How
Trump took middle America
The Long Read: After a
month in a midwestern town, the story of this election is clear —
when people feel the system is broken, they vote for whoever promises
to smash it
Gary Younge
In 1924, Robert and
Helen Lynd, a husband-and-wife team of researchers, travelled from
New York City into the heart of the midwest to undertake a study of
daily life in an ordinary American town, Muncie, Indiana. The Lynds
approached their mission in much the same spirit that Joseph Conrad
entered the Heart of Darkness – to look upon denizens of middle
America as an anthropologist might chronicle the strange customs of
another race.
While many
sociologists were “quite willing to discuss dispassionately the
quaintly patterned ways of behaving that make up the customs of
uncivilised people,” Helen Lynd wrote, for many others it was
“distinctly distasteful to turn with equal candour to the life”
of their fellow Americans. “Yet nothing can be more enlightening
than to gain precisely that degree of objectivity and perspective
with which we view savage peoples.”
The Lynds didn’t
happen upon Muncie by chance. Indeed, they scoured the country in
search of a city “as representative as possible of contemporary
American life” – something that could stand in for the whole of
American culture. In the bestselling book they published five years
later, which would become a classic work of American sociology, they
did not name Muncie or any of its citizens. They simply called it
“Middletown”.
For the past six
months, the idea of the “real people” out there has been the
preoccupation of most journalists. First during Britain’s EU
referendum campaign, and then as Donald Trump ran away with the
Republican primaries, commentators opined from the metropolis while
reporters ventured to the parishes to anthropologise the white
working class. Editors charged their employees with finding out why
“they” are so angry; what has made “them” so disaffected;
what is driving “their” erratic electoral behaviour.
The view from
Middletown
For this
twice-weekly series ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Gary
Younge spent a month in the mid-western town of Muncie, Indiana –
known as Middletown and traditionally viewed as emblematic of middle
America. He wanted to know how the town would deal with this big
moment, and what we could learn about the electorate’s view of the
political class from its citizens, who voted for both Donald Trump
and Bernie Sanders in the primaries. Gary tried to find out what
people might think, not just how they would vote – and invited
readers to contribute to, guide and help shape this series.
Learn more about
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But the real problem
is baked into the premise: “they” are not “us”. “We”
don’t know “them”. “Their” views are not often heard in
newsrooms and “they” know it. And so the journalist swoops in for
a day or two, armed with polls, reports and expectations and finds
the angry and disaffected people they are looking for. The reporters
question their subjects on the holy trinity of identities – race,
sex, and class, but only one at a time – and then they find some
local colour (but rarely people of colour) and hurry back to the
office.
Pundits speculated
whether Hillary Clinton could win Texas when it turned out she
couldn’t even win Michigan
The protagonists of
any given story are easily slotted into already existing archetypes –
soccer moms, white van men – and placed within a narrative arc that
makes sense of their views: a revolt against the elites, or why the
right must embrace diversity, or how the left needs to learn values.
And then election night arrives – and the whole thing collapses
under the weight of its own hubris, before starting all over again
the next day with the hasty construction of a new narrative to
explain what happened.
I came to Muncie in
the path of the Lynds, although not necessarily in their tradition,
in the hope that I might do something a bit different. Like them, I
did not happen on Muncie by chance. It sits in a swing county –
both Barack Obama and George W Bush won it twice – and voted for
both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in their respective primaries,
rejecting the pleas of both party establishments. It seemed like an
ideal place to avoid the made-for-TV spectacle of a presidential
election – which had pundits, at one stage, speculating about
whether Hillary Clinton could win Texas when it turned out she
couldn’t even win Michigan.
I arrived on the
night of the second debate to find people more embarrassed than
angry. Looking for a debate-watching party, I went to the Fickle
Peach, a bar in town, where the three screens were set to either
Sunday-night football or baseball. Dylan, the barman, put the debate
on for me with the sound down and two of us watched it with
subtitles. It was two days after news broke of Donald Trump bragging
about grabbing women “by the pussy” – when his election
prospects were understood to be over.
When I left town a
month later, Trump was putting together his transition team and
meeting Obama in the White House. On election night, a small crowd
had gathered in the Fickle Peach. The results were on every screen,
with the sound turned up, as the liberal audience, some crying,
watched the certainties of just a few hours earlier evaporate –
their hopes crushed in real time, state by state.
