2017 — Do we gotta?
Happy New Year. As we drag ourselves out of the sludge of last year to face 2017, The Jourmudgeon keeps thinking about the opening lines of Woody Allen’s “My Speech to the Graduates” from his book Side Effects, published more than 40 years ago:
“More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
(While he was at it, Allen also satirized politicians, and our distrust of them: “Unfortunately our politicians are either incompetent or corrupt. Sometimes both on the same day. The Government is unresponsive to the needs of the little man. Under five-seven, it is impossible to get your Congressman on the phone.”)
As the president-elect courts the Russian despot Vladimir Putin, parallels between Putin’s regime and Trump are already being offered, with some validity: He has surrounded himself with oligarchs. An oil oligarch with close ties to Russia will be responsible for executing and in some cases setting our foreign policy. The combined net worth of Trump’s 17 cabinet-level appointees is about $6 billion. By contrast, according to Politifact, the combined net worth of at least one-third of Americans is zero.
This cabinet of oligarchs will report to a charismatic despot who will play each against the other, rewarding loyalty but leaving his followers guessing about what constitutes loyalty because he changes allegiances and commitments so often. New York Times columnist Russ Douthat hopes better angels dwell in Trump, but he’s still waiting for evidence of that. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/opinion/the-donald-trump-matrix.html?emc=edit_th_20161228&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=27174500
Pundits and journalists are still mulling how such a man could win, and why so many of them did not see it coming. Were the pollsters caught as off guard as everyone says? Not really, but people reading the polls were, mostly because they weren’t reading the fine print. Consider: In nationwide surveys, the ones most people paid attention to, most pollsters predicted a Hillary Clinton popular vote win by anything from a whisker to 5 percentage points, nearly a landslide in today’s polarized political environment. Clinton won the popular vote by about 2.8 million, or 2.3 percentage points. That was about in the middle of the range of poll predictions. It was also well within most scientific polls’ margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Obviously, state-by-state is where the polls broke down, and that accounted for the wildly inaccurate Electoral College vote predictions. Again, though, considering the margin of error, almost every state’s popular vote came in where predicted. But the three that didn’t – Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — were big misses, and they made all the difference. Neither the news media nor the pollsters found the relatively few voters who mattered there, or they did and didn’t realize that the voters were lying to them. Still, the claim that journalists never find or speak to white, working class Middle Americans is grossly exaggerated. (See, for example, findings by my colleague Alecia Swasy: http://www.poynter.org/2016/actually-journalists-arent-failing-rural-america/440342/)
Where the press failed was in our failure to recognize what Saleno Zito did in The Atlantic back in September, in an observation that has since been paraphrased endlessly: The press takes Trump literally but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously but not literally. Many Trump voters – maybe not all, but enough to make a difference – believed his message even before he uttered it, and so they didn’t need proof and weren’t inclined to pay attention when told his evidence was bogus. Worse, they saw the fact-checkers and their findings as arrogant and self-righteous.
In an op-ed in The New York Times, political analyst David Paul Kuhn addressed those who put Trump’s victory down to simple bigotry: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/26/opinion/sorry-liberals-bigotry-didnt-elect-donald-trump.html?emc=edit_th_20161227&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=27174500
Kuhn overstates the case. Many who voted for Trump are undeniably bigots and misogynists. David Duke, white supremacists and white nationalists are all delighted at his ascendance. For everyone else, his bigotry and misogyny weren’t a deal-breaker, or they thought he didn’t mean it, which are about the same thing. It’s the other side of the coin that paid for millions of Trump voters to opt for Obama in 2008 and 2012, when Obama’s race was neither deal-maker nor deal-breaker. For them, and apparently for Kuhn, their vote for Obama was proof they couldn’t be racists.
What, then, was motivating those former Obama voters, the ones who made all the difference in more than 200 counties in the Midwest alone? They reacted similarly to Trump’s egregious misogyny and jingoism as they did to his racism, conflating any reporting of it with the hypersensitive excesses of the so-called “P.C. crowd,” as obvious and ripe a target for them and Trump as the bigoted rednecks they themselves were often stereotyped as.
