YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO
I read an article in the New York Times today about why Youngstown, Ohio, a working class town, which until the 1970’s was thriving, has changed from voting staunchly Democratic to voting solidly MAGA Republican. It isn’t because the voters of Youngstown think Donald Trump is such a great guy or because they feel he will keep his promises of bringing back the blue collar factory jobs to Youngstown. They voted for him, and were part of Ohio turning from blue to red, because their lives have gone from comfortable to near poverty because of the hollowing out of the industrial rust belt through globalization. They don’t trust the promises of any politician, Republican or Democrat, and want a revolution, which Trump promises. They want to tear the house down and rebuild it without caring how. Trump may be a philanderer and a liar and but he seems to be an authentic philanderer and liar who echoes their grievances and who attacks the same elites and politicians that they feel betrayed by.
This seems to answer for me why MAGA people vote for Trump with great enthusiasm. They are not fooled by him, they are not stupid, they feel betrayed by the loss of the American dream and are egging him on to tear down liberal institutions.
They know he isn’t sincere in his profession of being Christian, but he has seen the light and in spite of his being unchristian in every way he argues that he is going to protect fundamental Christianity. He is almost a useful tool. He is an imperfect vessel but he is professing the right things and acting in the right way. He is leading the way to restoring the United States as a white Christian nation, a fundamentalist Christian nation, not a liberal, open, accepting nation of diversity.
All the things that shock liberal Democrats, seizing Greenland, making Canada a state, cowing the Supreme Court, threatening to jail those who oppose him, departing all non citizen immigrants and on and on, delight his MAGA followers. The more he pokes his finger in the eye of liberals the more pleased they are. The more chaos Trump causes the more pleased his MAGA followers are. It doesn’t matter whether his policies actually make the lives of his MAGA followers better, they are tired of promises of a better life, what they want is to turn the country upside down.
So it doesn’t do any good for Democrats to tell these MAGA voters in a condescending way that they are hurting themselves by voting for Trump, that they are stupid. They don’t care, they want to tear everything down.
And now they have their chance. They won the election. Democracy, which they didn’t trust, actually worked for them.
What this makes me realize is that from the perspective of the people who voted MAGA that everything now is just fine.
Who am it, for whom everything has worked out through genes and family and the liberal culture I have lived in and my experience of the world, to criticize. If I had grown up working class in Youngstown or Kansas or Swannanoa I would probably feel exactly as MAGA people in all these places feel.
I realize that not only are liberal politicians who live privileged lives a little clueless about the lives of MAGA blue collar workers or MAGA farmers who have lost their livelihoods, but I am also one of these clueless living in my liberal sheltered college community. I live in a different world from the blue collar workers of Swannanoa. Of course, they are clueless about my world as well and find the privileges that I take for granted to show how out to touch with the real world of hard physical work I am. From my perspective they live narrow lives without books and music and travel caught in a material, banal life while I have enough to live on with the material life mattering less then being fully open and responsive to the world around me. Good hard well paying work is what MAGA people feel has been taken away from them and what they want. I find that hard physical work wears me out and numbs my mind, what I want to do is sit at my computer and explore the world. If I am lucky I will have a retirement without hard work which will be almost as long as I got paid to work (and from a MAGA perspective wasn’t really working at all).
But in the end my good luck doesn’t seem fair. Why should I have the time to wonder and explore when others are just scraping by? And it isn’t just here in the United States that I feel this. Whenever I visit Varanasi on the bank of the Ganges in India and delight in the colors and smells and flavor and rich variety of life, when I visit the people in the Ramesh Singh Boundary, bicycle rickshaw drivers and boatmen who row tourists up and down the Ganges or are servants in hotels, who live in tiny, flimsy one room shacks without toilets, I realize again how unfair life is.
I don’t have any solution, here or there, and don’t have anyone to blame for this unfairness. I don’t know a way out of unfairness.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 