We woke to a new
normal. The object of our derision would soon have the nuclear codes.
Gingerly, but deliberately, respect for the process, the office and
its trappings, superseded the moral issue of what the victor had said
and done en route to victory. Many of the very same people who, just
the day before, said he was unfit for office, now told America to
unite around him. Meanwhile, those who had not seen any of this
coming confidently told us what we had seen and what would be coming
next. Middletown had spoken. For reasons to do with class, gender,
race, masculinity, disaffection, populism, elitism – or all of the
above – it had made common cause with a garish New York City
multimillionaire to send a message to the establishment. Reporters
were dispatched not to test this thesis but illustrate it.
When the Lynds
arrived in Muncie 92 years ago to begin their fieldwork, they had
more resources and more time than are generally available to a
newspaper reporter. They had two research assistants, and they stayed
for the best part of two years. They published their findings in 1929
with a detailed portrayal of a town becoming less devout and less
deferent, more educated and more automated, where women were less
likely to bake their own bread and more likely to work outside the
home, young people led more independent lives, public speeches were
getting shorter and schoolgirls preferred cotton to silk stockings.
“We are coming to
realise, moreover, that we today are probably living in one of the
eras of greatest rapidity of change in the history of human
institutions,” they concluded. The sentiment is all too familiar.
Something is happening, and faster than we thought possible. Trump
follows Brexit as Marine Le Pen may follow Trump. Our political
parties no longer seem capable of connecting with those they claim to
represent; our democracies are more fragile than we knew; those
institutions that make a functioning democracy possible – the
press, Congress, the police – are less trusted than they were.
At these moments,
the natural tendency is to search for a mirror we might hold up to
ourselves – a reflection that tells “us” who we really are in
the midst of crisis and change. When the Lynds published Middletown ,
it was immediately celebrated as an authentic portrait of real
America in dozens of rave reviews, and reprinted six times in its
first year. The influential columnist HL Mencken declared: “It
reveals, in cold-blooded, scientific terms, the sort of lives
millions of Americans are leading.” Stuart Chase at the Nation
magazine wrote: “Whoever touches the book touches the heart of
America.”
Robert Lynd once
claimed that ideally the best person to study Muncie would not be
American but a Chinese anthropologist with sufficient distance from
his subject to fully understand it. But, he reflected, a foreigner
would “have had a devil of a time in Middletown getting into homes,
being a regular fellow at Rotary and the Chamber of Commerce, and
generally hob-nobbing”.
I didn’t do much
hobnobbing – though I did attend a swanky opening at an art gallery
on campus. But I did have a prime-rib dinner one night with some
Republicans and enjoy a Cuban sandwich with some Sanders supporters.
Stick around long enough and you’ll meet the Republican chairman,
with Syrian grandparents, who loaded his factory’s machines on to
the lorry that took them to Mexico, and the Democratic school board
candidate who lost his brother to a drug overdose. You’ll see the
gun show at the Delaware County Fairgrounds right next door to a
cavernous hall where they are giving away coats so the poor don’t
go cold in the winter. You’ll hear a black candidate for local
office choke up as she admits she will not let her husband accompany
her canvassing for fear that he might get shot, and meet Republicans
who ask if London is safe because the mayor is a Muslim and you can’t
carry a gun.
You’ll hear things
that have nothing to do with the elections and everything to do with
politics. You’ll realise that the reason this outcome was
unimaginable has as much to do with our imaginations as the outcome
itself. The seeds for this moment were sown long ago and the roots
are deep.
The result was
dramatic; the fallout was tumultuous and the consequences will be
dire and, for some, even deadly. But the final stages of the process
that led us here were characterised less by anger than ambivalence.
They didn’t poll for indifference. Few imagined we would sleepwalk
into the abyss.
Every country has a
Middletown. A real place made mythical by its elevation as an
archetype – a town, city or region that encapsulates what a country
wishes it had been; a nostalgia rooted in a melancholic longing for
economic stability and cultural homogeneity, then nourished by
patriotic myth.
Muncie is a small
post-industrial town in eastern Indiana of around 70,000 that is on
the way to nowhere in particular. On the inside cover of Middletown
in Transition, the follow up written by Robert Lynd after the
Depression, a map lays out the human geography of the town. To the
north-west of the railroad tracks lie “homes of business class”
and a small college and hospital, to the north-east of the tracks is
the “Negro” area also known as Whitely, to the south of the
tracks and the White River are “homes of working class”.