They trusted Trump – enough — for three reasons: First, every time he said or did anything that was manifestly bigoted, jingoist or sexist, they saw something in themselves. (The classic example was Trump’s impression of a New York Times reporter with a physical disability.) Who among them hadn’t said or done something similarly “un-P.C.”? They knew it was wrong, but they didn’t think themselves bad people for yielding to such weakness once in a while. And they didn’t care to be lectured about it. Similarly, when it came to the will to believe the promises Trump was making to them, they didn’t see his bad-boy behavior as disqualifying.
Second: They saw Hillary Clinton as equally flawed – or more so – but unwilling to acknowledge it, and thus hypocritical and deeply untrustworthy. Clinton apparently didn’t indulge in racist or sexist comments, but they saw plenty that was worse in her, because nobody survives a long career in public service without a trail of moral transgressions and serious misjudgments. Trump was the naughty boy with the good heart, his transgressions harmless at the end of the day. Clinton was Eddie Haskell, oozing the patina of care but rotten to the core. The fact that her husband had championed NAFTA while her opponent had no public service to corrupt him – and whose wealth would shield him from corrupting influence – potentiated both the Clinton and the Trump mythology. Every righteous pronouncement by Clinton set off her corruptibility more starkly. Every apparent misstep and falsehood by Trump merely underscored that he thought like them, and understood them, because he was fallible like them.
Third, as has been widely reported in 20/20 hindsight, the voters in the Rust Belt who made all the difference had reason to be suspect of anyone who had had anything to do with the political mainstream of either party over the past two decades. (Remember that Trump won the Republican nomination over any number of establishment Republicans, all of whom loathed him.) Nationwide, unemployment in the Obama years dropped from a peak of over 9 percent to 4.6 percent today. Real GDP is up 15 percent, including a spike of 88 percent in auto sales. The total number of jobs is up 8 percent, the percentage of Americans without health insurance is down almost 40 percent. The stock market is up 180 percent. American manufacturing workers are still the second-most highly compensated in the world, after Germany’s. But in five Rust Belt states – Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the picture over the past 16 years, through one Republican and one Democratic presidency, has been far bleaker. Pennsylvania has lost 35 percent of its manufacturing jobs, Michigan and Ohio 33 percent each. In the five Rust Belt states there are 1.2 million fewer manufacturing jobs than there were in 2000. This all cuts to the core. Life expectancy for the poorest women in America is 14 years less than for the wealthiest, and 13 years less for men.
After 16 years of promises from mainstream candidates on both sides, Rust Belt voters didn’t need to see the statistics. They were living them. And they seized on the only person of either party who seemed to be listening. Nationally, Trump’s share of white male voters with no college degree jumped 18 percentage points over Mitt Romney’s in 2012. He got a bump of 16 percentage points in households with family income below $30,000.
So, what are we left with? Can Trump deliver to those voters, assuming he even wants to? Of course not. His bread-and-circuses style of governance is no match for problems that are long-standing precisely because they are complex. And he faces a Republican Congress that for the most part loathes and mistrusts him as much as it is beholden to continuing to enrich its biggest donors. The millions of voters who decided to trust Trump more than Clinton are neither foolish nor innately evil. But in their desperation they allowed themselves to be misled. It has been ever thus with demagogues. Because complex problems remain unsolved we yearn for simple solutions. When someone offers those simple solutions, particularly in new packaging, or at least in language we are not used to hearing, he gets traction.
The millions who voted for Obama and then for Trump because they believed Obama didn’t deliver on his promises are fated to be disappointed again by Trump – soon, and much more bitterly. Our tough problems will grow in complexity when people start trying to shoehorn them into simple solutions. Identifying scapegoats doesn’t solve problems, it masks and then exacerbates them, and distracts us from the hard but real fixes.
Again, to almost 66 million Clinton voters – some three million more than voted for Trump – Trump’s outrages were a deal breaker, and Clinton was either the voice of compassion or at least better than Trump. But for Clinton, those were the wrong three million voters, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
By the way, if you are looking for an alternative to Woody Allen’s vision, here’s one: http://www.americamagazine.org/issue/pro-unity-and-pro-voice
Whoa! I actually started out writing about this as now and
well I notice that a number of the troubles covered
here coincide with what I have published. Still you’ve
acquired here the freshest info. https://goo.gl/mzjFhF