Post by the Scribe on Dec 25, 2020 9:34:11 GMT
Confessions Of An Elitist: Why People Love Donald Trump So Much
www.bedlamfarm.com/2020/04/15/confessions-of-an-elitist-why-people-hate-donald-trump-so-much/
by Jon Katz
“Elitist: one who is an adherent of elitism: one whose attitudes and beliefs are biased in favor of a socially elite class of people.” – Merriam-Webster.
I lived on the East Coast in cities much of life. I got kicked out of two colleges; I worked for the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and CBS News, among the pinnacles of “Fake News.” My daughter went to Yale.
I’m not into labels, but everyone else is, so I guess you could call me an elitist.
And this is the problem with labels – left, right, elitist, bigot – it’s so easy to forget that there is a person behind the label, we can just hate the label. Isn’t that the other virus tearing the country apart?
For the past 15 years, I’ve lived in rural communities in upstate New York. My understanding of the Donald Trump phenomenon has changed.
Ever since President Trump was elected, I began asking my neighbors and friends why they voted for him. And almost all of them voted for him.
Almost everyone I ever knew in the other world has asked me why Donald Trump’s followers love him so much, and how can they stand him?
When I lived in Montclair, N.J., everyone hated George Bush. When I moved to Washington County, N.Y., everyone hated Barack Obama.
Where I live now, everyone loves Trump (almost), and back where I came from, everyone hates him. Personally, I prefer a more nuanced way of looking at things.
I am neck-deep in Trump country, and happy here, I am treated better than ever.
I like most of the people who share my community very much and admire them. They are at least as smart as I am, and most often much wiser. They are honest, hard-working, family, and country loving.
Until a generation or so ago, they were the heart and soul of the American Experience, they were the foundation upon which America was built. Today, their world is in shambles.
“Whether our politicians and we know it or not,” wrote Wendell Berry, “Nature is a party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”
Now, the people who live in rural America are mostly hanging on by their fingertips, sicker than anyone, poorer than anyone, addicted more than anyone, out of work more than anyone, dependent on Wal-Mart more than anyone, dying younger than anyone.
They are not bigots; they are not dumb.
I have been thinking hard about this boiling volcano for a while, and now and then writing about it. And here’s why it’s so important. The President I see raging on television every day, pronouncing himself a Ceasar, lying and dodging and pointing fingers in desperation is self-destructing.
But the nightmare he spawned will never go away as long as the part of the country we call rural America is in ruins.
I will offer this, It would be much more productive for people to stop hating Donald Trump so much and instead take some time to figure out why he is upon us, and so much more loved than any of us will ever be.
Yet, here is the real mystery:
Donald Trump is not loved much by anyone, even those who vote for him and defend him and are eager to vote for him again.
They are not stupid. They are not blind. They know what he is. They apologize for him all the time.
So what is it, then?
They just hate what we are, what I am, and what we have done to them and their families and communities for generations now.
They don’t love Donald Trump because of Fox News, which is mostly watched by cranky old 65-year-old white men and hysterical reporters, or even because of windbags like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, skilled entertainers and propagandists both.
They love him because of me. And perhaps, because of you. I suppose it is the nature of elitists to be hated, because so many of us have a tendency to feel superior to other people.
We did it to ourselves, and if anyone is going to fix it, we will, or nobody will.
___
Sometimes it feels like Donald Trump hates me, that he is out to upset and worry me, that he is determined to dismantle every good thing I believe has been done in recent years in our country.
There seems to be nothing I care about that he doesn’t hate, or ridicule, and that is awful for anybody to see, day after day. I don’t understand this elitism stuff. My family was poor, I worked every day in my life for everything I have, and as it happens, I don’t have much. I think I make a poor elitist.
President Trump seems determined to undo almost everything I believe in, and in the cruelest, most arrogant and destructive way. It’s unsettling for me to have a President who hates me. I always counted on them to take care of me.
I’m not being narcissistic, I’m sure that President Trump has never heard of me and cares nothing about me.
But his hatred of the things I love seems personal, even vindictive. In his drive to thumb his nose at me (I’m afraid I don’t know how to label myself, but I think I know how he would label me) and people who are like me, the question comes up again and again: why do people put up with him, and forgive him so much?
I know that many people hate Donald Trump, they wake up stewing about him, they see him in their dreams (or nightmares), they believe he is a liar, a misogynist, and if he can pull it off, a dictatorial tyrant.
They believe he is cruel, offensive, divisive, and racist. Much of that is true.
I live on the cusps of two worlds – the elitist and the rural. I feel for both sides.
Almost everyone I know here voted for Trump. When I sit in Jean’s Place munching on my excellent egg sandwich, I am surrounded by Trump followers – everyone in the restaurant loves him and can’t wait to vote for him again.
They could not be nicer to me or make me feel more welcome.
I decided several years ago to not and waste my time hating Donald Trump, I’d instead try to understand where he came from and why he is still around. And I’d rather do good than fight about it.
