Originally Posted by The Toronto Star
Far more important, I believe, was the rude existence of a wide swathe of regular folks who deeply resent being looked down upon and treated as stupid (or racist, or sexist, and so on) by ‘elites’ — whether framed as “Washington,” “Wall Street,” or “the media.”
Just as important were their own lived insights into the structural unfairness (that shades into structural corruption) that lies at the heart of the U.S. economic-political complex. And a corresponding sense that their experience of life (from joblessness to working-poor precariousness) was treated by politicians and government technocrats as unworthy of attention.
It should thus come as no surprise that sticking it to these elites, Democrat and Republican alike, was a driving desire for a critical mass of Trump voters who made up the numbers in a coalition that included Republicans who voted for party-political or wealth-protection reasons and independents who voted for specifically anti-Clinton reasons.
It was likely also a sentiment that, I suspect, was shared by a significant chunk of those who voted for Clinton, but unenthusiastically and only because they could not vote for Trump due to his repugnant character and the illiberal, if not protofascist, values he revelled in propagating.
A good number of these reluctant Clinton voters would have shared Bernie Sanders’ critique of America’s broken democracy, unequal society and environmental insanity, and a sense that transformative change is both necessary and possible.
Indeed, had Sanders prevailed over Clinton in the primaries, it is entirely possible that the sledgehammer represented by many alienated Trump voters would have been wielded for Sanders’ democratic socialist vision of a better society and world.
But what of the relevance of the hypocrisy and irony of Donald J. Trump being the messenger for such anti-elitism and economic fairness? The standard narrative, which assumes the ignorance of regular people, is likely only partly correct.
On election night, ABC News’ Matthew Dowd — recovering from his firm predictions two days before that Clinton would win by 5 per cent and well over 300 Electoral College votes — recalled the underappreciated aphorism: Trump’s critics took him literally but not seriously, while many Trump supporters took Trump seriously but not literally.