Abandoned plants
like giant art installations depict what capitalism looks like when
it doesn’t need people any more
“You could take
this map and lay it on the town today and it’s just the same,”
says James Connolly, the director of the Center for Middletown
Studies at Ball State University, which occupies a far bigger section
of the north-west than it did on the 1930s map; it is now the town’s
largest employer.
No tour around
Muncie is complete without a visit to the sites of its closed
factories. The car slows down to the pace of a funeral cortege as
your guide rolls past the tens of thousands of square feet of
brownfield where abandoned plants sit like giant art installations
depicting what capitalism looks like when it doesn’t need people
any more. Muncie used to host factories that mostly made
transmissions for cars. One in five people in the town were employed
in manufacturing – today it’s one in 10. During the 1960
campaign, John Kennedy addressed workers at the Borg Warner factory,
which is now abandoned.
“Almost everybody
worked there,” says Jamie Walsh, 35, who grew up in Muncie’s
Southside, the poor white part of town. “Most of my family, my
friends’ parents. My grandpa retired from Borg Warner. Everyone was
affected. By the time I grew up it was all gone … People started
retiring early by 2000. By 2005 they were completely done.”
Skilled union jobs
either went abroad, or to the south – places where labour is
cheaper and unions are weaker. In the meantime heroin and crystal
meth have arrived, ravaging huge sections of the town, both black and
white. According to the US census, a third of Muncie lives below the
poverty line, while white male earnings have slumped dramatically
since 2000.
“When the
university or the hospital [the town’s second largest employer]
goes to hire a professor or a doctor, they don’t put an ad in the
local paper,” says Connolly. “They draw people from around the
world as applicants. So you have one part of this community that is
plugged into these global networks and lives in a way that is not
that different from a major metropolitan centre. And then you have
another part of the town that is more isolated than ever because
those old things that connected them, like unions and the party, have
withered and the connections they created have declined. So not only
are some people paid poorly but they’re not at all engaged with
this global economy and these networks of connections that extend far
and wide.”
This is as good a
place as any to start understanding Trump’s victory. Because just
as almost every nation has a Middletown, most western nations also
have a Trump. Indeed, in no small part, they have a Trump precisely
because they have a Middletown and their Middletown is suffering.
Ukip’s Nigel Farage campaigned with Trump; Marine Le Pen, the
leader of the Front National in France, was one of the first to
congratulate him. Whether it’s Geert Wilders in the Netherlands,
the Vlaams Belang in Belgium or Viktor Orbán in Hungary, each
applies the same mixture of patriotic fervour, class grievance,
racial animus and economic insecurity to their own national
conditions.
The link between
economic anxiety and rightwing nationalism can be overdone. The easy
narrative of a populist revolt has an appealing simplicity, but
Clinton won votes from more than half of the people who earn less
than $50,000; the rich voted for Trump. He won the electoral college
and lost the popular vote. Thanks to the lowest turnout in 20 years,
Trump won a lower percentage of the eligible vote than John Kerry,
John McCain, Mitt Romney and Gerald Ford – and they all lost. He
got the same proportion of the white vote as Romney in 2012 and Bush
in 2004 and only a little more than McCain in 2008. He may have led
the charge to the right but comparatively few marched with him.
Nor is such a link
inevitable. In several countries across Europe – from Greece to
Britain – a populist left response has emerged to this same crisis.
In the US Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who calls himself a
democratic socialist, shocked everybody, including himself, by
mounting a dynamic insurgent campaign that addressed these very
economic issues.
Nonetheless, the
link cannot be denied. The case for solidarity requires more effort
and empathy than the case for scapegoating. It also flies against the
prevailing headwinds of individualism, nationalism and a narrow
understanding of self-preservation.
The connection
between closed factories and the rise of the populist right is
threefold. First, people are desperate. They were desperate before
the economic crisis. It’s not that there are no jobs available in
Muncie. As well as the university and hospital, some new
manufacturing jobs have arrived. But none can provide the kind of
lifestyle to which previous generations were accustomed. Many of the
houses on Muncie’s Southside that are not abandoned are collapsing,
signalling that a way life is disappearing. Some factory jobs cannot
be filled because applicants cannot pass company drugs tests. I heard
of at least one manager who is thinking of laying on a bus to get
people to work because they don’t have cars and public transport is
inadequate.
