Interacting with Trumpista-Americans

It’s become a cliché the way corporate media outlets periodically send out reporters to some small city to interview elderly white people in a diner to find out what Real Americans are thinking. We invariably learn they don’t feel like the politicians are “listening” to them, long since a well-established gripe. A completely safe one to make, of course, because in itself it says nothing but makes the speaker sounds like one of the Regular Folks who vaguely expects the politicians to be responsive.

I assume they get lots of clicks with stories like this, because they keep running them. They are worth approaching with particular skepticism. For one thing, because they are almost never fact-checked. UC-Berkeley sociologist, Arlie Russell Hochschild, did a participant-observer study several years ago that was basically a variation on this genre, Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. It attracted particular attention because it came out in 2016, the Trump-vs.-Hillary election year. It seemed to provide a sympathetic study of Southern white folks suffering from “economic anxiety," which then had become a notoriously popular but not-particularly-meaningful buzzword pundits used to pretend to explain why people who weren’t corrupt billionaire woman-haters were attracted to an orange circus-freak like Donald Trump as somehow representing the common folks.

To borrow from what I wrote earlier about it, her findings are interesting and underwhelming at the same time.¹ She did in-depth interviews with self-identified Tea Party supporters in the Lake Charles, Louisiana, area in which she deliberately selected as a particularly conservative, pro-Tea Party, pro-Trump area. After five years of research, she determined that a lot of white folks there don't like Black people very much. And lots of them are dubious about equal rights for women. And those people tended to vote Republican and conservative and loved Trump.

My reaction to this revelation was similar to the one that people who live around cats get when they read a news item that zoologists or veterinarians have done a study establishing that cats recognize a lot of words their human companions use. Which is, you needed a whole study to tell you that?

Lucinda Williams also saw Lake Charles as a place where vague alienation could catch up with people.²

Lucinda fans wouldn’t be surprised that lots of people in St. Charles feel chronically grumpy. But the big fault of Hochschild’s analysis is that she seemed to take her white subjects’ explanations at face value. Which on its face is legitimate, because it’s hard to understand what people think without the contexts they themselves give to it.

But since xenophobia and racism live by anecdotes, people are going to explain such prejudices as though they came exclusively from their own observations and experiences. They aren’t going to explain them to a Yankee academic from Berkeley by first citing by citing David Duke or some notorious segregation-era Southern governor like Mississippi’s Ross Barnett. They are going to cite something - usually pulled out of their behinds in the moment - about welfare cheaters or Black criminals. She describes one interview this way:

When I asked one couple what proportion of people on welfare were gaming the system, the woman estimated 30 percent while her husband estimated 80 percent. There, inside the Tea Party, was the gender gap. Despite this difference, women and men of the right voted in similar ways, and more than gender—those affirmative action women [allegdly] cutting ahead in line—they jointly focused on race and class.

But she doesn’t explain what relation those estimates might have to reality, either locally, or in Lousiana, or nationally. If Michele Gilman’s judgment in 2020 was remotely accurate - “The evidence suggests incidents of user fraud in government welfare programs are rare”³ - then neither of those two in Hochschild’s interview had any idea what they were talking about. Or they were just lying. Which would not be surprising, since Southern racists have been saying things like that ever since that concept of “welfare” entered the vocabulary.

Hochschild does note that such criticisms from her white subjects were closely associated with anti-Black rhetoric. But the fact that her subjects were choosing to use arguments that aren’t very closely tied to reality (to put it mildly!) didn’t seem to her to call for any particular analysis. Yet treating that as though it were some sincere, value-free description just seems silly.

Another analysis that didn’t get nearly as much attention as Hochschild’s anthropological study in Louisiana, Jennifer Silva’s We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America (2019) shows how a study like this can be done in a more substantive way. Her study in Appalachia actually provides some real insight into how difficult life experiences translate into larger social and political attitudes.

Politico Magazine visits the wilds of New Hampshire

Michael Kruse reports on his own anthropological-journalistic investigation in deepest, darkest New Hampshire where an earnest Real American named Ted Johnson explained how he views the national political situation.⁴

“He’s a wrecking ball,” Johnson told me here at the place he chose called the Copper Door.

“Everybody’s going to say, ‘Trump is divisive,’” he said, “and he’s going to split the country in half.” He looked at me. “We got it,” he said.

It’s what the Ted Johnsons want.

