Since you guys probably don’t know me very well yet, I should go ahead and point out that I did not vote for, nor do I support Donald Trump for president. Maybe I should even write a blog post entitled “Why is Donald Trump so unpopular?” so you can get a handle on my style.
This question has essentially taken over the news cycle for the last few months. I think many people look at him and his bombastic style, his vulgarity and general irreverent tone toward everything and are really grossed out by it. To these people it raises the question, “How could anyone listen to this guy?”
So let’s walk ourselves through some answers.
A post here: Washington Post: The real reasons Donald Trump’s so popular tries to get at it from a left-wing perspective (if you didn’t know, the Washington Post is a pretty far-left newspaper). Their reasons are four:
- Trump has simple answers for everything
- A lot of people dislike immigrants
- People are sick of the political establishment
- He says things that people have been afraid to say
There’s some good stuff in here, mixed in with the bad. The first two reasons are essentially saying that Donald Trump’s supporters are racist and simple-minded. I don’t think that’s true. These sorts of accusations are an easy way to caricature your opposition and they fail my test: “If you think the only way people could hold a view is through stupidity or moral blindness, you probably don’t understand their viewpoint.” (I need some kind of shorthand for this. I’m guessing it will come up a lot.)
I might spend some time debunking those assertions, but I’d like to focus on the second two, since I think that they have a little more heft to them.
“People are sick of the political establishment.”
Yes, I think that’s absolutely true. There are a lot of people out there who feel like their voices are falling on deaf ears in Washington. I think most people look at the issues that really concern them and see the Congress and President as ignoring what matters to them. A really interesting quote came up in an article on the Federalist (a pretty far right news outlet, for those keeping score):
While communities like mine face suicide clusters and drug addiction, Yalies wept over the possibility that someone might dress up like Pocahontas. It became clear to me that places like northeast Wisconsin could not look to elites in places like New York or DC for help with our problems; we would have to rely upon our own community and resources.
It should not come as much surprise that these people in rural America feel ignored by the urban, highly educated (and often very wealthy) elite. It should come as less of a surprise that they are uniting behind a candidate that acknowledges this. This is not to say that Trump really has their interests at heart or, even if he did, that his plans would do anything to help them. Merely the acknowledgment that they have been ignored and that their very serious problems are not getting the attention that they deserve is enough to win their loyalty after decades of the opposite being true.
“He says things that people have been afraid to say.”
This also has a ring of truth to it. Many people feel like they have been living under a watchdog, Big Brother-style regime. Whether we agree with it or not, we all know that there’s a spectrum of allowable opinion and perspective. It’s been sold to us as tolerance, plurality, ecumenicism. To quote an article on teaching tolerance: “tolerance is respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world’s cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human.”
This sounds beautiful doesn’t it? In broad strokes, I think this is an admirable perspective to have. In fact, I don’t know very many people that would disagree with this.
The problem comes in how it works itself out. If your perspective is labelled as “intolerant”, it becomes okay to be intolerant to you. You are no longer in the circle of “good people” who deserve respect. By not having “respect, acceptance and appreciation” as it is defined by people who hold to this, you are no longer worthy of the same. This is an understandable development of the essential idea expressed in the above. I used to say, as a teenager who thought he had a good grasp of irony: “I’m prejudiced against Nazis”.
But then it becomes easy to start finding reasons to dismiss groups and viewpoints. As soon as you have a criteria by which someone is no longer included in your umbrella of protection, all you have to do is characterize their viewpoint in that way and you can let loose with all the hateful vitriol you wish. Incidentally, that is what is being done with the Washington Post article, when they claim that Trump supporters don’t like immigrants. If they hate immigrants then they don’t deserve the respect and we can be as nasty as we like toward them.
I think it’s clear how hypocritical this is.
But we’re terrified, as a people, of being seen as outsiders in the culture of inclusiveness, so we steadfastly avoid saying anything that could get us thrown out of the circle of respect. We self-censor in the workplace and in our social lives, afraid to voice unpopular opinions or perspectives. We are afraid to ask certain questions for fear of being labelled as a ‘hater’.
And let me be clear: this is not a matter of only avoiding saying things that offend others. Lots of offensive things get said by people on the inside. It’s just that the offense is toward people who “deserve it” or who are themselves “offensive”. You can say that Westboro Baptist is a vile nasty place that’s vicious and ugly and a stain on our American conscience. (I tend to agree with this. I bring it up just because it is an acceptable target of speech that would certainly offend any members of that church.) And while we have no problem when people say stuff like this when we agree with them, you can get fired if you target a group that is within the circle of “respect”. You will lose friends if you go on Facebook and speak against certain groups of people.
The fear of saying what you think and the feeling that we are not free to speak our minds is suffocating to many people. Trump gets out there and offends a lot of the “insider” group. Whether people agree specifically with what he’s saying or not, they love watching him stick it to the people that they see as oppressors in this culture of “tolerance”.
There are many more reasons why Trump is popular with different people, but this is a good start.
The photo used above is copyrighted by Matt A.J. , made available under Creative Commons.