If you spend any time in rural America and step back and look, you will find a once vibrant, once wealthy, once vital heartland now in ruins, riddled with addiction, and poverty, forgotten, hollowed out.
The downtowns are empty, the storefronts sealed up, the bridges are falling apart, the farms are dying, young people kill themselves all the time, the jobs and factories gone, the children forced to the cities, working for people they hate and who care nothing for them.
Rural poverty in America is an emergency, reports the Advocacy Group Save the Children. Poverty in rural America is higher than in urban America. New job growth in rural America is three times lower than urban America.
Disabilities are nearly twice as high in rural America as urban America. Death rates for unintentional injuries such as drug overdoses and motor vehicle accidents are 50 percent higher in rural America than in urban America.
In 2019, health officials reported that suicide rates among adults increased 41 per cent with the most rapid growth occurring in rural areas. Health officials cited underemployment, poverty, and low educational attainment, “especially in rural areas.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture found that 75 per cent of American farmers have been impacted by the opiod crisis. In 2017, 70,237 people, mostly from rural areas, died of drug overdoses. Polls showed most Americans had – have – no idea those numbers were so high.
The military has long viewed the rural poor kids as fodder for its forever wars.
President Trump, the savior of rural America, has done nothing to address any of these issues or problems.(Neither did his predecessors.) He is as or more popular than ever in those communities.
While politicians fought with one another in Washington, the children of rural American took drugs that killed them by the tens of thousands: Berry, the poet of rural life, wrote this about the devastating opioid epidemic:
“People use drugs, legal and illegal because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs because we have lost each other.”
And because the corporations have taken all of the lands too. “We don’t have callings anymore in the country,” one farmer told me, “if we are lucky, we have part-time jobs. I grew up on a farm. I mow lawns now.”
The economists killed the spine of rural life, the family farms, by deeming them too small and inefficient for the global economy. Milk prices haven’t risen since 1980.
The bureaucrats and insurance companies killed off the hospitals and left the heartland without doctors or health care.
The Democrats killed off all of the jobs and sent them to Mexico and China, promising wealth and prosperity for those left behind. They lied.
The political scientists say demagogues show up when the government breaks its promises to people. The trade pacts were a giant whopper.
You don’t need a lot more knowledge than that to understand Trump. The jobs of their fathers and grandfathers, the foundation of their lives, and their villages and towns just dried up almost overnight.
The Republicans, best friends of the Corporate Nation, have been quick to exploit the fear and anger and devastation in rural life by blaming immigrants and their political opponents, especially Democrats.
They pretended to love these people more than anybody else. It’s a lot better than no message at all.
Desperate people will believe almost anything, even that their leader is the solution rather than the problem. No one else has even troubled to lie to them.
Most of big money flowing into political coffers from corporations and cities comes from the city and into Congress, not from dairy farmers.
It is an article of faith in the country that their communities and lives were ruined by the people they – and President Trump – calls the “elitists,” the Ivy League graduates, the entrenched federal bureaucracy, the fake news journalists, CEO’s, bankers, snobs and snooty rich people, the hypocrites who pretend to care about the poor, but only some of the poor, the ones that live close by, the ones they can see.
Trump’s bugaboos are immigrants and socialists; people here tell me all the time they dread socialists taking power in Washington.
“Do you really think Joe Biden is a socialist?,” I asked one woman who says she is terrified of him.
“Isn’t he?” she answered. People up here are not in the national conversation. Reporters do not ever come here. They don’t pay too much attention to the news.
Nobody seems to care about the poor in rural America; nobody ever talks about them much.
Don’t these people know he is lying to them, people ask me?
No, I said, they have already been lied to for many years. All President Trump has to do to be loved is to be is angry and attack the elites and disrupt the system and the people who run it.
That is perhaps as close to victory as they will ever get with him as their leader.
___
Here, envy and grievance and rage are woven into the public consciousness. They don’t hate people; they hate the labels.
The people who live here believe almost all of the money and federal aid and worry are going to minorities and newcomers – many in our country illegally – and rarely to them.
They came to hate the cities that stole their sons and daughters and ruined their callings and wrecked the soil with their mega-corporations and emptied their towns and churches and meeting places and fairs and obliterated their businesses with box stores like Wal-Mart.
The odd thing is that they see Trump is pretty much the way that I do, once you get them talking.
They hate his tweets, his cruelty, his arrogance, his unabashed hypocrisy. Arrogant billionaires are not loved in the country.
But he songs their song, music to their ears.
They just hate us more than they dislike him and deeply.
They believe we see them as stupid and grubby bigots. They think they are often considered “deplorable” by the elitists, one of the most ill-chosen and damaging words in American political history.
President Trump may not have saved them in his first term or even helped them much, but he wasn’t the one who wrecked their lives.
It’s not personal. In the years I’ve worked and lived up here, I have experienced nothing but kindness and generosity. In theory, I should be someone Trump people hate. But they are not haters, not face to face. When I am in trouble, they come running. When I need help, they are there.
Some have become good friends, more than I ever had to live in New York City or Boston or New Jersey.
