The night was November 8, 2016. I and my Democratic Party associate cleaned our Get Out the Vote office, loaded all of the makeshift equipment into our cars, and headed over to Harborside Event Center to watch the election results. We went in expecting a victory celebration and came out in a state of shock which the intervening 18 months have done nothing to diminish; in fact, time has only deepened the disbelief. That night for me is epitomized in a facial expression. As the awful truth became evident, our group prepared to go to our homes to absorb the full impact of it. Just as I was heading toward the door, I saw a friend and former colleague across the room with his daughters. I made my way through the crowd to say hello and give him a hug, then turned to rejoin my group who was then halfway to the exit. As I looked back over my shoulder, my friend and I exchanged a parting glance which for me will always be the poster picture of that evening. I’ve rarely seen anyone look as dazed, confused, and utterly lost as he did at that moment.
In the 18 months since that evening, those of us in the majority of voters who did not vote to elect our current “president” have wrestled with many questions about what the minority group (who are so distributed as to constitute a majority in the Electoral College) could possibly have been thinking when they cast their precious vote for a con man? Couldn’t they see? Did they not hear the same whiny, childish, churlish voice we did? Are they not troubled by the behavior so lacking in dignity and decorum compared to every former president? Did that vocal group among them who claim the highest standards of religious and moral rectitude not see the Access Hollywood tape? Do they not know that he’s credibly accused by more than a dozen women of sexual harassment and assault? Did they not hear the part of the tape where he confesses to doing those very things? Are they really okay with the language he uses at public events? Have they forgotten that presidents don’t govern by tweet? Can they say they live by the ten commandments and still justify his daily lies?
We told ourselves they had just been swept up with the current of a populist movement and had been taken in by the bellicose rhetoric but that once the reality of day-to-day life in this twilight zone settled in, so would their buyers’ remorse. Then they’d hasten to demand their party impeach him. Yet here we are 18 months later and their support hasn’t begun to wane; the same people, the “base,” are now signing on for his 2020 campaign.
In 1949, playwright Arthur Miller introduced America to his fictional creation Willy Loman, a hard-working guy who chased the American Dream right into his grave: a grave he chose for himself. Miller called Death of a Salesman a tragedy, the tragedy of the common man. In classical tragedy, Greek and Shakespearean, the tragic protagonist is always a man of high standing–a king or a hero–who because of an internal weakness, or tragic flaw, is unable to withstand the onslaught of life and of antagonistic forces and in the end succumbs to them. The key to a play’s being a tragedy is that the hero’s downfall must be the direct result of his own internal flaw. Willy Loman is no hero. He’s a weak, self-deluded man who refuses to accept his status in life, believing he deserves more than he has achieved and blaming people and circumstances for his failure. Yet his downfall is every bit as heartrending as that of Oedipus.
The play depicts the final 24 hours of Willy’s life, when the walls are closing in on him and he can think only of the fact that he has “nothing in the ground.” Just before his suicide, having been fired by his boss Howard, Willy buys seeds to plant in the back yard in a desperate attempt to feel that his life has amounted to something. Earlier, when Howard fires him, Willy angrily shouts, “I put thirty-four years into this firm, Howard, and now I can’t pay my insurance! You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit!”
Arthur Miller, in a 1949 New York Times essay called “Tragedy and the Common Man,” wrote, “I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were.” He explains:
“As a general rule . . . I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing-his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his ‘rightful’ position in his society.
“. . . Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.
“. . . The flaw, or crack in the characters, is really nothing-and need be nothing, but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status.”
Further on in the essay, Miller says,
“The quality in such plays that does shake us . . . derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world. Among us today this fear is strong, and perhaps stronger, than it ever was. In fact, it is the common man who knows this fear best.”
Arthur Miller may have unknowingly written the most apt description of the group known as Donald Trump’s base and the most coherent explanation of what motivates them. Like Willy Loman, many of them have chased dreams; above all, they’ve believed in the American Dream. But the American Dream which motivated most of us through our youth has failed a large percentage of American people. We were told that America is the land of opportunity, that those who work hard and dedicate themselves to success will succeed and prosper, that we are a classless society where everyone is created equal, that this is the country where there is no monarchy and therefore any little boy (now any little child) can grow up to be president. Most of these beliefs were never true, but we clung to the promises anyway because our sense of personal dignity and our desire for our rightful status in the world demands it.
