Recent opposition to the Democratic Party has centered on their failure to appeal to the common laborer or the hourly wage-earner, the “working stiff,” as my old man used to say. Dad was the classic working stiff – went to work as a warehouse guy after getting blown up a couple of times in WWII. Packed his medals away and settled down to raise a family in a tract house down the street from Lowry AFB. Damaged his back in the warehouse and landed an indoor job, sales for the same company. Worked there for the rest of his life. My mother died in the late ‘60s, and the old man went bankrupt from the medical debt. Lost his pension when the company went bankrupt too. He was 73 when he died, living in a double-wide out in Commerce City with his second wife and several horrible near-but-never-quite grown children. He lived long enough to see me – high school dropout, GED – accomplish my first actual graduation: the Colorado State Police Academy. Working stiffs.
Working stiffs can be a moody bunch. Obama touched a nerve in his presidential campaign when he said of the rural red-staters, "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." His opponent, Hillary Clinton, tried to use that comment against Obama, recognizing that he had ventured into the dark swamp of “Elitism.” She made the same mistake herself when, in her subsequent campaign against DJT, she characterized some Trump stalwarts as a “basket of deplorables,” saying they're "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic". It probably should come as no surprise that many of Trump’s supporters seized on the sobriquet “Deplorable” as a badge of honor.
Well-known advisor to the Clintons – James Carville – says “it’s the economy, stupid,” meaning, one supposes, that if the economy is doing well, in the sense that people of average income don’t feel threatened by foreclosure, job loss, inflation, etc., they are likely to vote for the administration that made that happen. He’s not necessarily wrong, but neither is he completely right. All these so-called “Corporate” Democrats – Obama, Clinton, Carville, and others – are struggling for a straightforward answer to the question “what do people want?” Another answer to that question has been ventured from the Progressive Left – Saunders, AOC, Hogg, etc., who are making a popular case that people want more government, not less. The Democrats, as they stand today, are riven by internal dissent. It’s not a good look.
And yet, the polls – yeah, the polls, can’t live with them, can’t take ‘em out and shoot them – make a convincing case for the proposition that a large chunk of U.S. citizens want you to go away and leave them the fuck alone. Go ahead, take a look, I can wait. If you include “did not vote” as a category in national elections, you will find that (with the singular exception of 2020, Trump and Pandemic and Unemployment, oh my!) people who are otherwise qualified to cast a ballot are no-shows in consistently greater numbers than the voters mustered by either one of the major parties. Year in and year out “non-voting voters” stay home and firmly express their “I don’t give a shit” choice. Let me hasten here to say that while I don’t agree with this position, I am sympathetic.
My former political science prof, a Republican named Stoddard, reasonably asserted that people who don’t vote are simply expressing their satisfaction with the way things are, and/or are indifferent to the warp and weft of our American politics. I’m certainly no expert, but my experience with non-voters puts them into two categories: young people, who pay no attention to elections because they’re going to live forever and who cares? (the archetypal Stoddard non-voter), and older people, who are firmly convinced that differences among politicians are nominal – that candidates for public office are mostly crooked, self-serving, and not worth the powder to blow them up.
The latter group may be on to something.
Instead of asking “what do people want?” – insert your G.T. Walls/Earl Butz joke here – one might better wonder what makes a successful politician? The conventional thinking, as far as I can tell, is that a good politician is a mirror to the community they serve. The closer a candidate hews to the desires, needs, interests and biases of the populace, the more likely election becomes. Accordingly, politicians are often sociopaths, accomplished liars that can tell immediately what it is that someone wants to hear. They know exactly what people want, even when the people themselves don’t know it.
This sociopathy is now so baked into American politics (as it has been in other countries for hundreds of years – Russia is a fine example) that both the voting and non-voting public have come to expect it. As the United States has slid into oligarchy – not for the first time, but always a mistake – the dissembling grow more and more outrageous, and the ability to sort the true wheat from the false chaff is lost in a maelstrom of bullshit.