Kruse in this report isn’t as sloppy as the stereotypical diner visit story. He seems to have verified Johnson’s claim that he contributed $120.90 to Niki Haley’s campaign, for instance. And it is interesting to read a relatively detailed interview with a articulate Republican voter, even if it’s hard to draw any broader conclusions from it.

Despite his seeming fondness for Haley’s Presidential campaign last year, Ted Johnson sounds an awful lot like an all-too-typical Republican base voter, mainlining on FOX News and fond of conspiracist thinking, who’s happy to give Cult Leader Trump another chance to be President:

“You know what made a big difference? A lot of the ads” that he saw mainly on Fox News, he said. Particularly successful on Johnson was an ad from a pro-Trump super PAC that had Haley “saying that illegal aliens were not illegal,” he told me. “I’m a black-and-white guy. [sic] You break the law, you break the law,” he said. “If I go out there and break the law, ain’t nobody going to help Ted Johnson. I’m going to jail.”’

Johnson started talking about “Russia-gate” and “Biden’s scandals” and Hunter Biden. What, I wondered, did Hunter Biden have to do with Nikki Haley? “She’s not going to hold anybody accountable for what they’ve done,” Johnson told me. “People need to be held accountable. That’s why you’ve got to break the system to fix the system,” he said. “Because it’s a zero-sum game right now. And to be honest with you, the Democrats are genius. They did anything they could do to win and gain power, even if they lie, cheat, steal. … What they’re doing is they’re destroying the country. Who could bring it back?” He answered his own question: “Trump’s the only one.” [my emphasis]

Apparently, he wants accountability applied to Democrats - for being Democrats. To Trump, not so much. Not at all, it seems.

Oh, and Johnson thinks Nancy Pelosi staged the January 6 insurrection.

This is actually a revealing interview if we look at it as a kind of case study rather than treating Johnson as some kind of representative symbol of the Salt of the Earth Genuine American. We see toward the end of the report that Johnson wouldn’t or couldn’t engage in any kind of realistic good-faith discussion.

And this is a continual challenge when small-d democrats deal with convinced Trumpistas. On the one hand, one has to engage with them, including challenging them on false claims or absurd reasoning. On the other, deluded is deluded, and bad faith is bad faith. Analysts of conspiracy theories commonly caution people that engaging with discussions over facts with true-believer conspiracists may actually reinforce them in their faith in the correctness of their position.

But false claims that become politically influential do have to be refuted. David Neiwert frames this dilemma as follows:

If we [pro-democracy Americans] look at the 2016 electoral map, and see all those red [Republican] rural counties and come to terms with the reasons why none of them ever turn blue [Democratic], it's important to come to terms with our own prejudices and our easy willingness to treat our fellow Americans - the ones who are not like us [i.e., Trump supporters] - with contempt and disrespect. Simply beginning the change will require both humility and empathy.

That's not to suggest that we respond to racist or violent provocations with touchy-feely attempts at "reaching out" to the other side; these are always rejected with contempt, or viewed as a sign of weakness. Certainly it does not mean we need to "reach out" to the rural haters and the conspiracy-spewing Patriots. I grew up in rural America, and I'm all too familiar with the bullies and swaggering ignoramuses who hold too much sway in that culture, and whose politics and worldview are now ascendant beyond their wildest imaginings (and they are wild, trust me). There's really no point in trying to reach out to people who will only return your hand as a bloody stump. The only thing they understand, in the end, is brute political force: being thrashed at the ballot box, and in the public discourse.⁵ [my emphasis]

1. Miller, Bruce (2017): Arlie Russell Hochschild, the "Tea Party" and the problem of empathy. Contradicciones (Original) 10/12/2017. <https://oldhickorysweblog.blogspot.com/search?q=strangers+in+their+own+land> (Accessed: 2024-23-01).

2. Lucinda Wiliams - "Lake Charles". Live From Austin, TX YouTube channel 07/17/2017. (Accessed: 2024-23-01).

3. Gilman, Michelle (2020): How algorithms intended to root out welfare fraud often punish the poor. PBS Newshour 02/17/2020. <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-how-algorithms-to-root-out-welfare-fraud-often-punish-the-poor> (Accessed: 2024-23-01).

4. Kruse, Micahel (2024): ‘Our System Needs to Be Broken, and He Is the Man to Do It’. Politico Magazine 01/22/2024. <https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/22/new-hampshire-primary-voter-00136850> (Accessed: 2024-23-01).

5. Neiwert, David (2017): Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, 374-375. : London: Verso.