As I thought about it, and the more I read the shock, awe, and disgust that my friends were rightly venting on Facebook, my mind eventually turned toward trying to figure out *how* this happened. My assumption was that there was something I must have missed. And I think it was the same thing that all the polls and talking heads that I paid attention to all year had been missing. There really was a "silent majority", and they made their voice collectively heard that Tuesday night.
Who are they? I began to wonder. To figure it out, I first threw away all the studies that I had read about how Trump supporters are high-income whites, or non-college educated white males, or whatever. Because the sources telling me that were the exact same ones that also had Hillary winning from anything to a 3-point lead to a landslide.
Let's start with this question: are over half the American population racist, xenophobic, sexist, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ maniacs that will swallow any populist lie they're told? The answer, of course, has to be no. There's no way this country could exist in the form it does if that were true. Even further than that, I don't even think it's possible that they're all so ambivalent that they're okay with supporting a candidate who is. Because there are tons of non-election-related surveys over the span of the past ten years that say that the country is gradually but steadily leaning *away* from those things.
So why did they do it? The answer, even though I was too stunned to see it at the time, lay in the election analysis maps that they kept referring to during the televised coverage. It was repeated in state after state... blue cities, with red in between. I remember seeing the same thing in previous elections, although it had been less pronounced. This time, however, I started stitching it together with a couple other things I had been thinking about...
My parents both grew up in a small town in Ohio. It was a thriving community back then, a company town that had been built up around a local manufacturing plant for a major industrial supplier. Two of my four grandparents worked for it, and a third was in an ancillary development company. But the plant closed in the late 80s. The town is still there, and several of my relatives still live in the area, but what does a town do when its major economic driving force is gone, and it's basically in the middle of nowhere, thirty miles from a major interstate? Honestly, there's not a lot it can.
That's why the people who live there now can't see themselves included in the years of Obama progress. It simply didn't affect them, and the situation gets worse as income, industry, and young people slowly bleed away to the big cities. When you live in a situation like that year after year, without a clear solution in sight, I imagine that you'll be willing to put up with an offensive blowhard *if* he tells you that he can fix it, if he tells you that your situation is not your fault (and on that point, if not much else, he's right). He says that it's the fault of the immigrants that are simultaneously a drain on the economy and also "taking" good jobs, religions you have never come into close contact with, evil corporations that are moving overseas, welfare moochers, etc. It must sound particularly good if the alternative is four more years of the same.
In no way here am I sticking up for Trump, or endorsing him. Honestly, it's like someone asked me to fill out a questionnaire about what I find most odious about humanity, and then turned it into human form. But what I'm trying to figure out is *why* a generally rational person -- which, like I said, we have to assume most of his supporters are -- would act like they've lost their damn mind and actually vote for him.
It struck me, when network news started describing who was voting for Trump on that fateful night, that I was kind of hearing myself being described. "These are people who are struggling," they said. "They live paycheck to paycheck, and any increases in their salary are not enough to match the increase in the cost of living. Gains in the economy aren't applying to them, and the feel that they're being left behind." Wow. That's me. My wife and I work one-and-a-two-thirds full time jobs, raise our child, live in surprisingly affordable housing considering on its location, and yet we worry about paying the bills. We don't live beyond our means, and in general we have what we need to get by without a ton of hardship, but we're well below the country's median income. I went ahead and tallied it up, and was surprise to find that my personal yearly income over the past six years has increased by a shade over 6%. Now, this figure spans three different companies, two of which I was laid off from due to their financial difficulty, so I have to say the recession paid a large part in this. But still, there was a time when a 3% yearly increase was considered the standard, enough to cover the general cost-of-living increases and the usual rise in health care costs. This isn't to complain, I'm just saying that I think that, while we're living on the fringe of an affluent, major metropolitan area, we're still just one layoff, accident, or mechanical breakdown from seriously losing our hold on things.
I know we're not alone. Many of our friends, I'm sure, are in the same boat as we are. It's kind of the reality of American living these days. While the economy was recovering, we accepted this, but should we anymore? Why aren't we one of the 49-whatever-% that voted to be led by a disgusting, misogynist bully? I'm starting to form an answer for that.