People need
something to change. “The [Democratic party says] ‘Let’s just
do the things we’ve always done and have incremental change’.”
says Dave Ring, who runs the Downtown Farm Stand, an organic food
store and deli. “So they’re very, very happy with incremental
change. And the rest of the public is out here like: ‘We don’t
have time for incremental change.’”
Second, people blame
the entire political class for making them desperate. Bringing down
trade barriers and letting manufacturing move abroad was part of a
western political orthodoxy that became dominant in the 1990s,
creating an overcrowded political centre and leaving so much room at
the extremes. The North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), was
promoted and passed by Bill Clinton – who also repealed the
Glass-Steagall Act, which deregulated the financial sector and
contributed to creating the conditions that produced the crash of
2008. Obama championed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious
trade deal involving 11 other countries, crafted mostly in secret,
which would not only have likely depressed wages but allowed
companies to sue governments if they change policy on, say, health
and education to favour state-provided services. Clinton vacillated
on it, first backing it, then opposing it. In the wake of Trump’s
victory Obama has now effectively abandoned TPP, Trump having
campaigned heavily against it.
This also helps
explain why Sanders, who campaigned hard against TPP, did so well
here. “They understand the trade issue,” said Ring, who voted for
Sanders in the primary and then Clinton. “People know what killed
their jobs and that was Nafta. And not only did it kill our jobs here
but it exploited people elsewhere, and I think people are starting to
understand how multinational corporations work. They move the jobs
where there’s people they can exploit.”
But the issue was
not simply about trade or globalisation: to many voters in Muncie,
Clinton looked not only like an integral part of the establishment
that had brought them to this place, but like a candidate advocating
more of the same. “If you take a step back and look at all America
has achieved over the past eight years, it’s remarkable to see how
far we’ve come,” Clinton argued. For many of those who already
had their backs against the wall, it was hard to see the progress.
Trump, on the other hand, offered the near certainty that something
would change. “At least he’ll shake things up,” was the phrase
that kept coming up. One in five of those who voted for him thought
he didn’t have the temperament to be president. For some who had
little to lose, he was evidently a risk worth taking.
“The Democrats
keep making out like everything is OK,” says Todd Smekens, the
publisher of the progressive online magazine Muncie Voice. “And
it’s not. Nobody’s buying it.”
Third, and perhaps
most dramatic of all, people have come to feel they have no say about
what is happening to their lives. That is why the slogan “Take Back
Control” resonated with so many during the Brexit referendum. The
nation state is still the primary democratic entity; but given the
scale of globalisation it is clearly no longer up to the that task of
meeting the needs of its citizens. Voters see people coming through
borders they can’t close and jobs leaving that they can’t save
and wonder how they can assert themselves on the world.
Trump, and his
counterparts, are often described in Europe as a threat to democracy.
But in truth they would be better understood as the product of a
democracy already in crisis.
The Lynds were keen
to concentrate on issues of class, and sought out a town with a
“homogenous, native-born population” in order to avoid “being
forced to handle two major variables, racial change and cultural
change”. So one of their key criteria for selecting Muncie as
“Middletown” was that it had “a small Negro and foreign-born
population”. The foreign-born population really was small because
the local business class deliberately imported workers from Tennessee
and Kentucky. “There was a conscious attempt to keep foreign
workers out,” says Connolly. “Because they wanted people to go
home during slack times and they were worried foreigners would bring
in dangerous ideas.”
So like a fairground
mirror, Middletown gave America an image of itself that was both
familiar and woefully distorted
The black
population, however, was not small. At 5%, it was proportionally
higher at the time than New York, Chicago, or Detroit – and growing
faster as well. Today it stands at 12% of the population. “They try
to unmask this myth about class. But what it did was create this
other myth about a representative America – a nostalgic, white
nativist America,” says Sarah Igo, a historian at Vanderbilt
University, and the author of The Averaged American.
So like a fairground
mirror, Middletown gave America an image of itself that was both
familiar and woefully distorted – an image that the American
commentariat preferred to reality. That myth, says Igo, is enduring.
It can be found in Sarah Palin’s praise of the “real America”
in 2008 or Ronald Reagan’s TV ad “It’s morning again in
America” in 1984, or, most of all, Donald Trump’s pledge to “Make
America great again” – a phrase first employed by Reagan in 1980.
