Bubbles
This column is for Bernard Gibson, a good man from the state of Indiana. Late last month, NPR went out to Vigo County there to explain why it flipped from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016. Gibson was one of those interviewed, and here is what he said: “These are real people here. These are not New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles. You know, these are real people that live every day from hand to hand, just have to work to make a living and everything else.”
Oh.
Richard Cohen adduces some facts about his background – not privileged – and says life in the bubble wasn’t just handed to him (unlike a certain son of a certain Queens owner of apartment houses). He says he’s tired of being told he’s not real because he didn’t vote for Trump or because he lives on a coast.
Same here. It’s not the case that everybody who lives in a coastal city (and I guess Chicago counts as a coastal city because of the lake – which means so do Buffalo and Cleveland and Gary and Milwaukee) is unreal because upper class and effete. Cities have a lot of people in them, which means they have a lot of bus drivers and nurses and teachers and truck drivers in them. They have a lot of people who work their asses off and can’t afford to live near their jobs. It’s not all latte-wearing cashmere-sipping millionaires.
After the election, I was repeatedly told that I live in something called a “bubble” and, because of that, I know nothing about my fellow Americans. Well, in the first place, my bubble is bigger than theirs — size ought to matter in this instance — and in the second place, I know plenty. Among the things I know is that Trump voters were played for suckers. After lambasting Clinton as a tool of Wall Street, Trump has so far named four Wall Street figures to his administration — three from Goldman Sachs alone — and an oilman is under consideration. And for the Labor Department, Trump has chosen Andrew Puzder, a fast-food magnate (Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.) who is opposed to a decent minimum wage. This is fast shaping up as a Cabinet of billionaires and, just for leveling, the occasional millionaire.
We always get this. People are repeatedly tricked by the style into ignoring the substance. Trump is a vulgar malevolent asshole, so gullible people somehow decide that means he’s a working stiff, and the fact that he’s made millions by cheating and lying is somehow irrelevant.
Things suck for workers, but that doesn’t mean Trump is going to make them unsuck.
I will not concede that a greater wisdom exists in what is known as “flyover country.” It has voted for a charlatan, a blinged ignoramus who has promised the past as the future. Trump, who lives in a gilded bubble of his own, cannot reverse automation, replace robots with people or blunt American businesses’ compulsive search for the cheapest workforce.
Gibson is one thing. I understand. What I cannot understand is fellow bubble dwellers who tell me, with an air of impeccable condescension, that a vote for Trump was such proof of their own superior wisdom that it eclipsed all doubts about his qualifications, his temperament, his honesty in business and his veracity in speech. These people live in a bubble of their own. It is one that excludes the lesson of history and the demands of common sense. It will burst.
I hope sooner rather than later.
It has struck me, more than once, that talk of this ‘bubble’ is really a repudiation of the ‘American dream’. People on the coasts, who often weren’t born there and usually had (and have) to work very hard to better themselves in order to be part of the ‘elite’ (i.e., people who read the occasional book and enjoy the occasional film that doesn’t have explosions in it), are somehow inauthentic precisely to the extent that they’ve made something of themselves. People with advanced degrees, who’ve mastered the most difficult material in the realms of technology or culture or science or philosophy, are dismissed as somehow lazy or unworthy. Indeed, the hard workers of the coasts seem to be derided commensurately with the amount of effort they’ve put into bettering themselves; journalists, techies, artists, and mid-level professionals are part of no one’s ruling class, but they’re the ones who’ve somehow betrayed the supposedly-rural values of self-sufficiency and hard work, while the aristocracy and captains of industry who’ve never even touched a fucking shovel are the ones who speak most directly to the ‘authentic’ experience. As though it were poverty itself, and not the struggle to abate it, which were virtuous.
And those of us who live in flyover country are laughing our asses off at all these people getting things so wrong, saying people in coastal cities are condescending to the middle of the country, which somehow justifies the middle of the country to vote for a dangerous clown to have the nuclear launch codes. I live and work among these folks and there is no special wisdom here. What there is…wait for it…is an immense sense of entitlement and an excess amount of condescending attitudes towards people on the coasts, especially if said people have an education beyond high school. This is true even of many college graduates out here who somehow seem to believe that living here washes off the stink of education and makes you one of the locals, superior in every way.
This election isn’t about people tired of feeling inferior; this was about people determined to make sure that those who are inferior to them did not get elected again.
I have never seen a movie (especially any by Ingmar Bergman) that could not be improved by a couple of bombs going off, a gunfight or a good car chase.
Preferably all three.
;-)
Great. Fantastic logic. 100% correct. Couldn’t agree more.
So how are you going to flip them back?
They weren’t tricked. They knew.
They just didn’t care, because what they also knew was that the establishment didn’t like him.
Trump wasn’t elected to build things up but to tear them down.
