A message for Democrats
The Roseanne affair has galvanized thought among some liberals that Trumpism is simple racism, hate and primitive resentment.
They say: Told you so. Barr was a Trumpian; so, of course, she inevitably revealed herself as racist. The ABC network tried to present programming that appealed to Trump voters and got what it deserved—smeared in the lowest human denominator.
These liberals insist that Democrats ought to eschew Donald Trump supporters entirely, wasting no effort on trying to understand, much less appeal to, any of them, emphasizing instead the mere outnumbering of them with the votes of decent, redeemable, younger, female and ethnically diverse people.
—————— Naturally, I see it differently. I’m simply playing the odds. Sixty-three million Americans, give or take, voted for Trump for president. It seems entirely plausible to me that some of those 63 million were not racists nor haters nor resentful primitives.
I suspect there were 80,000 exceptions at a bare minimum. As it happens, 80,000 was the scant cumulative margin by which Trump carried Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to win in the electoral college and become president.
To stereotype all Trump voters as beyond redemption is to engage in bias. And it’s to lose.
I dare to propose that I understand these non-racist, non-resentful and non-primitive Trump voters.
They simply could not abide Hillary Clinton, not because she was a woman, but because she was of a manner they found off-putting in the extreme. She was Al Gore, whom they also disliked, but less pleasant and less credible.
They contend that they’d gladly vote for a woman for president, but not one whose path was marriage to a political phenom and whose claim seemed more than a little like entitlement.
They did not see Clinton as sensitive to the working man. They did not know quite what to make of Trump, except that he was an almost cartoonish character. But at least he seemed to have a plan to renegotiate trade deals and relieve environmental regulations, thus saving or creating jobs.
They watched Roseanne Barr’s show and thought it had funny moments about everyday life. But they understand that what she put on Twitter was racist and indefensible, and they agree she had to go.
They don’t mean to imply that the liberal slant of the major networks produces anything as singularly offensive as Barr’s racist tweet. But they don’t like that the The View is overwhelmingly to the left and that Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel have turned late-night talk shows into blatantly one-sided political orgies.
It just doesn’t seem fair to them.
They don’t know who Samantha Bee is. But they shake their heads that our culture is now such that somebody would say that word—the “c” word—on television. About anybody.
They know that Trump is himself coarse and crude. But they know that he didn’t call those places “s***hole countries” on television. He said it in a private meeting with leading members of Congress. They do not think profanity and vulgarity are new to the most intimate conversations of our political leaders.
They think Trump is the one whom Democrats can’t wait to tattle on to an anti-Trump media ever-waiting with “breaking news” logos.
Trump’s bad language or bluster in a private conversation—or even publicly on Twitter—bugs them less than what they hear in popular music and throughout the debased culture.
They have a gun because they’re wary. They’d be all right with banning military-style assault weapons, but they doubt it would do much good in the short term—because there are so many of those weapons out there, and too many crazies walking around.
They go to church because they feel they should, especially for their kids, and they need something providing value and virtue in their weary lives, though faith can be a challenge.
They don’t think for a second that Trump is godly. They think maybe some politicians are legitimately religious—John Kasich, perhaps, but he wasn’t on the general election ballot. And he might not be all that as president anyway.
They think abortion is wrong, but that it’s foolish to try to stop it altogether. They wish the politicians would talk about something else.
They’ll vote for Trump again unless the Democrats give them a connection and a cause and a candidate.
If the Democrats want them to be decent and redeemable, then they should treat them decently and provide them a means of redemption.
They preferred the American condition when a right-wing comedy creation on television—they remember Archie Bunker—limited his offensiveness to a clever script and a halfhour’s teleplay on Saturday nights.
They don’t want to go back to the 1950s. The ’70s would do. If forced to negotiate, they’d even settle for Bill Clinton’s ’90s.
And that’s a message for Democrats right there.