Trump voters aren’t “morons.” Just white.
THE STANCE THAT TRUMP SUPPORTERS are morons can be, admittedly, a temporarily satisfying one, if you're in the mood for a good old “ain't it awful” session.
The problem is that, as a thesis, it's unlikely to be true and it explains nothing. It does not get to the core mystery: How the hell can his supporters sanction what he does? By calling them morons, we simply throw up our hands and come up with what scientists would call a bad explanation.
Bad explanations are what prehistoric humans came up with when they heard thunder and said, “Well, that must be Wilbur, the Great Caribou, drumming his hooves across the tundra of the sky!” You see? I just made that up. Works for me!
The problem is that you can “just make it up,” too, and it will work equally well. Pretty soon my idea about Wilbur the Great Caribou is in conflict with your belief about Jasper the Beaver of Heaven smacking his big tail on the clouds, and we’re at war.
Sheesh! Calm down, Beaverites! It’s OK, we’ll convert!
It’s how you deal with reality when you are missing vital pieces of information, that lightning is electricity, and thunder is sound which propagates in waves…look! Melinda the sun goddess came out and chased the caribou away!
I’ll stop making things up now.
It's simply not possible that so many “morons” summoned up the energy to get to the polls, or in fact could even exist; and, having voted, could view Trump’s reign of senseless terror and approve of it. Sure, some did, but if they all did, we'd be dealing with a moron pandemic that might even throw the coronavirus pandemic to the fold-down seats so we could come to grips with it.
Could it be the water? Air quality? Public education? What might be causing the alarming atrophy in the brain cells of American voters whose cognitive challenges, some like to assert, are proof that representative democracy isn’t a viable system; not that any alternative is suggested.
I’m not letting you off the hook so easily. Like they say in the corporate world, don't present a problem without also presenting its solution, you're holding up my golf game!
Given that it is extremely unlikely that any random sample of Trump voters in any given state would all be catastrophically stupid to the point of condoning all of Trump’s actions and believing his lies (and this may indeed have changed during the pandemic), then it follows that the Trump part of their brains, the Trumpebellum, possibly, behaves differently, holds a different standard.
They know the earth is round and that the moon landing was real, but when Trump suggests injecting Clorox, they laugh indulgently and say, “Well, stranger things have happened!” Then they get on the blower and find a way to rent an army tank, because that’s easier than putting on a mask.
What is the missing piece of the puzzle? Always, in America, look to race for the solution to the mystery. All comes clear when you put on your long-distance night-vision White Supremacy Goggles and take a closer look.
Here's a little story: A few weeks back, Mitch McConnell was photographed in the Oval Office wearing a tan suit. You may already see where I'm going with this.
Now, Barack Obama once wore a tan suit to work, and heads fairly exploded with how unseemly this was, how disrespectful, unbecoming. You’d think he’d strutted into the Oval Office wearing a Madonna cone bra, so ruffled were the feathers.
“There’s no way I don’t think any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday,” Peter King, the New York congressman, told Newsmax TV, using refreshingly non-traditional grammar to emphasize his point. “ISIS is watching!”
Obama, in fact, could do nothing right. Actually, Obama could do virtually nothing either right or wrong, as Mitch McConnell and the Senate stonewalled him on every front, beginning with his SCOTUS appointee. "One-term president" I believe was the phrase McConnell used.
In comes Trump and soon it is clear that his entire agenda is a revanchist one: he will systematically undo Obama.
I will state upfront that what follows is a white guy's necessarily superficial summary of the brilliant analysis made by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his October, 2017 article for The Atlantic, "The First White President." I urge everyone to read it.
[In case I need to spell it out, I say necessarily superficial because as a racialized white man I cannot ever have anything but a superficial understanding of the Black experience of racism, no matter how sincerely I might approach the imaginative exercise. And I can’t ever stop reminding myself of this.]
So, in two paragraphs, and expressed in my own words as I understand Mr Coates's thesis:
Trump is the anti-Obama. Trump can do or say anything and none of his supporters really care. It doesn't matter what he says or does, because he's not there to do and say things. He's there to restore the white supremacist world to its proper functioning. (A little slip like a Black president? Whoops, let's fix that. )
And if you look closely at the stats, Trump voters cross every demographic line. They are rich, poor, educated, uneducated, male, female — but overwhelmingly white.
Makes more sense now, doesn't it?
Mitch McConnell, who is evil but not stupid, could not resist the urge to wear that goddamn tan suit, in effect saying, "White guys can do shit." He knew exactly the statement he was making by wearing it, it was the smack-your-forehead, how-could-I-have-missed-it clue in the Agatha Christie novel. He was taunting you.
One other important factor in Trump’s victory is that, like Canada, you have this dysfunctional plurality voting system where the winner can have nothing like a real majority of the votes. This encourages extremism on both sides rather than consensus.
This is why you have Biden as the candidate (not that I have anything against Biden; he seems like a sensible, sensitive and smart man and his choice of Harris for VP underscores that he has integrity. He gets it. I think he's a great candidate, just maybe not the one you'd have if your system were different).
Biden is the candidate because, with your winner-take-all system, your candidate must appeal to the broadest spectrum of voters, and think how difficult that is! Young, old, working class, middle class, white, Black... progressive, centrist... but that's what you need, because Dems need a super majority, an overwhelming majority to offset their disadvantage in your system. Not to mention the blatant gerrymandering and voter suppression (and Trump might not accept the results anyway).
There, you never have to fall back on the moron argument again. Because, unfortunately, it's simply not true.
David Roddis
Toronto
