I still don’t get why rural voters latched onto a clearly narcissistic big city property developer who lies constantly and treat rural people like shit as a response to big city politicians who rural voters think lie constantly and treat rural people like shit.
Just because he said words they wanted to hear? Politicians do that all the time! How is he the one they believe?
All the points in the article are accurate, but it just doesn’t make sense that the personification of everything they hate about cities is who they end up worshipping.
He’s a fighter. He fights everyone, about everything. I think that’s the crux of it.
Over the 1990s and 2000s these people were completely and utterly forgotten. Textiles, mines, manufacturing plants, they shuttered over and over and over and over again, and their children moved to big cities en masse. Their small cities and rural towns went from being on a growth trajectory (everything was on that trajectory between WWII and NAFTA) to being on a path to contraction and decay. Over that time they got madder, and madder, and madder, and madder, and they watched the Republican party (the one who at least paid lip service to “small government” and “traditional values”) lean harder and harder into corporatism. They were promised good things over and over and over again, and they were constantly pandered to, then lied to, and then ignored. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Well, Trump was the first one who didn’t talk, act, and think like the other guys. He wasn’t a politician, and that’s a great thing because (as they’d all come to agree) politicians are lying scum. So then not only was he willing to fight ferociously for them (and only them), he was willing to spit in the face of the people who lied to them all those years. And those political figures started to look like whiny little children when they stepped up and started saying, “hey, he’s lying to you!” The voters’ response was, “yeah? so the fuck what! you did too!”
He flips the system on its head, and he exposes politicians for what they are, because he’s exactly like them but he doesn’t give a fuck about playing the political game. To them, this is a godsend (literally). It’s the first crack in the political system that gave them any kind of sustained, meaningful authority to push back both politically and culturally, and he delivered a court system that’ll now push the entire country to the right over the next few decades. They simply don’t care about the democratic institutions he’s destroying, because they never helped the rural folk anyway.
Note: I don’t personally agree with much of this nonsense, and I think it’s a lot like shooting yourself in the face to cure a hangnail, but I’m just giving you a sense of how they look at it, and why he’s so weirdly transcendent to them. He’s a rich, connected insider, who decided to burn the system down from the inside.
If only there was a group of people who told us neoliberalism and NAFTA would be disastrous!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests
Since NAFTA, Americans have watched the economy grow, but its stability plummet.
https://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/testimonies/comesatime.htm
Interesting reflection in today’s world where we keep getting told that the current administration has done great for the economy, and yet the wealth devide keeps growing, and more and more people are living paycheck to paycheck.
There’s an also an interesting linguistic difference that is very noticeable between this movement and today’s repercussions of the inaction that followed. While in English we often speak of “anti-globalization” in French they say “alter-mondialisation”. A different globalization instead of against globalization. The French term much better described the left wing movement of the time, while the media only spoke of anti-globalization which now became a calling cry of the right.
Fun fact, a Twitter was originally conceptualized as a result of the 1999 protests^1 due to the difficulties and successes people on the streets had with coordinating via SMS (which at the time was rather new and novel).
Anyhow, I guess we should all vote for the neoliberal again, surely that will fix it!
I mean, you’re not wrong. I think Trump’s ascendancy represents the collapse of the neoliberal consensus of the late 20th century. Where we go from here is anyone’s guess, but the fact that both the left and right are screaming about the evils of neoliberalism means that there’s now a bipartisan coalition willing to dismantle the institutions that arose out of that consensus. It’s a loose coalition, to be sure, and each wing is arguing for fundamentally different futures, but they’re still targeting the same players, and new economic models are now en vogue and within the realm of possibility. Just sucks that one of them is outright fascism.
The two also have been fundamental in establishing those policies.
Reganomics/Thatcherism is just as much to blame.
I still don’t get why rural voters latched onto a clearly narcissistic big city property developer who lies constantly and treat rural people like shit as a response to big city politicians who rural voters think lie constantly and treat rural people like shit.
Because he gave their bigotry a voice.
Credit to @shalafi@lemmy.world - this applies very well to this comment.