Its persistence has
been unaffected – and perhaps even strengthened – by the
increasing diversity of the American population. As the white
population shrinks in relation to other groups, some people keep
their whitewashed image of the country alive by finding ever more
desperate ways to dismiss the existence or validity of non-white
Americans.
A few days before
the election, when reports of huge Latino turnout for early voting
presented the false promise of a Clinton landslide, the rightwing
troll Ann Coulter tweeted that “If only people with at least 4
grandparents born in America were voting, Trump would win in a
50-state landslide.” (Apparently not realising that would mean
neither Trump, whose mother is Scottish, his children or his wife,
who is Slovenian-born, could vote.)
Race was a key part
of Trump’s message and appeal. He branded Mexicans rapists, vowed
to build a wall on the border and to stop Muslims coming into the
country. He complained that an American-born federal judge presiding
in a case against Trump University was “hostile” because he was
“of Mexican heritage”. He threatened that he would not accept the
results of the election because there would be voter fraud in the
“inner cities” – a term that Trump uses to refer to places
where non-white people live. When a black Trump supporter was booed
at a rally in North Carolina, presumably because the crowd could not
imagine he was not there to protest, Trump ordered security to throw
the man out and called him “a thug”.
This was as
electorally savvy as it was morally reprehensible. After eight years
with Obama at the helm, at a time of heightened racial consciousness,
the white anxiety on which Trump preyed was ripe for leveraging.
This sense of racial
fragility was both local and global, real and imaginary. At home,
white people will become a minority in around 25 years, the president
is the black child of a mixed-race relationship that involved a
lapsed foreign Muslim, the southern border is porous, and black
people are on the streets again, demanding equality before the law.
Abroad, jihadi terrorists are becoming ever more brazen and brutal in
their attacks on western cities and civilians, the Chinese economy
will soon be larger than America’s, the US military has failed to
deliver victory in several Muslim countries, and refugees are
desperately fleeing the Middle East. Add all that to the stagnant
wages, falling living standards, decreasing life expectancy, and
vanishing class mobility, and you can see how being a white American
feels like it’s not what it used to be.
“While few
explicitly talk about Obama in racial terms, the base [Republican]
supporters are very conscious of being white in a country with
growing minorities,” the veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg
explained a few years ago. “Their party is losing to a Democratic
party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly
benefit minorities. Race remains very much alive in the politics of
the Republican party.”
Making small talk
over dinner with some Republicans in Muncie, I asked one if he had
any plans to visit Britain. He shook his head and said he wouldn’t
feel comfortable travelling in Europe at the moment – I assumed
because of the threat of terrorism. The only place he would feel safe
outside of America, he continued, was Israel. (In 2014, the murder
rate in Muncie was higher than in London.)
For the white
working class, says Jamie Walsh, who voted for Trump, the benefits of
being white aren’t obvious. “People are afraid that they’re
stupid. This whole PC thing – racism, sexism. All this stuff is
being stupid. All these isms are ignorance. People don’t feel
racist, they don’t feel sexist … They feel marginalised because
of their ignorance. You don’t want to offend people.”
Trump’s
victory cannot be explained by racism alone. He won several states
that Obama took easily in 2008 and 2012
It is in the precise
place where race and class merge that a section of white America
finds itself both bereft and beleaguered. “White privilege is like
a blessing and a curse if you’re poor,” Walsh says. “White
privilege pisses poor white people off because they’ve never
experienced it on a level that they understand. You hear ‘privilege’
and you think money and opportunity and they don’t have it. There’s
protected women, minorities – they have advocates. But there’s no
advocates for poor people.”
So Trump got almost
60% of the white vote and performed poorly among every other racial
group. Race was clearly a central fault line – and how could it not
be, in a country that practised slavery for 200 years, apartheid for
the next 100, and has been a non-racial democracy for only the last
50?
But Trump’s
victory cannot be explained by racism alone – and the efforts to
understand race and class separately result in one misunderstanding
them both entirely. Indeed, to get to the bottom of Trump’s appeal
we will have to go beyond any monocausal interpretation of these
results and adopt a more intersectional approach, one that takes into
account the fractious way a constellation of identities collide and
align.
