This is an ongoing email conversation between myself and a knowledgeable friend as we ponder the ins-and-outs of this presidential race. You might enjoy this as much as we do.
I apologize for any formatting glitches. All my bad. Chas
George and I have been quiet for a bit. I think that may qualify as "stunned silence." Now that The Donald is waving his freak flag high, I think it might be a good time to return to a piece I posted over a year ago. I have edited it a bit to bring it up to date, but I consider it (okay, in my own arrogant way) a somewhat prescient piece of commentary about the Rs candidate for President.
3 September 2106
TRUMP AND THE AGGRIEVED
.....What has now become clear is that McTrump’s campaign is the latest and greatest wave of “symbolic politics.” Electoral politics becomes symbolic politics when a political entrepreneur (McTrump) uses very potent symbols (freedom, nationhood, liberty, etc.) to mobilize political support. This entrepreneur attaches these symbols to issues or problems that may, or may not, at their core be that important.
But, the symbols attached to these issues transform the issues. These issues become important because they are ‘symbolic” of some more deeply seated concerns of groups of individuals. Thus, immigration becomes an important issue among potential Republican primary voters in New Hampshire.
It is not just the immigration issue with which Trump is toying. Trump is now the reigning master of symbolic politics in America. A glance at the Trump’s sound-bites below makes that clear:
Immigration is a terrible problem; immigrant crime is tremendous; a country without borders is not a country; I will build a wall; Make American great again (Ronald Reagan redux); Everyone (China, Mexico, Russia, and Iran) plays our country for chumps; we have become a nation of losers; The silent majority is back (Richard Nixon redux).
But, with whom do these symbolic issues resonate? Media commentators have been spending what seem like endless hours of chatter searching for the magic formula Trump and his fellow-travelers possess. One analyst decided that Trump’s main support (I would include Carson’s and Cruz’s supporters here as well) is among what the PEW pollsters call the “disaffected.” They are younger, less well-educated, more likely to be male, more likely to identify as Republican or Independent and definitely more likely to be white.
I think that commentator is partially correct. Trump does pick up many of those whom PEW classifies as disaffected. But, to better understand Trump’s success, one must reach somewhat deeper than a polling category. Michael Kimmel, a sociologist who in his book, Angry White Men, looked at some men’s reactions to the women’s movement. His research led him to coin the phrase “aggrieved entitlement.” Those filled with this negative emotion:
“…feel they have been screwed, betrayed by the country they love, discarded like trash on the side of the information superhighway. Theirs are the hands that built this country; theirs is the blood shed to defend it. And now, they feel, no one listens to them; they’ve been all but forgotten. In the great new multicultural American mosaic, they’re the bland white background that no one pays any attention to…[and] they’re mad as hell.”
While Kimmel was discussing a specific social group, these kinds of statements are exactly the concerns we hear voiced when Trump supporters are interviewed by the media. What we see in Trump, Cain, and Cruz devotees is exactly that sense of “aggrieved entitlement” or what I prefer to call “a grievous sense of loss.”
Those who support Trump see themselves as de-valued in our society, and they see the de-valuation of the symbols they hold dear. For simplicity, for the remainder of this essay, all these people will be identified as—The Aggrieved.
The Aggrieved are fed the idea that illegal immigrants live here and receive all sorts of imagined benefits that detract from the welfare of “real” citizens like themselves. They see themselves being continually forced to navigate treacherous economic waters; they also understand that they are the first generation whose children will not do as well economically as they did.
All these realizations are painful. That pain leads to anger. They are not getting what they want; their kids won’t get what they want. Why should these illegals get what they want, largely at the expense of “real” Americans? Immigration thus becomes an issue that symbolizes their broader and deeper distress among The Aggrieved about their lives and the lives of their children.
Adding insult to injury, they as individuals may have fallen on harder times, but they have always believed that at least they could claim membership in an exclusive club with a blindingly sterling reputation. They might personally be struggling, but they were citizens of the United States, that unstoppable #1 World Power. That was something they could claim as their own and something to make them proud.
We have all seen wax figures melt when faced with heat and flame. For the American public, the compelling myth of American invincibility began to melt on September 11. The stunning muddles we made of Afghanistan and Iraq led us to the growth of a potent new devil, ISIS. Even more shameful, America has to “negotiate with” rather than “dictate to” the leaders of Iran, whose favorite phrase in English seems to be “death to America.”
These people feel like a middle-aged White woman in the audience at what I think was a Tea Party town meeting in 2008. When she was given the microphone, she was battling back tears because (I’m quoting from memory here) “I don’t recognize this country any more. This is not my America.” In a very real sense, this statement encapsulates the worldview of The Aggrieved.
