Bubble shmubble
Ah the old latte-drinking elitists trope – it just won’t go away, will it. Kevin Baker at the New Republic hates it as much as I do.
The most irritating media trope to emerge in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election is the idea that it was a rebuke to “condescending” liberals who live in our own “bubbles.” Steve Schmidt gave us a preview on MSNBC even before the race for the White House was decided. “The people who are for Trump are not embarrassed to be for Trump. This is a fiction of New York City,” the former Republican political consultant told us early on election night. “This is a fiction of the New York City, Acela Corridor imagination, who are embarrassed for these people. This is part of the condescension.”
Condescension my ass – if you’re not embarrassed to be for Trump you should be. Trump is a horrible human being in literally every way we know about – he may have been a loving, kind, understanding father, but if so it’s certainly a well kept secret. It’s not condescending to think people should be embarrassed to support Trump; it’s treating them like grown ups who have to own their choices.
J.D. Vance, author of the bestselling Hillbilly Elegy—about whom so much commentary has now been written that a foreigner would be forgiven for thinking that at least two-thirds of all Americans are hillbillies, and that the rest of us do nothing with our waking hours but, well, condescend to them—informed us in a New York Times op-ed that liberals might revere the military, but it’s Trump voters who actually join it.
Trump voters were people who vote Republican, for one thing. They were people who prefer Republican policies, which favor rich people and corporations. They were bible-huggers. They were, as a bloc, richer than the people who voted for Clinton.
But the reasoning, I suppose, that the people who voted for him primarily because he’s a sexist racist bully are the ones who were rebelling against the condescending bubble liberals. But how is it “condescending” to oppose sexism and racism and bullying? How is it not even more condescending to assume sexism and racism are immovable, inherited, an “identity”?
The whole idea that liberals live nowhere but in their own bubbles has become such a commonplace that it was turned into a (pretty funny) Saturday Night Live sketch. Yet at last count, well over 65 million Americans voted for Hillary Clinton, which would make for a helluva lot of bubbles across this country. But then, it’s always easier to invent figments like “the Acela Corridor imagination” to explain the people who don’t agree with you.
Yes, Democrats make them up as well. Witness “basket of deplorables,” or “clinging to their guns and Bibles.” But we were the ones whose candidate ran on the slogan, “Stronger Together.” It wasn’t us who went to rallies in shirts that read, “Trump That Bitch,” or shouted, “Lock her up!” We were the ones who wanted to talk about how we could all move forward, not who we could demonize or deport. Our candidate was the one with the laundry list of practical, immediate ideas about how to help Americans knocked flat by the global economy, instead of some vague palaver about how one man alone could fix the modern world. So who, exactly, is living in the bubble?
…
Is it really so condescending that we should vote for the candidate who would keep in place the footholds and safety nets that helped us? Or does the real condescension come from the likes of those who would infantilize white working class voters, making out that they cannot help but vote against their own interests if they even suspect that someone, somewhere is looking down on them?
Yes, it does.
The trouble wasn’t condescension, it was kind of the opposite.
The trouble was the negative consequences of a Clinton presidency were explained pretty well, all things considered. Her support for the TPP would mean harm to the rust belt economy, whatever harm could be done by her lax email policy was pretty well explained, her foreign policy fuckups were very well explained etc…
All by a press which was outwardly in her favour (Trump’s coverage, though ubiquitous, was pretty universally negative toned. Clinton’s meanwhile was that specific flavour of positive that sometimes seems designed to make people hate someone.)
The fact that Trump is a crooked idiot wasn’t given enough depth to really hit home with what he is. Given that Trump is in my view exactly the same kind of person as my country’s president, here is what I predict you will see in the next decade, once Trump is actually in office:
1: At first Trump will be seen as better than expected, there may even be glimmers of hope that he might be a good president. Jacob Zuma spent his first year in office popping up in municipalities and rousting sleeping mayors out of their beds, pointing out that they had jobs to do and what the fuck were they doing not at the office?
Trump has announced that he is going to do a victory tour – but also that he would keep rallying during his tenure. You’re going to see him visibly smacking local Republican pols who don’t show up for work on time, and he will very likely put in a show of going to Flint and demanding the water crisis be solved. Do not be fooled, Trump’s actions will have the appearance of doing things, without actually doing them.
Besides, Trump’s coming off a very low base with expectations.
2: Trump will spend government money on his own stuff. Trump will end up getting “security upgrades” to his property. You will have an equivalent to the South African term “Fire-pool” – but despite factions of true believers breaking away from Trump to create even more fascist leaning political groups (Such as happened with the EFF) Trump will probably win a second term, and be maintained as president by the Republican majority in Congress and the Senate, even as the economy tanks. Why?
3: The opposition will maintain its focus on the highly populous cities and urban areas. Part of this will be lack of vision, most of it will be because of outright intimidation and violence directed towards opposition politics in the rural areas. In South Africa part of what characterises our politics is that the ANC has groups of people who will physically attack the opposition if they come out to the rural areas to campaign, Trump is going to take a leaf out of that book.
4: The Republicans will start killing each other. I’m not talking figuratively. The degree of corruption that Trump’s administration will introduce to America will be such that positions within the party and country will be so sought after that there will be assassinations over them. One of the side effects to using violence in your campaigning means that your party becomes full of people who see that as a means to politically advance.
5: Unemployment will hit record highs. Trump’s policies will render American goods less attractive on world markets, which can and will prefer goods that a: won’t poison them and b: won’t bring about the end of the world. Trump’s anti-environment, anti-quality stances were played as protectionist, but precious little ink was spilled on how they render America fundamentally unattractive as a brand.
6: This will be blamed on shitty world markets, despite the fact that America’s economic health is generally one of the major drivers of world markets. South Africa’s economy generally relies on mining, and works in a counter-cyclical manner. When world markets are poor, our gold is actually worth something and our major import, oil, is a whole lot cheaper. With the ANC we haven’t managed to take advantage of the weak world economy the way we should, in part because we didn’t invest in power stations but also because most of the money in government was going to lining our ruling class’s pockets.
Yet South Africa’s government consistently blames world markets for its failure to perform.
7: Trump will turn on Putin. Trump will need a bogeyman to scapegoat for his failures, he will need the ability to paint some foreign actor as being a third force actively working to bring down his government. Putin will be that third force, feeding into conspiracy think. Do not believe him, Trump’s fuckups will be Trump’s fuckups.
I’m struck by the way that ‘normalizing’ Trump voters twists reality. The strongest comparison I can think of is the way that the 9/11 killers were translated into the Downtrodden Opwessed by so much of the Dhimmi Left. Flying jets into buildings, and voting for Trump, are evil acts in themselves. The people who do either are Bad People, or spectacularly deluded. They do not earn any respect, nor do their acts suggest that they should have been ‘listened to’ or appeased before hand.
Here’s the thing with elites: it actually means that they’re better than said Trump rubes. They’re mad at their betters because they’re terrible and proud of it.