The Obama years have brought many things back to the country since it was handed to him on the brink of collapse, and I will always commend him and his team for stopping that from happening. We took serious damage, but in general it was a huge nation-killing bullet that he helped us dodge. But you know what I admired most about him as a President? It was the social change that he fostered. By the time he leaves his office, he will have significantly advanced women's rights, provided a safer national environment to fight racism, rape culture and homophobia, and in general made America more inclusive for everyone. For me, economic growth has taken a backseat in the last few years as I've seen gay marriage legalized across the board, grassroots anti-racism movements gain momentum, and women's roles in government and business escalate. These are the main advances I don't want to see go away under a Trump presidency. One thing I am sure of here is that I will do whatever I can to prevent rights being rolled back for anyone who's gained ground in these comeback years.
So that's my main personal agenda: continued social progress. I am positive that we can't help but prosper economically when over half the population (women and traditional minorities) aren't hamstrung and limited in how much they can contribute to the country. All the boats will rise, I say. But I say this with full awareness that, despite everything, I have the financial luxury to make it my priority.
So why was this such a rope-a-dope to most, if not all, of us Hillary supporters? I have to take a look at where I chose to go for my reassurance. Yes, I was one of those people who would open Nate Silver's 538Election website in the morning and periodically refresh it all day. It would dictate my moods, watching the red and blue squiggles thrillingly diverge and converge. And why shouldn't I have believed it? I chose that particular source because its founding principle was utter impartiality -- Mr. Silver's goal has always been to find the truth behind the numbers, utterly devoid of the urge to craft a story arc out of them. I found it refreshing, based on the skewed journalism I saw everywhere else, and in his goal he very well might have succeeded. He wasn't doing the polling himself, which was where the flaws entered the equation.
But I digress. What were my other sources? Well, they mostly came to Facebook in the guise of major metropolitan news sites and pitches from celebrities. I didn't piece it together until it was too late that all these sources originated in -- aha! -- big cities. It truly did seem like there was a tidal wave of Hillary support, but what I didn't consider was the online persona I had unwittingly crafted for myself. You see, as the tide of Trump support began to rise, I began to obsess when I saw one of my friends post something pro-Trump, gun-positive, or anti-Muslim. In my head, I would try to craft the perfect counter argument regardless of how much thought (or lack thereof) they put into their post or share. It would dominate my day and would never amount to anything I deemed worthy to respond with, so eventually I found it was just mentally less taxing to unfriend or block them.
But I see now what I was doing there. I was drawing up my bridges, creating a protective barrier of like-minded folks around me. And while it has been a source of great feelings of support and solidarity for me, it totally cut me off from what was happening in the rest of the country. (By the way, I don't see this practice changing. I won't voluntarily put up with hate speech in any form.) So while the Republican forces were marshaling, I was blissfully unaware, looking forward to another four years of prosperity without realizing that my family was only marginally profiting from it all. It was the same trap that our major news institutions and everyone else who had a real voice in the media fell into.
So what do we do now? Well, for one thing, we have to be even more vigilant than before to keep social progress from backsliding. What we Democrats all focused on was the support Trump had from racist and anti-immigrant groups, and this was well-founded. They're the scariest, most vocal and self-delusional minority in his base, and that's what we've trained ourselves to pay attention to. But they support him for a different reason than most do. Eradicating hate is not the only thing we need to do. But he sad truth is that we misled ourselves. We've ignored the bigger picture, which is that there is a vast segment of the country for whom the current system is just not working for, and hasn't been for a long time.
And so I come to a truth that keeps getting demonstrated to me... and I hate it because it goes against everything I was taught as a child. Even so, I'm forced to admit that it must be true: If you see something as a black-and-white conflict between good and evil, you're not looking closely enough. The problem is always more complex and harder to fix.
(Note: As I was working on this, I noticed that there were other people around the Internet that were seeming to come to the same conclusion. While this reassures me that my thinking may be on the right track, they often say it much more clearly and with better jokes than I ever could. Case in point, David Wong's recent article for Cracked that he wrote *a* *month* *ago*: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/.)
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