People are, of
course, many things – male, white, straight, rural,
college-educated and so on – and just one thing: themselves. It is
that whole person, not a segment of it, that goes to the polls and
that we need to understand. Hillary Clinton won women – but Trump
won white women and older women.
This, despite the
fact that his campaign was steeped in misogyny, lambasting women for
their looks, dismissing women who accused him of sexual harassment as
gold-digging liars, and excusing his own boasts of assault as “locker
room talk”. He even passed judgment on Clinton’s looks, telling a
crowd in North Carolina: “She walked in front of me, believe me, I
wasn’t impressed.”
Bea Sousa, the
former spokesperson for the League of Women Voters of Muncie-Delaware
County, said a higher bar was set for Clinton than her male
counterparts of the past. “I’ve met a lot of women who detest her
intensely,” said Sousa, who said she was not a “rabid Hillary
fan” herself. “I can’t take credit for this statement but I
heard someone say, ‘We’ve gotten used to voting for males we
don’t like. We’ve held our nose and we’ve voted for them for
whatever reason. But we aren’t used to doing that with a woman.’
Our culture holds women to a higher standard.”
But once again, to
isolate misogyny as the central factor in Clinton’s defeat would
ignore the fact that 94% of black women went for Clinton – and
black men were nearly twice as likely to vote Clinton as white women.
Just as race alone cannot sufficiently explain the choices of Trump
voters, looking at only class, or only gender, in the absence of
race, cannot make sense of these disparities.
Older people voted
for Trump and younger for Clinton, although young white men went to
Trump. In another sign of the widening divide over education – also
visible in the Brexit vote – college graduates were for Clinton,
those who did not attend or finish for Trump. An even starker
partisan divide than gender or age was visible in the split between
the rural and the urban vote.
To fully grasp how
identity played a role in this – and clearly it did – the
challenge is not to try to isolate the variables, as the Lynds did,
but to include them. Otherwise, we trade the distortions of one
fairground mirror for another.
“The age of party
democracy has passed,” the late Irish political scientist Peter
Mair declared in Ruling the Void, his 2013 autopsy of “the
hollowing of western democracy”. “Although the parties themselves
remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society and
pursue a form of competition that is so lacking meaning, that they no
longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.”
The situation is no
less dire in America than Europe – and it finds illustration
everywhere you look in Muncie.
Thanks to its past
as a manufacturing hub with strong unions and a reputation for
machine politics, Muncie was once known as Little Chicago. The
“little” matters: Muncie is big enough to have a political
machine, but small enough that most of the people in that machine
have known each other since childhood.
The Democratic party
is based at 214 North Walnut Street, not far from the courthouse and
City Hall – locally, the party establishment is referred to simply
as 214. It drew its leadership, primarily, from the local fire
department – the current mayor was once a firefighter – and it
has a dynastic culture that would not be unfamiliar to the Clintons
or Bushes. A few families have dominated the party, and their names
still carry weight: Annette Craycraft, the unsuccessful candidate for
Delaware county commissioner, for example, is the sister of Steve
Craycraft, the Delaware county auditor, and both are the children of
Ally Craycraft, who long held positions in town.
In 2010, a reformist
caucus took shape within the Democratic party, calling themselves
“Team Democrat”. These were Democrats who wanted to disassociate
themselves from what they saw as the incestuous and corrupt grip of
the machine overseers. “Every person had their own breaking point,”
explains Victoria Rose, who once held a senior position in the local
party. “I just couldn’t take it any more.” Rose says that each
candidate for local office had to pay 10% of their salary to the
party in order to stand, and then 1% annually if elected. Whenever
possible, she says, the party liked the money in cash; much of it was
never accounted for.
For at least six
months, the FBI has been investigating Muncie’s Democratic city
government over allegations of corruption. In one case, it is alleged
that the city’s building commissioner – the son of a local
Democratic party grandee who is also a fireman – gave his own
building company more than $250,000 of work, some of it for
demolitions at addresses where there are no buildings. “It doesn’t
surprise me at all,” says Rose. “You could see it coming years
away.”
Team Democrat set up
a separate “political action committee”, asked people to sign up
to a code of conduct, and ran in Democratic primaries against
establishment candidates. Their office, a more modest, threadbare
affair, sits on the other side of City Hall from 214. Beyond the
ethics issue, Rose says there is little in the way of political
difference between Team Democrat and the local establishment,
although the reformists are possibly less working-class and more
likely to have supported Sanders.
