“It ain’t about Trump” is an interesting thread topic, and it’s one that I have come more and more to believe. While the personal invective expressed toward Trump supporters in here has thankfully moderated, one might reasonably question whether the invective really has all that much to do with Trump as a person as it does with Trump as a symbol. A symbol of what, then?
Well, we have seen some glimpses of it in the “bitter clingers” comment of Barack Obama and the “deplorables” comment of Hillary Clinton. Its more overt in some of the media coverage; the kind where, e.g., pro-abortion groups are represented by well-dressed and coiffed spokespersons while prolife groups are represented by, e.g., a superannuated nun and perhaps a long-haired and hefty woman in something resembling a prairie dress.
And, of course, we hear frequent repetition, both favorably and unfavorably of the expression “flyover country”. We very, very frequently hear Trump supporters characterized as things like “white, uneducated males from the Rust Belt”. While, indeed, no few “white uneducated males from the Rust Belt” supported Trump, that’s not the only image repeated to characterize his supporters. Now and then, the image of David Duke or (the very rare) Klan members are suggested as representing Trump supporters.
While there really are issues sharply dividing the seeming ideologies of, say, Obama and Trump, I wonder whether the ideologies themselves are really the contending ideas. After all, there are some similarities between the uber-left (for America anyway) Sanders program and that of Trump, just as there are striking similarities between Obama/Clinton affiliations and approaches and those of the “globalist right”.
I recently ran across two very interesting books, both of which I intend to buy. One “accounts for” the rise of the U.S. as a global superpower by describing the central geography of the U.S. and what it meant two centuries ago and what it means now. If one looks at the map of the U.S. clearly showing the rivers and soils, it shows something found essentially nowhere else on earth; a vast area of very rich, temperate soils drained by an immense central river system that, taken together, excludes little useable land other than the east and west coasts. To be sure, similar conditions exist in Europe, but on a much smaller and less connected scale. Imagine Europe if the Danube, Garonne, Loire, Rhone and Po all flowed into the headwaters of the Rhine. Europe and its history would have been much different. Imagine that the Rhine then veered east just before the Netherlands and took in the Oder and Vistula and emptied into the Dnieper. Very, very different still.
The other book is a “revisionist” (or perhaps more accurate) understanding of a literary genre that arose in the early 20th Century and greatly influenced peoples’ understandings and misconceptions about themselves. That genre is represented by such writers as Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The conventional view is that they represent the “unmasking” of a smug, hypocritical, hide-bound central U.S. (the huge Mississippi drainage area) befouled by boosterism and Babbitry. To that, perhaps one might think of O’Connor and Faulkner in that same way. Those works were taken by so many as glorifying the “smarter”, “more elegant” and “more enlightened” coastal culture in which a certain rootlessness of place and belief were thought to prevail and to be “smarter”.
The author, it appears, posits that the early writers in that genre had the exact opposite intent; to portray a people, tainted by human frailty to be sure, who actually “had it right” in struggling to uphold adherence to timeless principles along with a sense of community and place.
One is very tempted to think of Obama’s characterization of “bitter clingers” as being derived from that misunderstood genre, and that Hillary’s reference to “deplorables” is simply reflective of the accepted moral judgment of those characterizations.
Is it really about Trump, or is it really just a latter-day rebellion by “flyover country” against the disdain and assumed moral and intellectual superiority of those in “cosmopolitan country” who actually rule most of the time and are, most of the time, regarded as having a “right to rule” even by those in the center?
Anyway, it might be beneficial for those (both supporters and opposers) to consider the possibility that the current contention really “…ain’t about Trump” per se. Even saying it’s about “culture” is helpful, but isn’t really quite sufficient. It’s about self-understanding, of which “culture” is an important part, but only a part.