Enter the disenchanted.
This country is full of disappointed people. Disappointed by the lies. Disappointed because the shining city on a hill isn’t. Disappointed because Manifest Destiny turned out to be a steamroller. Disappointed because they didn’t get their fair share of American Exceptionalism. Disappointed because the American Dream was a fiction – there’s no promised land down the holler in the shack where they live. God has failed to smite their enemies, and their “Christian values” have turned decidedly Old Testament. They are disappointed and frightened and fiercely angry. They are exactly where the current administration wants them to be – angry at the “Elites,” angry at government, angry at the people not like them, angry at science. There are no vaccinations for racism, homophobia, income inequality, jealousy, failure, rejection, rage.
And there’s certainly no cure for stupid, because, Dunning-Kruger. Stupid people are too stupid to know that they’re stupid. They’ve turned their back on every opportunity to become better citizens, and now are pissed because the good jobs and real money go to tech bros instead of assistant managers and coal miners. They dropped out of high school, blew off college, and picked up a DUI or two on their way to becoming a full-fledged abusive parent of some sullen 16-year-old who’s gonna grow up just like them. They got rid of abortion, and it didn’t solve any of their problems, so now they’re on their knees praying to get raptured. They’re building stairways to heaven. Contrarywise, the billionaires are building survival bunkers for the coming global catastrophe.
It turns out Obama and Clinton were right all along. As for Carville, it looks like his thesis on the power of the economy is about to be put to the test.
Returning to those damned polls for a minute, we discover that Donald Trump is tanking on tariffs (net -16) and deeply in a hole on inflation/costs (-23). Huzzah, you shout, but hang on a minute, there. When it comes to matters less economic and more constitutional (i.e., the wholesale deportation and incarceration of people caught being brown), his ratings are net positive. Well, of course. Who hasn’t rooted for Liam Neeson dispensing justice without the niceties of due process? Yet, the people who want MS-13 members summarily taken out and shot are the same people who beat down the door of their local Public Defender’s office, demanding one ‘a them free lawyers for little Johnnie, who just got caught dealing crack down at the corner.
The last ten years or so has exposed the raw underbelly of American society, and it is not a pretty sight. The ugly American has evolved
from: loud, brash, arrogant, insensitive, rude, generally competent but embarrassing,
to: crude, petty, cruel, insecure, vindictive, uncouth, incompetent – and even more embarrassing.
Dan Quayle to J.D. Vance. Colin Powell to Marco Rubio. James Comey to Kash Patel. Pete Hegseth, for whom I don’t think there has ever been a comparably disastrous Secretary of Defense. Most of the notable women in this administration are in Congress. Feel free to draw up your own list. Sean Spicer to Karoline Leavitt.
I haven’t written much, lately. I’ve been feeling that the crisis is upon us and have been waiting for the other shoe to drop. Mixed metaphors aside, I think we’re right on the edge, vis-à-vis whether our Constitutional Democracy will survive, and in what form. A few posts back I discussed the curious fact that Trump was going around telling his rabble that if he was elected, they would never have to vote anymore. Much as I might enjoy being relieved of the burden, the sinister nature of that promise does not escape my notice. Between the SAVE Act and divisions within the Democratic Party, that vow may well come to pass. With or without Trump, there’s no doubt in my mind that his MAGA operators and fellow travelers have dictatorship in mind. I’m sure they’d like to make non-voting voters of us all.
I’ll never get over Karoline with a K.
You’re right. Being a dictator has been his (wet)dream all along. He just finally said the quiet part out loud, admitting it. I’ve been voting for 58 years which works out to 14.5 election cycles and I can proudly say I haven’t missed a presidential election ever; maybe a few primaries but that’s it. It’s always been my motto that if you don’t vote then you can’t bitch about the state of the world you find your stupid self living in. The costs of apathy and hate have been extremely high for the rest of us.