Who Are These People? It's Not Just Guns and Religion

 

The big question about Donald Trump is not Donald Trump. 

It has always been: who are these people who love him so?

Why did he know what he said from the very beginning? "I could shoot someone on 5th Avenue, and it wouldn't matter. They'd still vote for me."

We all know people who love Trump and we know there are many different roads to perdition, but a study from the University of Chicago's Richard Pape has illuminated some surprising things about those who committed insurrection his behalf on January 6, 2021, which may be a distinctive group of Trumpsters.

It turns out those 420 men (nearly all men) who were arrested at the Capitol were not living in their parents' basements, unemployed, isolated, but the were mostly owners of their own businesses or CEO's or professionals with extensive connections in their communities. These men had something to lose; they were not loser, drifters. What they shared was they mostly came from counties where the demographics had shifted, where Biden won, counties which had shifted from deep Red, and these mostly white men saw their power and privileges were being displaced and "handed" to non whites. They were the "we will not be replaced crowd."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xuvdU2flSE&t=140s

They were straight out of Charlottesville.

"I would have thought," said Terrence O'Rourke, running for Congress in New Hampshire, after Charlottesville, "That with all the divisions in our country, all the deep differences of opinion, there would be one thing we could all agree on: There is no such thing as a very fine Nazi." (Which is how Trump described those torch carrying throngs in Charlottesville--"some were very fine people.")

Apparently, not.

This is not Bible thumping Iowa evangelical stuff. 

This is more the Thomas Friedman resentment from "What's the Matter with Kansas?" As Friedman observed, "All claims on the right...advance from victimhood." 

But how could these men, successful in so many ways, feel victimized? In this crowd, apparently, it wasn't resentment of being down, but the fear they were headed down.

For most Trump supporters, who are wage earners or tradesmen, not business owners, Friedman's 2004 book is still true: "Ordinary working class people are right to hate the culture we live in. They are right to feel they have no power over it, and to notice that it makes them feel inadequate and stupid."

But the group at the Capitol was more the "officer class" of the Trump Orcs.

Both groups have a right to be offended. 

I can see it myself, in my own experience, although none of this would ever push me into Trump's camp.

But consider my son, who applied to the same medical school from which my brother and I both graduated. Now this particular college  was for more than half a century a bastion of WASP privilege on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Classes consisted of 90 men and 4 women, all white and no Jews. Sometime in the early 60's they started admitting Jews, but my class had only one Black man and one Black woman. Many of the students had uncles, fathers, grandfathers who graduated from the same school. Then, in the late 1990's, someone decided this was not a good thing and the class shifted to over half women (likely a good thing) and more non whites than whites. So when my white son applies, he never gets an interview. It didn't hurt him, he was promptly accepted at the rival medical school across town, which, truth be told is likely a little better school, so no harm, no foul, right?

Well, maybe not. You can never know about school admissions, but from where I stood, he could not attend the school he deserved, because his spot was reserved for someone else who fit more desirable demographics. 

Then there is the case of the white man who applies for a faculty position at the University of California and asked on his application how hiring him would serve the goal of diversity at the university and what plans he had to foster diversity (and equity and inclusion) on campus. The guy taught engineering. He said, "I felt like I was being asked to take a loyalty oath."

And then there is the topic which causes my female friends to threaten to kill or castrate me or do the one before the other, whenever I talk about it: Campus sexual assault. 

Anyone who has ever gone to college since the 1960's knows that young women, in a variety of settings, are sexually assaulted, or at the very least, have sex forced on them after they have said, "No."  Some of these women have gotten inebriated, gone to the bedroom of the man, got naked and then said "No," but the argument is, "No means no, whenever it is said." 

The problem is, on most campuses if the man is accused he has no due process rights. The university courts do not operate by state court standards. Neither the man, nor his lawyer, are permitted to cross examine the accuser. He has no right to face or challenge his accuser. That cherished Ivy League spot he competed for since age 7 crashes and burns. 

But that is liberal orthodoxy: "No means no! Believe the Woman!"

This, too, is liberal orthdoxy.

And transgender athletes who went through male puberty, only to transition to female, and then win all the glittering prizes in women's swimming or track, that too sets aflame the liberal house of straw.

During the Weimar Republic, Berlin became a cauldron of experimentation, free love, gay love, sexual expression and the non urban population was appalled by this "liberal" revolution, this Sodom and Gomorrah. 

As the republic unraveled, 500 assassinations of political officer holders undid political stability--all but about 20 were assassinations of liberals. 

During the 60's assassinations took the Kennedy brothers, and Martin Luther King: liberals.

"Why aren't these conservative firebrands ever assassinated?" people asked. (Well, eventually someone shot George Wallace, but that was just some crazy, with no political agenda.)

Because, we all knew, the whole idea of conservative authoritarianism is power, control and violence to maintain all that. Liberals do not do violence; they abhor violence.

Which brings us back to the January 6 rioters. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, the man said. 

Archie Bunker is someone few people remember, but from his loins have sprung the Trump crowd today. 

 Archie Bunker : If your spics and your spades want theirrightful share of the American dream, let 'em get out thereand hustle for it like I done. Mike Stivic : So now you're going to tell me the black manhas just as much chance as the white man to get a job? Archie Bunker : More, he has more... I didn't have no million people marchin' and protestin' to get me my job.Edith Bunker : No, his uncle got it for him

Archie Bunker:
If your spics and your spades want their rightful share of the American dream, let 'em get out there and hustle for it like I done.

Mike Stivic:
So now you're going to tell me the black man has just as must chance as the white man to get a job?

Archie Bunker:
More, he has more... I didn't have no million people marchin' and protestin' to get me my job.

Edith Bunker:
No, his uncle got it for him.