On election night
last week, 214 looked like a wake. Presidential outcomes aside,
Republicans won a virtually clean sweep, from what should have been a
closely contested US Senate race, to the governor’s house, down to
the county commissioners. The only Democrat candidates that broke
through in local races were from Team Democrat.
During the primaries
there was no doubt whose side 214 was on: Clinton’s campaign was
based there. But beyond the African American community, where Clinton
won handily, there was little they could do for her. Sanders talked
trade and class, and that message goes down well in Muncie. Bit by
bit during the primary, the sceptical became committed and the
committed became active. Sanders won.
Muncie’s
Democratic machine, much like the Clinton machine, maintained power
but lost influence. Within the Democratic party, the Clintons had
been cultivating connections for a generation. During the primaries
they had the superdelegates sewn up; after it they had the funders
lined up. They had the best surrogates: Barack Obama, Michelle Obama,
Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé.
Clinton’s past provided extensive evidence that she was qualified,
but for her future presidency – and the changes she might bring –
there was no narrative.
In this period of
despair and volatility, their offer of milquetoast, market-led
managerialism is not a winning formula
You can pin it on
the Russians, WikiLeaks, the FBI, the media, third parties, and they
all played a role. But sooner or later moderate liberals are going to
have to own the consequences of their politics. In this period of
despair and volatility, their offer of milquetoast, market-led
managerialism is not a winning formula. For a political camp that
boasts of its pragmatic electability, it has quite simply failed to
adapt.
Carefully scripted
but complacently framed, the Clinton campaign emerged from a centrist
political tradition at a moment where there is no centre, offering
market-based solutions at a time when Clinton’s own base has begun
to see the free market as part of the problem.
Nationally, the
machine does not need a tune-up – it needs a complete overhaul. The
people to whom Clinton failed to appeal wanted more from their
politics than she would provide or was prepared to deliver. In short,
economic injustice and class alienation are as much the reason why
Clinton lost as why Trump won. He stoked his base’s fears; she
failed to give her base hope.
“People look
around Muncie and think, ‘What has capitalism done for the working
man?’” says Dave Ring, the Downtown Food Stand owner who voted
for Sanders and then Clinton. “Well, it’s taken our jobs and
ruined our infrastructure and increased our healthcare prices so
they’re unaffordable. If your job is good and you have good
healthcare and you have retirement, then you don’t understand.
That’s a very small group of people. And it happens to be the group
of people who are in power.”
Trump did not
introduce racism to the modern Republican party. He simply refused to
observe institutional etiquette.
For half a century,
Republicans had relied on Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”,
which deployed a coded racial message that could bind together a
formidable coalition of southern states and suburban white voters.
“You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the
blacks,” Nixon told his chief-of-staff Bob Haldeman. “The key is
to devise a system that recognises that while not appearing to.”
Trump had no problem
“appearing to”, although he focused his bigotry on Latinos and
Muslims more than African-Americans. Some people voted for him
because of this rhetoric, while others voted for him because it
didn’t put them off. The Republican party establishment was
terrified by it. Even with less inflammatory rhetoric, the party had
been struggling to win the White House.
Over the last few
election cycles, the black Republican vote has all but vanished –
and the party’s escalating anti-immigration rhetoric seemed certain
to erase its share of the Latino vote as well. The trend is clear:
Republicans are attracting fewer votes from a growing segment of the
population.
Party leaders have
long been arguing that this trend is not sustainable. “We’re not
generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long
term,” Senator Lindsey Graham said in 2012. Then along came Trump,
the erstwhile leader of the birther movement – insisting that Obama
was not a legitimate president, because he had really been born in
Kenya. When people said they hadn’t seen anything like this before,
they actually hadn’t been paying attention. True, he was more
brazen than his predecessors. But he didn’t break the mould; he
adapted it.
I
hated Donald Trump during the primaries. He was a mockery
Jamie Walsh, Trump
voter
Trump’s nomination
was supposed to tear the Republican party asunder. When the primaries
came to Indiana, only Ted Cruz and John Kasich were still in the
race, and Trump’s nomination felt like a done deal. He won 53% in
Delaware County, but most of the Republicans I spoke to there thought
he was a deeply flawed candidate.
