https://extranewsfeed.com/i-listened-to-a-trump-supporter-49a41a9a99de#.7h0hp2r4o
On the journey to somewhere else, OS tripped upon this well-written account. The Ohio woman he describes is, for OS, a composite of so many people in his world. Mr and Mrs OS have been bruised by the events of the past fifteen years, to be sure, but blessedly not shattered like this lady. So many others around us have not been so blessed.
Is The Donald The Answer? Likely not--but at least he's not pretending the problems don't exist. And he knows how to articulate people's anger, and to give them opportunity to bellow it for themselves. Thus the inevitable chants of 'Lock Her Up!'. Normal Deplorables are completely fed up with a governing class that operates by one set rules while imposing quite another upon them.
The essay is a very good read, and OS urges his legions of followers to read and share with friends.
A few quotes to sample here:
I
talked at length with a Trump supporter I grew up around. I wanted to
understand. I respected her growing up. I wanted to know why a person as
kind and compassionate as I remember her is voting for someone like
Donald Trump.
She was a family friend, a
good person. In rural Ohio, everything was tight. Money, jobs. If you
really needed quick cash, she’d put you to work doing landscaping. She’d
pay fairly and reliably for the area.
She’s voting for
Donald Trump. I disagree with her choice, but I understand why she
rejects Clinton so fiercely, and why she’s been swept up in Donald
Trump’s particular brand of right-wing populism. I feel that on the
left, it’s increasingly easy to ignore these people, to disregard them,
to write them off as racists, bigots, or uneducated. I
think that’s a loss for everyone involved, and that sometimes listening
can help you to at least understand why a person is making the choices
they make, so you can work on the root causes. For her, the root cause
isn’t racism. In fact, I remember her as one of the only people in the
area who proudly hired black workers, in a place where that was a huge
issue. She fought over that choice.
But that’s enough background. Let me relay a bit of what she told me.
She’s a person who built her
business from the ground up. She wasn’t rich, but was very comfortable
for the area. She had a nice house, a nice car, and was stable. She
achieved the American dream of not having to struggle. Things changed
during the housing crisis. A landscaping business requires customers who
need landscaping, and people who don’t own homes just don’t need
landscaping. In some of these neighborhoods, one in five people lost
their homes. That almost immediately turns a successful landscaping
business into a struggling one.
Then there was a domino
effect. She couldn’t pay for her lawn-care equipment leases and loans.
That hurt her work efficiency. Then, she lost her car. But that didn’t
stop the payments. Then, she lost her house. She slowly had to let go
all of her employees, until it was just her, hand-mowing lawns for cash
the way you might expect a high school student in the summertime.
She told me that every
week, it seemed there was another default letter, another foreclosure,
another bank demanding more blood from her dry veins. To her, that pile
of default notices and demands for payment looked suspiciously similar
to Hillary Clinton’s top donor list.
She lost everything
she worked so hard for. Obama swore he was going to help. The Wall
Street bailout did seem to help Wall Street. But it did absolutely
nothing for her. She turns on the news and sees how the Dow Jones is
doing better than ever. But that didn’t bring her house and livelihood
back. Liberals insist that Obama’s made her life better. But, now she’s
driving a car that falls apart randomly while having to pay those same
banks for a car she doesn’t own and never will. It’s difficult to
convince someone whose life is objectively worse that their life is
better. And it’s disingenuous to try. You can break down the specifics,
sure. But when someone’s hungry, and you’re busy silencing their
complaints by telling them how well world hunger is improving, you’re
just going to upset them.
This is not a person who is stupid or racist.
She knows Bush caused the economy collapse with his irresponsible tax
policies and wars. But she saw liberals as fighting for the banks’
recovery, to hell with her needs. She sees in Hillary someone who
celebrates that approach. Who measures US success by the success of
multinational mega corporations?—?corporations who undercut and destroy
local businesses. This is a person who grew up in a town with a friendly
neighborhood general store, a locally-owned hardware store, farmers’
markets, florists, and auto shops. All of these businesses closed when
Walmart moved into town. All their owners now work at that Walmart for a
fraction of their previous wages, no benefits, and no hope for
something better, something of their own. And now, she sees a free trade
supporting former Walmart executive about to come in to office, and it
feels like salt in her community’s wounds.
This is a wounded
person. Insulting her or continuing to hurt her isn’t going to help.
She’s swept up in Trump’s message because she feels someone’s finally
listening. Right-wing populism is an awful thing. But desperate
people with their backs against the wall will grasp on to whatever they
feel will bring a change. Neoliberal capitalism is not sustainable for
these people.
Over the past few years, she
tried getting back in her business. But a corporation moved in and is
operating far cheaper, using undocumented immigrant labor. I should
note: She specifically said she doesn’t hold it against the migrant
workers. As she said, “They’ve got to take whatever jobs they can get.
Just like we do. It’s not their fault. They didn’t choose to make prices
so low that legal businesses couldn’t compete.” She was literally a
“job creator”. And she wasbeing priced out by the very people Donald
Trump insists are pricing her out. That hurts everyone, and it adds an
air of authenticity to what he says.
I asked her if she supports
Trump’s Mexico wall. She told me, “It doesn’t matter if I do. Hillary
wants a wall, too. That wall’s gonna happen.” She wasn’t simply making
this up. She’s heard this from many sources, Clinton being one of them.
So to her, the idea of a border wall is a non-issue. I pressed her on
the issue, and she said she thinks, “It’s a waste of money. If someone
wants to cross the border, they’re gonna cross the border.”…
A few times, she seemed
ashamed of things Trump’s said or done. I’d ask her to unpack her
feelings. She said he sometimes upsets her, but “If you wait and wait
for a flawless candidate, you’ll never find one.” She said she’d be much prouder to vote for Trump if he’d tone down his rhetoric.
I
talked to her a bit about Bernie Sanders, to see what she thought of
him. She told me, “He seemed like a nice enough guy. But I didn’t pay
him much mind because there was no way he was gonna beat Clinton.” I
talked with her about his platform, his policy proposals. She lit up.
She told me, “It’s a real shame he didn’t make it.” She told me that if
she knew him, his record, and his proposals, she’d have voted for him. I
said that since the primary concluded, Hillary’s shifted some to adopt
policies similar to his, and I asked if that changed her mind. She told
me, “It doesn’t matter what she says. It matters what she’s done.”
No amount of insulting
her from an ivory tower is going to change her mind. No amount of
guffawing about her lack of education, her self-deception, her racism,
or her internalized misogyny is going to change her mind. The only thing
she’ll listen to is a promise of real change to the system that’s hurt
her. If the Democratic Party can’t offer her a viable alternative, we’re
going to see another neck-and-neck election in 2020, and in 2024, and
in 2028.