That woman was correct. A Black man was on a road straight to the White House. Young people, Hispanics, and Blacks were stepping into the voting booth and the public’s eye in ways that were unheard of since the days of the Civil Rights Movement, which was an earlier generation’s wake up call to a changing America. All those Stars and Bars coming down now across the southern states went up largely in response to the Civil Rights movement last century. They were that earlier generation’s equivalent of members of this generation calling the President a Muslim.
This bitter sense of loss, combined with a good dose of implicit racism, is why over a third of Republicans, and many who identify as Independents, still cling to the belief that our President is not a citizen. While we now, outside the Old South, largely eschew the explicit racism of a Jim Crow world, the “race problem” remains a major issue in America. Implicit racism remains a problem. It gives us different responses to identical resumes based on whether the person’s name sounds African-American. Implicit racism makes up uncomfortable with the use of the “N” word, but we still see Black men as more threatening than Whites. Implicit racism feeds The Aggrieved’s sense that the world is somehow “out of joint.” When a Black man holds the loftiest honor this nation can bestow, it has to be some kind of trick or dirty deal. For them, no other explanation suffices.
To top it off, even among the general population, Congress has a popularity rating that vies with that of a colonoscopy. The old joke, “Question: How can you tell a politician is lying? Answer: His lips are moving.” is no longer a joke. For many people, it has become a compelling political stance.
All of this is why we have “the Teflon Don.” He can say anything; he can say nothing. It doesn’t matter. Trump supporters love their man, but not really. What they truly love is finally having someone holding center stage and channeling their grievous sense of loss and waving their flag of angry resistance.
The Aggrieved want their nation back; they want someone who buys into, and loudly sells, the myth that America really was at one time invincible domestically and abroad and can be again; they want no more of those slick politicians with their stump speeches, complex answers to complex questions, or carefully-worded position papers.
And, Trump is all the more attractive because he continually reminds everyone within earshot that he has the “fuck-you” money that all of them (us) dream of having. McTrump’s braggadocio is the swagger that The Aggrieved American wants to have as he strolls down the streets of his city. The Aggrieved American heartily shares McTrump’s open disdain for professional politicians and the press. It is exactly what he or she would gladly display if anyone would just notice them and ask them.
The Aggrieved see a world around them that feeds into, and reinforces, that “bitter sense of loss” that motivates them. They often can’t really put their finger on the source of their distress, but they know something is deeply wrong. They feel it in their guts, in their souls.
They know they have lost something important, so they pat their pockets to jog their memory of what might be missing. They now know they have no need to go so far. Trump tells them often and loudly, in no uncertain terms, what is gone. He then points his well-manicured finger at the dastardly sneak thieves who let it be stolen away, and the crowd roars its full-throated approval.
For those of us not among The Aggrieved, we can only hope that Trump’s campaign largely resembles the path taken by infectious diseases. The most troublesome infectious diseases are those that allow the patient to linger and infect others before killing their host. However, most infectious diseases are self-limiting. They seek out the vulnerable; do their worst; kill off their hosts; then disappear.
McTrump, has fashioned his electoral foothold among The Aggrieved and now carries along all those Rs who can’t abide HRC or just fear the loss of their party’s power. Luckily, Trump seems incapable of organizing a campaign and incapable of controlling the devil who whispers in his ear, even as a looks at a grieving Gold Star mother.
It now seems that McTrump will go down in flames in November (from my lips to God’s ears). But, Trump will not disappear. He is already pitching a narrative that he will be cheated out of his due by a “rigged” general election. Unfortunately, the man-boy with small hands will still be out there grabbing headlines at every tick of a Clinton administration, and as always he will be “good news” and get extraordinary amounts of ‘earned” air time on all the networks.
But, more worrisome is the issue of where will those aggrieved voters go? Will they sink back into their Norman Rockwell fantasies and be satisfied with watching Gunsmoke re-runs? It seems unlikely. But, they will remain out their creeping around the edges of Republican politics.
One only hopes that no more traditional politician who has some filter between his darker side and his mouth emerges who can both re-energize The Aggrieved in 2020 and, at the same time, claim the mantle of “true conservatism” that traditional Rs rant on about. One also suspects that Trump’s most significant primary foe, Ted Cruz, is thinking just those sort of thoughts while resting somewhere on a rock in the Sun gathering his strength for a slide into the pool of darkness known as right wing Republican presidential politics.
Additional commentary on the race and other issues can be found at theleftcorner.com