Joe Scarborough, the co-host with Mika Brzezinski of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC has written an op-ed in the Washington Post worth reading. The link is below.
http://wapo.st/2vXfcmn?tid=ss_mail&utm_term=.274641df7cf8
Scarborough’s point is that no matter what Donald J Trump does (as in throwing in with the Democrats on legitimizing the presence of DACA children) his Base will not desert him. Leaders of the Radical Right will condemn him for breaking his fundamental promise to expel all the “illegals,” but even they can not shake his faithful followers from their allegiance to him.
Yes, but why is that? Is thirty percent of the Country so ignorant, so bereft of common sense, so fixed on despicable causes that they don’t see or don’t care that Donald J Trump is a “con man” who will do nothing for them if it interferes with his own interests since his only allegiance is to himself?
No, I don’t think that’s it.
I think the late social scientist Richard Rorty figured it out in 1998! You may know that in 1998, Rorty wrote in a book that dis-satisfied Americans would someday start “looking around for a strongman to vote for-someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, over paid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…all the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”
That’s it.
Much of Trump’s Base is revolting against being put down, ignored and generally seen as inferior beings (I exclude the Nazis and their ilk who are indeed, inferior beings) and they see in this man their Champion. As he once said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
His Base has a point (Nazis and their ilk excluded).
When I was growing up in the El Paso Southwest more than sixty decades ago the way we thought of and treated each other was different. I obtained a college degree at a small college of no great fame or importance but a lot of my friends didn’t even go to college. They became tradesmen – plumbers, welders, etc – or worked all their lives as clerks in a store or traveling salesmen and no one that I knew looked down on them, no one tried to make them feel inferior or unworthy.
My father did not have much education. I’ve read love letters he wrote my mother while wooing her. The spelling and syntax were lacking but not the love. He saved his money, bought farm land in the New Mexico territory, prospered and saw us through the Great Depression of the Thirties. He was highly regarded by everyone in the community.
Today, it’s different – particularly in the Countries’ big cities and sophisticated circles. My friends from the old days feel it; their children feel it. And, as Rorty pointed out long ago, they resent it.
I have gone through several “stages of grief” since last November – not “acceptance,” never acceptance. At times as I’ve watched the EVI (Egopmaniacal Vulgrian Ignoramus) work his evil will from the Oval office along with his gang of thugs, I have wanted to throw every one of his Base who brought him into the bottom ring of Dante’s Inferno…but, thankfully, I quickly came to my senses.
For the most part, his Base are good people whose grievances grew without the rest of us lucky ones dong much to help them and in the last few decades when it comes to economic help, why the greedy men and women of Wall Street and even Main Street have “lunched up” at their expense.
Now, we must help them (not the Nazis, I say again). We must work to see that they will have no need to find a “strong man” to vote for. And we must convince them by our actions that we understand they are worthy and deserve respect.
As Richard Rorty forecast the future in 1998, another man long ago outlined the way we must think about and act toward Trump’s Base. During another difficult and divisive time in our County when like today it seemed we would tear ourselves apart this man pointed the way to reconciliation.
Let us follow his advice: He said “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”
Abraham Lincoln 1861