I’m a Democrat, but I fear the elitism overtaking the party I have watched this primary season unfold through a different lens than my very liberal coworkers and fellow New Yorkers.Sarah Eberspacher
I may believe in women’s reproductive rights and LGBT equality and background checks for gun purchases, but I also took childhood naps each Thanksgiving under the watchful glass eyes of my cousin’s prized deer head mount. And I may now work in the white-collar journalism world, but I spent my formative summers wandering around my Illinois hometown’s “Bagelfest”, an homage to one of our community’s several factories and its working-class heritage.
That’s all to say: the American electorate is complicated. But there is a narrow perspective that many liberals in my adult life use to paint the people from my hometown, and from the thousands of other places like it.
In that painting, it’s just the people reached on landlines that admit they plan to support Donald Trump who actually do. And those Trump voters time and again are given a suspiciously similar face: white; male; blue collar. And then those less neutral descriptors: racist; sexist; uneducated. The first three are often shorthand for the second set.
The Democratic party – and by that, I mean the party gatekeepers with power to wield media influence, which worked out great for the Brexit vote – are writing off those hardcore racists as an overblown minority that is making more noise than they can translate into votes. But overlooking “regular Joe” moderate voters like the ones who filled my childhood could be our undoing.
My party has gotten cocky, and I fear that condescending mentality will lose us this election. Because for all of his divisive bluster, Trump has gotten one thing right time and again: small-town America is not doing great.
Don’t get me wrong: I sure as hell won’t be casting a ballot for Trump this November. But I have watched this primary season unfold through a different lens than my very liberal coworkers and fellow New Yorkers, who live in a world that’s largely bounced back from the recession.
Where my family lives, factories are closing. Schools don’t have enough money for teachers, and all of Barack Obama’s hope and change hasn’t done much trickling down in the last eight years. And just because the moderate voters living in these areas aren’t showing up at Trump rallies or plastering your Facebook wall with tirades about Muslims doesn’t mean they’re planning to support Obama’s heir apparent come November.
That’s a hard truth for a lot of liberals with white-collar jobs and HBO subscriptions to process, but it’s a truth nonetheless. It’s a truth that is driving Trump fans who really do want to build a wall and “punish” women who have illegal abortions, but it’s a truth for millions of other middle America (yes, mostly white) voters who are overlooked once the primary race bunting comes down and the bandshells empty back out.
Especially in this election, minorities are being courted by Democrats – and considering how many Trump lines they have to choose from, the sell is pretty easy. For everyone else, it’s a disconcerting binary: either you’re a racist homophobe or you’re obviously not voting for Trump, so great, we don’t need to even bother paying lip service to your concerns.
Even if Clinton does win in a landslide, what I fear most is the elitism my party is embracing, and its ultimate cost.
Some of the people I grew up with are racist. Plenty more are sexist. And a lot of these mainly white midwesterners ventured no farther than the state college. But those are descriptors that also work on plenty of the liberals I’ve met in Boston, Chicago, New York – they just keep those views to themselves while living in much more diverse places. And that lets them off the hook. It sets up that insidious dismissal of anyone who doesn’t live like them, who doesn’t think like them.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/30/democrat-party-elitism-general-election-voter-issues-donald-trump-hillary-clinton
