A note to my Democratic and liberal friends. This may surprise you but the people I know well who will never ever vote for Hillary are not Trump supporters. They may have a Trump sign, or say something Trumpy on FB, but they don’t even like the guy. They know he’s a humbug. You don’t have to convince them of that. Trying is a waste of time because it’s not about Trump. It’s about Hillary, yet only partly about her. They blast away at her about Benghazi and email servers, which they partly believe, but deep down they know it’s all rubbish. However, once having dug the hole, they are not going to climb out of it. Going over that history won’t change their minds. Too much pride at stake.
What they can’t stand about her, but can’t find the right words for it, are her three big sins. One, she’s a woman coming on the heels of a black man, and that just doesn’t feel right. It’s not nice to be sexist or racist so other words have to be found that sound more defensible. Two, she’s a Clinton. They weren’t too fond of the Bush dynasty, and they don’t want a Clinton dynasty. They don’t like anything dynastic in politics. It’s too monarchal, although that’s not a word they would choose to call it. Three, and this is the big one, she’s an elite member of the ruling class with strong ties to other members around the globe, and that means she doesn’t care about or know about the real life of real people. She’s Marie Antoinette trying to take over the throne. This is important so pay attention. Remember the Bastille? They don’t like or trust elites, or the entrenched bureaucracies that serve them, especially if they are connected to Wall Street, which is not a place but an icon of wealth manipulating wealth for the benefit of wealth. If it wasn’t for their tea party labels and Republican registration they could be old time Bolsheviks, but don’t let them know that. They hate everything Marxist.
As if that wasn’t enough, the world is changing too fast to keep up with it. If you get a chance take a look at Yuval Noah Harari’s article in the October 8 New Yorker Today, “Trump’s Rise and Liberalism’s End.” Their identity as (white) Americans is threatened from all sides. They are very aware that their status as white American males who define the American way of life is eroding away, and it’s uncomfortable. Good grief, our elite local college now has a female president, and (gasp) she’s a lesbian living (can you believe it) with her spouse right there in the president’s mansion. Well what can you expect? They’re a bunch of far left liberals over there anyway. But on the other end of town, the reliably conservative SDA college fosters ordination of women in the SDA church. Even they are tilting left it seems. The future looks scary. Trump’s dystopian rhetoric merely echoes what they have been told and led to believe is true by talk radio hosts and congressional leaders over the last eight years. You can’t pound away at willing listeners for eight years and not have it stick. For them, Hillary can’t be trusted to do anything useful about that. Neither can Trump, but at least he’s rattling cages. That may not feel right either, but it does feel good.
Will they ever back away from Trump? Yes. Even they are offended by the flow of revelations about his moral character, and the “Yeah, but what about Bill Clinton” retorts have little traction because they didn’t like Bill either. It won’t move them toward Hillary. They may turn toward Johnson. Who knows? What they will do is stew for the next four years. The only thing likely to lift them out of it is an economic resurgence adhering to the middle and lower classes that includes a slashing of bureaucratic floundering among government agencies at the retail level.
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