Letter from America
The US election exposes ugly feelings in small-town Connecticut
In early August, my wife returned from a weekend in Vermont with a couple of lawn signs.
They showed a black fist thrusting through a white outline of the state of Vermont, with the words ‘Black Lives Matter’. She planted the first one by the side of the road. ‘I bet you someone steals it,’ she said. Within a week, it was gone. We placed the next one more strategically, just inside our property, but still clearly visible to anyone driving past. Any thief would also have to trespass. A few days later, we found just the wire frame which had once held our sign.
Since then, we have been wondering two things. First, what kind of colossal and immovable sign we could construct next. And secondly, who’s the twitchy, sign-stealing bigot prowling our street?
Litchfield County is a couple of hours north of New York. At its southern tip, the commuter suburbs of Connecticut peter out. By the time you hit Massachusetts in the north, it is all rolling hills, woods and farms. The town of Litchfield itself, where we live, is about two-thirds of the way up; it’s a county town in English terms. Something like Chipping Norton or Ledbury.
Its 8,000 residents include urban evacuees, their number swollen at the weekends by New Yorkers, but the core are flinty Yankees. When I asked my mechanic once how he got through the ice-bound months of February and March, he flicked me a look of utter disdain and said, ‘You shovel and wait for spring.’
In 2016, Connecticut voted Democrat as it tends to do, but Litchfield County voted for Trump over Clinton by the thumping margin of 55 per cent to 41 per cent. The county is 94 per cent white, and many of its residents share Trump’s economic conservatism and his belief that their culture is under siege by the radical left.
This year, you can see plenty of lawn signs and bumper stickers indicating another Trump win. Many of the New Yorkers who fled up here during the pandemic, assuming a kind of bucolic indolence, have been surprised by the zesty politics.
The virus has people revved up, bickering at the supermarket and at parties, claiming the whole pandemic is a Democrat scam. And there are plenty who say, ‘I don’t like the man, but the economy needs him…’ Or ‘I don’t agree with everything he does, but someone has to stand up to these radicals…’
Then off they go into these strange litanies of rumoured left-wing outrages. Plots to cancel Christmas or erase George Washington from the history books, or to incinerate the forests of California to make a point about climate change. I’ve learned a 1,000-yard stare to get me through.
There is a zebra crossing near our community playground and baseball field. During the late summer, I noticed a small group filling in the white bars with the colours of the rainbow. I thought it was an art project, but it turned out it was a gesture of support for the LGBTQ community.
The group who did it wrote a letter to our local paper recently, bemoaning the reaction to their work. They had been told to erase it; the town didn’t want people like them. It is hard to tally the lazy, summer-evening baseball games – the epitome of small-town
America – with this kind of prejudice.
The two petrol stations in town are owned by recently arrived Asian families. The other day, I heard someone I know well, and like, referring to them as ‘dot-heads’ – suggesting that they were all packed into apartments without the legal right to be here.
I am half-burmese; I look more like my English half. I am used to people flashing their racism in front of me, assuming I must agree. The dot-head comment, I felt, was coming from a place of prolonged economic pain; from years of steady erosion of this person’s place in the world. These are the very factors that drive so many people towards Trump.
The shame of it all is that Litchfield used to pride itself on its Yankee liberalism, a combination of conservative habits and liberal thinking. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, grew up here in a family of abolitionists.
When we moved here, there was a women’s prison on the town green, next door to the bank. I was told that the idea was to keep prisoners in the heart of town, so they had the best chance of reintegrating into the community on their release. The prison has since been redeveloped as a restaurant, shops and offices.
Today’s Litchfield has an organic farmer’s market alongside pick-ups each with an outsize Stars and Stripes jammed into their trailer hitch. It still exudes the patched-sweater self-sufficiency of New England, but there is also a sense of siege – the sense that one is always a cross word or two away from an act of emotional violence, a raised voice or a stolen lawn sign.
The two sides are not sitting well together, and the election cannot come soon enough.