“A lot of what
he’s done and said is indefensible,” said Jim Arnold at a meeting
of the Citizens of Delaware County for Good Government (CDCGG), a
local conservative group. “I would have been happier with almost
anyone else. I wanted [Ben] Carson, then Cruz then Rubio. Trump would
have almost been my last choice.” Most of the 12 in the group
preferred another candidate. One senior Republican called him a
“bully”. Jamie Walsh, who voted for Trump, called him “garbage”
and a “word-butcher”. “I hated Donald Trump during the
primaries,” she said. “He was a mockery.”
Around the time I
was talking to the CDCGG, the national press were writing premature
obituaries for the Republican party, complete with circular firing
squad metaphors, civil war analogies and even comparisons to the last
days of Hitler’s bunker. The local Republican party was also
divided – with the CDCGG attacking the party establishment with the
same kinetic energy and purist ideology I had seen in other Tea Party
groups over the years. When someone threw a brick through the window
of Delaware County’s Republican headquarters, the joke in town was
that nobody knew whether the vandal was a Republican or a Democrat.
But when election
day arrived, the Republicans all voted for Trump – because however
they felt about him, they loathed Clinton – and they enjoyed a
near-sweep of state and local races as well.
“From the
beginning I worried about whether she could win,” says Bea Sousa,
who cast her ballot for Clinton. “I think if the Republicans had
voted for John Kasich or Jeb Bush, we wouldn’t be talking about
this now because I think a lot of people who are having a hard time
voting for Trump would not have a hard time voting for a moderate
Republican.”
She had a point.
Trump lost the popular vote – which the Republicans have only won
once since 1992. But this year, it turns out that the people who
might have had a hard time voting for Trump had a harder time voting
for an establishment Democrat like Clinton. In the end, it was Trump
who was lucky to have her as an opponent.
A week before the
election, the police chief in Muncie – who also served as the
chairman of the county Democratic party until late last year –
abruptly announced his resignation after 31 years on the force. In
his resignation letter, he singled out the actions of the mayor, who
heads the city government currently being investigated by the FBI, as
the reason for his sudden departure.
Muncie is now
bracing itself for criminal indictments. People lower their voices a
little and roll their eyes when they mention the FBI investigation.
They are embarrassed, but not really surprised. What I heard over and
over again in the city, in many different ways – in matters
national and local, political and personal – was ordinary people
feeling that they were not getting a fair shake. That the news they
get is tainted, that politicians are lining their own pockets and
getting away with it; that nobody in power really cares about them
and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.
Trump’s
allegations of potential voter fraud were patently ridiculous. More
people in America are struck by lightning than impersonate other
people at the polls. Trump’s claim that the FBI had soft-pedalled
its investigation into Clinton’s emails was clearly bluster: he
withdrew it when they appeared to be reopening the case and renewed
it again when they said there was no case to answer. But his
incessant complaint that “the system is rigged” rang true.
Americans no longer have faith in the institutions that govern them.
They may differ on why and in whose interests it is rigged. But the
trust has gone.
In places such as
Muncie, where the recovery has been glacial by comparison to
Washington or New York, the legacy of the economic crisis is more
than just a distant memory. “My parents lost everything in 2008,”
says Cathy Day, an English lecturer at Ball State University. “They
remortgaged their home to put three kids and my mum through college.
All of that work they put in and they’re left with nothing.”
“It was brutal,”
Dave Ring recalled. He set up the Down Town Farm Stand, selling
organic produce, much of it from local farms including their own,
just before the financial crisis. “The first few years were very,
very hard. We just got through it. Every dollar that we have, we put
into this little store. We’re not wealthy. We were totally
undercapitalised when we started the store. It was half this size. We
didn’t have the deli. Just a few things on the shelves.”
And then, earlier
this year, the City of Muncie announced that it was partnering with a
major regional supermarket chain to help bring a new organic grocery
store to town. “A competitor wants to come here that’s one
thing,” says Ring. “But to subsidise a competitor? We live here.
Our profits are here. We pay our taxes here.”
It’s just one
story. But it’s the sort of story that I was told more often than
any other in Muncie. And when enough voters have their own versions
of this same story – of grievances real and exaggerated – their
sentiments don’t have to be firmly grounded in facts for them to be
keenly felt and fervently acted upon. When a tiny conspiratorial
minority believes the system is rigged, that’s their problem. But
when a majority believes it, then the system has a problem.
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