Those who so fervently cling to Donald Trump’s promises are the ones most likely to be screwed by his actions. He’s a liar. He’s a cheat. He’s a con. But have they laid down their lives for this chance to secure that “sense of personal dignity”? Are they sustained by a “total compulsion to evaluate [themselves] justly”? Are they so desperate to avoid “being torn away from [their] chosen image of what and who [they] are in this world” that they’ll elect a liar, a cheat, a con man who promises to elevate them to what they believe is their rightful status? Miller claims that the fear of being displaced was stronger than ever in 1949, but he never saw 2016 or 2018.
Have you ever been in a setting in which you felt inferior? You felt like the least wealthy person in the group? The least intellectual? The least expensively or fashionably dressed? The least hip or savvy? What would you have done to alleviate those painful feelings of inferiority? What would you have given to see those people who, knowingly or unknowingly, made you feel worthless and insignificant get their comeuppance? How good would it have felt to see the tables turned and to be the “insider” while they looked on in powerlessness and frustration?
Whom would you have followed or accepted as your advocate to have your sense of self-worth restored, or to achieve that self-worth for the first time? Is it possible that millions of people would vote for a snake oil salesman “if need be, to secure one thing–[their] sense of personal dignity?” I think they would and they did. For the first time in their lives, their “president” talks only to them. He’s their champion. He chooses venting to them for a couple of hours at a “rally” over attending stuffy events like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. They’re the inner circle now, and the snobby elitists are banging their heads on walls trying to figure out how to reassert their power. The Trumpsters have succeeded in, as we said in the ‘60s, “sticking it to the man.”
More recently, Julian Zelizer, CNN political analyst, wrote on April 29, 2018:
“The big myth about the 2016 presidential election was that economic suffering drove most of Donald Trump’s ‘base’ directly into his hands in states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.” In his article “Democrats need to stop believing this myth about Trump’s base,” Zelizer rejects the notions, or “myths,” that the problems in 2016 came from the Democrats’ obsession with identity politics and the Republican base’s desperation for greater economic stability. He says instead, “It’s the culture, Stupid.” He goes on to say, “The nation is in the middle of a battle over what this country is about. Trump’s attacks on immigrants and other groups seem to sit well with white male voters who fear that other segments of society are gradually displacing them.”
In other words, white males fear they are losing what Arthur Miller calls their “rightful status”; and they will destroy their democracy, if need be, to secure that one thing, “their sense of personal dignity.”
In an April 23, 2018 article in The Atlantic–“People Voted for Trump because They Were Anxious, not Poor”–Olga Khazan concludes, “In other words, it’s now pretty clear that many Trump supporters feel threatened, frustrated, and marginalized—not on an economic, but on an existential level.”
To counter the idea that the 2016 election was about economic hardship, Khazan quotes political scientist Diana C. Mutz, who based on her extensive analysis says, “It was about dominant groups that felt threatened by change and a candidate who took advantage of that trend.” Mutz explains, “For the first time since Europeans arrived in this country, white Americans are being told that they will soon be a minority race.”
Khazan sums up Mutz’s conclusions:
“When members of a historically dominant group feel threatened, she explains, they go through some interesting psychological twists and turns to make themselves feel okay again. First, they get nostalgic and try to protect the status quo however they can. They defend their own group (‘all lives matter’), they start behaving in more traditional ways, and they start to feel more negatively toward other groups.”
According to Khazan, voters’ highest priorities are their “desire for their group to be dominant”; the feeling that “the American way of life is threatened”; and the belief that “high-status groups, like men, Christians, and whites, are discriminated against.” As for evangelicals, Khazan says, “White evangelicals see more discrimination against Christians than Muslims in the United States.”
So that brings us to one conclusion. It’s the culture, Stupid. Now where do we go from here?