about the support for Trump. He confessed himself baffled. How can so many be behind such an amoral and indecent person? I think he thought that I, as a minister, might know Trump supporters, given Trump’s strength among many evangelical Christians.

I said, “I’m as baffled as you.” I went on to explain that my part of the Christian world was generally vehemently anti-Trump. So I wasn’t much help to my new friend when it came to explaining how so many people could support this dangerous con-man.

But my hunch is that a lot of those who vote for Trump aren’t doing so just because they love him or buy everything he says or does. Sure, there are those who are rabid, all-in Trumpers. But I suspect that many of the people I do know, as least casually, that are likely to vote for Trump (my sample being folks from rural, northeastern Oregon) do so for reasons other than Trump himself. Some may even be holding their noses while they cast their ballot for Trump.

For many their support has more to do with distrust of the left and of the Democrats, who have tilted further left under Biden than expected. Their own lean to the Republicans may have more to do with where they sit in our culture than it does with Trump himself.

Just before Labor Day David Brooks wrote a hypothetical column, dated November 6, on how Trump, pretty much despite himself and despite being a jerk, had managed to win.

In it, Brooks pointed to five “turbines of Trumpism” that powered his hypothetical victory. It struck me as an insightful piece, perhaps prophetic. It also helped to explain to me, and might to my perplexed fellow traveler, how people could be supporting Trump. I suggest using the link above to read the whole piece. Here I hit the high points.

The five “turbines of Trumpism,” deeper causal drivers for  GOP support, with a brief synopsis, are:

“People like the red model more than the blue model. The fastest-growing states by population are mostly governed by Republicans, including Florida, Texas, Idaho and Montana. The fastest-shrinking or -stagnating states are mostly governed by Democrats, including New York, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania and Hawaii. The red model gives you low housing costs, lower taxes and business vitality. The blue model gives you high housing costs, high taxes and high inequality . . .

“Democrats are the party of the ruling class. The most important divide in American life is the diploma divide. College-educated folks tend to vote for Democrats, and high-school-educated folks tend to vote for Republicans. Thus, the richest places tend to be Democratic. The Democrats dominate the media, the universities, the cultural institutions and government. Even the big corporations, headquartered in places like New York and San Francisco, are trending blue . . .

“Social and moral cohesion. Republicans can be rugged individualists when it comes to economics, but Democrats can be rugged individualists when it comes to morality. They are more likely to hew to a code of moral freedom that holds that individuals should be free to live by their own values. Individuals get to choose their own definition of when human life begins. Any form of family and social life is OK so long as the individuals within it give their consent. This is the privatization of morality . . .

“General dissatisfaction. Kamala Harris practiced the politics of joy in this election, running a hope-filled and sunny campaign, as any incumbent party tries to do. But many Americans are not feeling it. As the fall general election campaign got unofficially underway after Labor Day, only 25 percent of Americans were satisfied with the direction of the country, according to Gallup, while 73 percent were dissatisfied. According to Ipsos, 59 percent of Americans said the country was in decline, 60 percent agreed with a series of statements conveying that ‘the system is broken,’ 69 percent agreed that the ‘political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people,’ and 63 percent agreed that ‘experts in this country don’t understand the lives of people like me’ . . .

“The Blue Bubble problem. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama lived in the shadow of Ronald Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s victories. Clinton and Obama both understood the Blue Bubble problem: If you spend your life listening to what Democrats in the big cities say to one another, then you will misunderstand America. Both Clinton and Obama took tough stances to show that they were not Blue Bubble natives: the crime bill, welfare reform, Obama’s stances on illegal immigration, gay marriage and fossil fuels. Clinton triangulated and Obama talked about transcending left and right . . .”

Both my perplexed fellow traveler and I tend to look at and listen to Trump, shake our heads and say, “I don’t get it.” And we don’t. We live in blue bubbles. He in L. A., me in Seattle. And we are both pretty much part of the culture’s elite, he as a retired financial executive, me as a mainline minister with multiple graduate degrees. As Brooks notes, “If you spend your life listening to what Democrats in the big cities say to one another, then you will misunderstand America.”

There’s also a tendency amongst many to think that because Trump is so appalling that anyone and everyone who supports him is also an appalling human. Probably not a good, or fair, assumption.

While I devoutly hope that Brooks’s hypothetical Nov. 6 column is wrong, I won’t be surprised if it isn’t.