An Angry White Male
We are hearing a lot today about the angry white working-class men who formed the core of Trump’s support. Throughout this campaign, we’ve been told that we need to get over our urban, coastal, ivory-tower, liberal, elite pretentions and recognize that Middle America offers a perspective that we need to appreciate and empathize with. So many working-class whites voted for Trump, we are told, precisely because they are sick and tired of the arrogance demonstrated by the over-educated elites, sick and tired of being told that they are racists, that they’ve been duped and misled, that they don’t understand their own best interests, that their opinions are incorrect or illegitimate. If we hadn’t been so sure of ourselves and contemptuous of our fellow Americans, then maybe we wouldn’t be facing such a horrifying political crisis.
Fuck that.
I’m a white male too, raised in the Midwest by working class parents. And today I’m mad as hell. I’m as mad as any of the idiots from my home town who voted for Trump. And I have enough respect for those fools to treat them exactly as I would treat a Prius-driving, craft-brew drinking, New-Yorker-reading intellectual—if the latter had done something as obscene and stupid as vote for Trump.
If you voted for Trump because you think he is going to do something to shake up the elites and the powerful, and return America to “the people,” then you’ve been conned and you have just proven that you don’t know what’s in your own best interests. Deal with it.
If you voted for Trump because you believed that Clinton was even worse, because the media you consume has been filled with false equivalencies between her imagined crimes and Trump’s real ones, or because you can’t tell the difference between a typical deal-making smarmy politician and a fascist clown, then you deserve everything that’s coming to you.
If you voted for Trump because you are sick and tired of people telling you that your jokes are offensive, that you should treat women as genuine equals and not as sex objects, that you should accept that most blacks, Latinos, and Muslims have an even harder time in life than you do—if you are sick of being told that, sorry. It’s true, and I’m not going to apologize for telling you that. If every time someone mentions structural racism you think you are being called a racist, I get it—it sucks when you get stuck with overgeneralized labels. You know what other labels really suck? The ones you use to talk about everyone who is different than you.
Coastal elites really can be arrogant and clueless when they talk about people from the rest of the country. I’ve faced that myself. I remember the surprised looks I got in grad school when I admitted that no, my rural high school and mid-tier college didn’t introduce me to the canonical works of literature and social theory. I remember what it was like to not know a red wine from a white wine, or which fork to use at a fancy dinner. I remember what it was like to realize that I should keep quiet about the fact that I enjoyed going to football games and that some of my best child memories are of my Dad taking me to stock-car races. So yeah, the snobs of the world should get over themselves and start to recognize their own implicit biases against working-class whites.
But you know what else I’ve experienced? I’ve felt what it was like to have people tell me that because I was a university professor, I couldn’t possibly understand what “real life” was like. Because I lived in a college town, I “didn’t get it.” Because I only taught two classes a semester I couldn’t grasp what it was like to work for a living. Because I voted for Democrats I wasn’t a “real American.” You want to see some arrogance? Just ask a small business owner from a small town what he thinks about college professors.
Empathy is a good thing. We need a lot more of it in our country, particularly today. But it needs to work both ways. “We Republicans should get over our prejudices against liberals who live in multicultural cities, and try to see the world from their perspective,” said absolutely no one, ever.
Yes, we educated liberals should show true respect for right-wing America and strive to understand their worldview. Then, as equal to equal, as American to American, we have every right tell them that they’re full of shit.