Voting With Your Middle Finger
Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses. ~ H.L. Mencken
Like many people, I have a non-clinical schizophrenic side to my nature. On the one hand, my rural roots and working class background tell me I'm close to "the people," just another regular guy. But on the other hand, I am an overeducated professional class denizen with a passion for PBS documentaries and microbrews. This split personality plays out in my political views as well. I'll measure the worth of a candidate for public office by my father's dictum: "Has s/he ever had to take a lunch bucket to work?" But then I want to scrutinize their résumé for education and achievements. Will I vote for a candidate because they're "someone I'd like to have a beer with?" Or, because they have a solid platform of ideas with the brains to back it up? While folks opt for one or the other, or maybe even a combination of both, put me squarely in the corner of a solid platform backed by brains.
Which gets me to Donald Trump. For the life of me, I cannot fathom how any thinking citizen can throw their lot in with that bombastic buffoon. Irrespective of how justifiably pissed they are at our clearly screwed up political establishment, how can they entertain blowing the whole system up by electing an American Juan Peron to the White House? Are people that stupid? Not necessarily, but they are desperate as well as angry. Some, like Congressman Paul Ryan, can see the fool that Trump is, but are politically meretricious. But many others are acting out of nihilistic motives. These folks have thrown reason out the window. They are voting with their middle finger.
In The Dumbass Vote: A Modest Proposal to Repeal Universal Suffrage, I cite historian Akim Reinhardt's observation that "Many of the founders believed that, generally speaking, the mass of citizens are corruptible and easily swayed. This makes them susceptible to charismatic leaders, or even chaotic mob rule. So if you let the people decide what to do, it won’t be long before they either hand the reins of government over to some charming rapscallion who will quickly establish himself as a brutal despot, or the whole thing will simply devolve into anarchy and bloodshed." This explains the Grand Guignol Republican primaries of 2012 and this year which have seen, inter alia, a witch, a pizza magnate with a penchant for sexual assault, a surgeon who denies evolution and a relentlessly mendacious real estate wheeler dealer vie for their party's presidential nomination. And in This Isn't My Father's Republican Party, I lament the Republicans' purging their party of centrists and veering off into fringe territory with public debates about "legitimate rape," eliminating the minimum wage and carpet bombing the deserts of the Middle East.
A lot research has gone into this popular anger recently. Like oil and water separating, the top fifth in income is disengaging from the rest of the population. The percentage of families living in very affluent neighborhoods more than doubled between 1970 and 2012, from 6.6 percent to 15.7 percent while the percentage of families living in traditional middle class neighborhoods fell from 64.7 percent in 1970 to 40.5 percent, according to one recent study. "This self-segregation of a privileged fifth of the population is changing the American social order and the American political system, creating a self-perpetuating class at the top, which is ever more difficult to break into," states Thomas Edsall of the New York Times. And the lower 80 percent are resentful. That newspaper's principal center-right columnist, David Brooks, confessed, "I was surprised by Trump’s success because I’ve slipped into a bad pattern, spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata — in professional circles with people with similar status and demographics to my own." This goes for most of us, myself included. And yet -- the statistics reveal that Trump supporters' median income of $71,000 exceeds that of Clinton and Sanders backers by over ten grand. So, go figure.
But the stakes are too high in this election. Whatever one thinks of Hillary Clinton, her foreign policy speech in which she accurately identifies Trump as "dangerously incoherent" hits the mark. I elaborated on this in Donald Trump’s Farcical Foreign Policy: "He not only lacks a worldview, but also the foundation upon which to form one."
As we struggle to find explanations for the surge in support for Trump, I nod and say, "Ah yes. I see," but still remain puzzled and continue to ask myself, "Are people really that gullible and stupid?" Sometimes, history moves according to unexplained forces and that refrain from the movie Casablanca echoes in my head: "The devil has the people by the throat."