In their way, they are the most tolerant people I have ever known: what you do on your land is your business. I meet gay people all the time up here who fled to the country years ago to escape prejudice, live in peace, and get out of the cities, where they were so often hated and abused. They say they have never felt harassed or unsafe here.
When I left my first farm in Hebron, a neighbor, an old farmer with a huge tractor, rode by to say goodbye. He shook my hand and wished me well. As I was walking away, he turned to me and said, “Hey, my wife tells me you are a Jew. I don’t know that I ever met a Jew before. (He almost said, “and you are nice!”)
Nothing wrong with that,” he said, leaving me with a fresh-baked Apple pie.
An outlier, I moved to a land of outliers. An outsider, I live in a world of outsiders. There are not many elitists around here.
In the fast few years, my heart has been touched more than once by the relentless collapse of rural life, the drugs, the dying farms, the empty storefronts, the shuttered hospitals, and rotting factories, the lost jobs, the lost children.
It is relentless and heartbreaking. Every other week, I take pictures of a dying dairy farm, and watch a farmer break down and cry as his cows are hauled off to a factory farm in Pennsylvania, where they will never put their hooves on grass again.
I give them the photos; I can’t bear to publish them anymore. They will all vote for President Trump.
They are not haters; really, they love people; they love their dying communities and their friends; they hang onto them for dear life.
I decided in 2016 that I wasn’t going to spend too much time hating President Trump.
It accomplishes nothing except to tie his followers more closely than ever to him and reinforce the idea that elitists out there are out to get him.
Because so many of us think they are bigoted and stupid. A middle-aged man in a bar told me that every time Trump gets attacked by the media, he gets another family in the country to love and support him.
I think Governor Andrew Cuomo has the right idea. If there is a better way than Trump, show it, don’t promise it, do it. Don’t argue about it or belittle the people left behind or disagree. Just do it, at long last. Get something done.
They would love to vote for somebody else, somebody who doesn’t lie, who doesn’t tweet. But not for the people who have been taking their lives apart for generations now and gloating about it.
Will things get better? If we help these people get their lives back, I think they would. If we don’t, it will happen again.
People in cities have no idea what’s happening in the country. I sure didn’t.
We are becoming a country of radically different classes, and not just billionaires and the poor – the wealthy urban class, the poor rural class.
What kind of justice is it for the smartest and wealthiest and best educated and most engaged people to turn their backs on half the country? Why shouldn’t people be angry and hate this system?
Think about this: not a single journalist in Washington, New York, or Los Angeles, not one pundit on the cable channels understood what was happening in 2016, or predicted it, or heard the cry of rage and anger until it was upon them until it was too late.
It will take a long time to unscramble that mess.
How is that possible? Because elitists don’t come to the country to talk to people, they sit at their computers or yell at one other on cable news channels.
As a former journalist, I have to forgive these people for hating them and not believing a word they say. I’m not one to glorify the old days, but I remember a much-admired colleague – David Broder, a Washington Post political writer and inspiration for me – traveling the country for a grueling full year before a presidential election to gauge the mood.
I can guarantee he would have seen Trump coming. He was never once surprised by an election.
Because it was right there to see, had anybody looked or asked. And they are still not looking and asking, even after the Trump revolution.
Wendell Berry asked the elemental question, the one that most explains Donald Trump, in his book “What Are People For?”
“The great question that overs over this issue (the future of rural America), one that we have dealt with mainly by indifference, is the question of what people are for? Is their greatest dignity in unemployment? Is the obsolescence of human beings now our social goal? One would conclude so from our attitude toward work, especially the manual work necessary to the long-term preservation of the land, and from our rush toward mechanization, automation, and computerization.”
Climate change is, blessedly, one of the favored political issues of the elite. But nobody seems to worry much about the destruction of life and land in our heartland, on our farms.
That is the rural experience with journalists and politicians. And their sad history seems to doom them to being abandoned again. For them, nothing will have been lost that isn’t already lost.
Trump does not create anger and grievance; he explores it, he feeds off it; it is his genius. Most of us didn’t even know it was there. You can blame him for eating off the flesh of his followers, but not for destroying their way of life.
The rural economy and culture are dying – dead businesses replaced mostly by abandoned businesses and chain restaurants, and if the town is lucky, a Wal-Mart. A good job is waiting tables at Chile’s.
What I’ve learned is that these are just people, good and bad, just like the rest of us, just like me. They would like to have health care, farms to work, kids who can stay at home, places to shop, futures to aspire to, some money in the bank, a few years in Florida before they die.
In a sense, Donald Trump has nothing to do with their rage. He is just a reflection of it.
Someone needs to help them restore their faith in government. I doubt it will be Donald Trump.
You can’t kick people in the head for years and then wonder why they are angry and want something different. I don’t need to hate Donald Trump. As a veteran elitist and happy ex-employee of Fake News, I know a self-destructive man when I see one.
I’ve always believed that Donald Trump is his own worst enemy, far more dangerous than I could ever be to him by calling him names. I’ll leave him to his work, and me to mine.
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
–Wendell Berry.