Arlie Hochschield has written an important article in The Nation, “Inside the Head of a Trump Supporter.” Subtitled “ Mike Schaff’s community was destroyed by the failures of a private company, but he’s voting for America’s most notorious businessman. Why?,” I expect it to be undernoted. But the article has two-fold significance. As backdrop, it tells an important story of environmental degradation and the callous indifference of Republican elected officials in Louisiana. Its greater significance, in my opinion, is how it highlights both the challenge and the opportunity for Democrats to reach all those decent white middle class males who have been lured by the Republican mendacity machine to vote against their true interests for decades now.
Mike Schaff worked himself up from hardscrabble working class roots valuing family, community, initiative, perseverance, responsibility, and self-reliance — in other words, core American values we pretty much all share, regardless of color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or immigration status. Yet Republicans have managed across five decades of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, as embraced and extended by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh, to instill a victim mentality in people like Mike Schaff.
Author Hochschield summed up Schaff’s feelings like this:
He had struggled hard to climb out of the world of a poor plumber’s fifth son, to make it to a salary of $70,000 a year with a company that built oil rigs, to a third and at-last-right wife, and to a home he loved that was now wrecked. At the entrance gate to the middle class, he felt he’d been slapped in the face. For progressive movements from the 1960s on—in support of blacks, women, sexual minorities, immigrants, refugees—the federal government was, he believed, a giant ticket-dispensing machine in an era in which the economy was visiting on middle-class and blue-collar white men the sorts of punishment once more commonly reserved for blacks. Democrats were, he was convinced, continuing to make the government into an instrument of his own marginalization—and media liberals were now ridiculing people like him as ignorant, backward rednecks. Culturally, demographically, economically, and now environmentally, he felt ever more like a stranger in his own land.
That is the mood, the frame of mind that Trump is exploiting. The exploitation is not new, it is just more vivid and unvarnished now. Republicans both incubated and exploited that sense of marginalization through close to five decades of profound mendacity and deceit. It is more out in the open and crude now because the veil is coming off. The only way to keep the subjects in thrall is to turn up the volume.
So people like Mike Schaff deal with the cognitive dissonance between their lifelong loyalty to the Republican Party and their real world experience by clinging to their perception of victimization and taking on faith that Donald Trump will “switch off that marginalization machine and restore the honor of his kind of people.” The marginalization is a myth, of course, but all the attention given publicly (and controversially, courtesy of Republican provocateurs) to various insular minorities (attention which is really only attempts to mitigate oppression of those minorities) gives it traction with persons distrustful of government.
The question thus is how do Democrats reach red state white males? The party has taken some steps in the right direction, but “$15 and a union” has an urban bias, and the party needs to reach ordinary working people, and white males in particular, in rural areas as well.
Hochschield suggests wounded pride is behind white male support for Trump despite the utter discontinuity between the true interests of people like Mike Schaff and anything Trump represents or would effect in office. Pride, of course, is considered a cardinal sin for a reason. “Pride goeth before a fall,” as they say, and white males have been taking the fall for Republican duplicity for decades. But in Hochschield’s account of Mike Schaffs’ psychology, I see opportunity. For if Democrats can communicate to ordinary working Americans in red states that they truly honor their fortitude, hard work, and values — their place in the American pantheon and foundation — there will be a seismic shift in American politics.
As soon as Democrats can find a way to persuade this demographic that its interests are not being subordinated to those of other groups, the ego will become ally rather than obstacle: the ego wall will crumble and the ego's fury at having been duped, directed against the Republican Party, will be of thermonuclear dimension.