That 1st. quote in the OP; surely people live ‘hand-to-mouth’? Hand-to-hand is unarmed combat.
@6 If you’re (a) poor enough or (b) live in a zombie wasteland, then hand to hand might well describe how it’s perceived at least.
Acolyte, how would we know? We are not real people. We may say hand to mouth, but real people say hand to hand? I suppose…
Well (and with tongue firmly in cheek) if they’re just passin their food from hand to hand it’s hardly surprising they’re hungry.
Person A lives in a big coastal city. A is surrounded by, and interacts regularly, with people from almost every variety of racial and cultural background. People who work in all sorts of industries and professions. People of all religions and of none. A’s city contains numerous colleges and universities, quite a few bookstores (some of which are even independently owned!), theaters, and other cultural centers. The city supports one major newspapers and several small independent ones representing various political viewpoints. Visitors come from all around the country and from overseas.
Person B lives in a small town in “the heartland.” The community is over 90% white, and over 90% Christian. Half the town’s jobs are provided by a single employer, and most of the others are dependent on that industry in one way or another. The nearest college or university is over a hundred miles away. There’s no local newspaper. Hardly any outsiders come to the town.
Which person lives in a bubble?
This one was badly written, but I thought that the point of most of these bubble criticisms was to say that there needs to be more of an attempt to communicate to the people of the ‘heartland’ in their language. The way Sanders can sit down with a Trump voter, and in five minutes, have HER saying, in her own words, “The business owners have gotten rich off the work folks like us do, and they SHOULD pay their fair share of taxes. That’s what needs to happen.”
When people lecture, harangue, or condescend, it puts the back up of the audience.
Trump was a horrible liar. He spoke poorly. He contradicted himself. His entire history showed his incompetence and his contempt for the needs of others. And yet, he knew how to reach his audience.
I really think that the idea that we have to SELL our ideas is an important one, and that we should pay attention to the allies we have who are trying to tell us how to sell those ideas.
That’s not the point of the ones I’ve seen.
Samantha, most of the ones I’ve seen are saying that the Democrats pay too much attention to diversity, and they need to quit talking about and to LGBTQ, people of color, women, etc, and start acknowledging the aggrieved white middle-class male voter in the middle of the country. Only they don’t put it that way. They couch it as identity politics. Democrats are tied to special interest groups. Democrats are oblivious to working class voters (because people of color are not working class voters in this vernacular, nor are women). Democrats need to work on meeting the needs of these non-special interest, hardworking, salt of the earth, working class voters in the heartland. The problem is, what most of the non-special interest, hardworking, salt of the earth, working class voters in the heartland want is to make sure that they can say ugly things about people they don’t like (with no consequences), prevent women from choosing what to do with their own body, discriminate in hiring, schooling, and serving people who don’t meet their idea of “proper American”, and force other people’s kids to pray in public schools.
Oh, and by the way, why is it that LGBTQ, women, and people of color are special interest, and white, middle-calss, Christian males are not? Because that’s the way it is, sweetie, so just shut up and go back to your corner.
That.
If these articles had been merely knowing advice on how to communicate, I wouldn’t have bothered to challenge them. That’s not what they were at all. They were yet more entries in a perennial favorite, the repudiation of “identity politics” aka “special interests” by people who don’t need them. They’re banal, they’re smug, they’re wrong, they’re selfish, and they’re crap.
iknklast: I agree with most of what you posted there, but there’s one line that I think we have to at least qualify a bit:
That’s true of the folks in that class who also voted. But we know that a vast population of Americans did not vote at all this year, and that this is just the peak of a long trend. Those are the folks that can be swayed by intelligent messaging, not the ones who actively voted for the orange nightmare. The progressive message can appeal to them, but it’s going to be because of enlightened self-interest, not because of altruism. I’m okay with that–I genuinely believe that the progressive agenda is fully capable of being right enough to actually work in the so-called heartland, provided we sell that part of the message, too.
The important bit, of course, is to not abandon or neglect the ‘identity politics’ in the process. Be honest–tell the voters, “Hey, we are going to fight for fair trade policies that won’t screw over small factory towns; we’ve got a plan for all the coal miners who’re getting laid off; we want to make sure your children can actually earn their way in the world with honest work, just like you did, because your grandparents fought for a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. And yes, we’re also going to fight for the rights of people of color, of the LGBT population, and of women in general. And we think that’s the best way to a better, stronger, healthier America, and we want you to be part of it.”
There’s been pieces about the ‘heartland’ that haven’t had this ‘abandon identity politics, ye who enter here’ vibe; they’re more about getting offices and volunteers in every county, about putting a neighbor’s face on progressive ideals, and not trying to just rely on the population centers to carry the vote. Those are the ones I think Samantha’s been seeing, and they’re quite valid.