So Why, Some Ask, Would Anyone Still Vote for Trump?

I'm going to tell you why . . .

I’ve seen a large number of responses to the debate that simultaneously exclaim how wonderfully Kamala Harris performed and then wondering, sometimes with more than a hint of despair, how anyone could still be supporting Trump.

I have been thinking and writing about this and related topics for some years now. I start from this quote:

“If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” ― Franklin D. Roosevelt

We have failed miserably at this ever since Reagan and “Trickle-Down Economics” began the 40+ year, bi-partisan commitment to leading and dominating the process of economic globalization. Millions of “heartland” Americans lost their good-paying manufacturing and adjacent jobs, thousands of communities lost their viability, tens of millions lost their dignity and any sense of personal or communal agency or purchase on the American Dream.

The result: disaffection, anger, bitterness, resentment, loss of basic social supports, the epidemic of “Deaths of Despair.” And on and on. At the same time, Reagan Republicans targeted the disparagement of people on welfare. “Makers vs Takers” and all of that. 

This has gone on for 40+ years.

Somehow, one of the most despicable humans on the planet, Donald Trump, recognized this and its potential as a vehicle for both of his main ambitions: adulation and wealth. Probably because of his close association with the World Wrestling ecosystem and with the millions of people who attend and tune-in to these events for cathartic release and “tribal” connectivity.

Trump came out of nowhere with a campaign built around “A plague on both their (Repubs and Dems) houses.” Powerful, cloistered, “woke” elites became the insidious enemy that has captured and created for themselves (ourselves — it is us that they hate the most because we are adjacent to them) the privileges and pathways that make it possible to “make it in America.”

Building on resentment of the “special treatment” minorities and women had been granted while the heartland was abandoned, Trump seized on the perennial target of immigrants (by definition rapists and murderers) as the most imminent threat.

It wasn’t enough that the elites shipped millions of our best jobs to brown people around the globe. Now these same elites are admitting these people by the millions to take what remains of our jobs jobs right here. Trump has solidly convinced many millions of Americans that these immigrants are here to “replace them.”

So, anger, threats, thuggery, bigotry, racism? Hell yes. This is plainly what FDR warned about. Again:

“If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”

This is why beating Trump is only part of our struggle. The rest has to do with the rest of us seeing that democracy moves forward as a living force that betters the lot of ALL OF our citizens.

We have to elect Harris and Walz. But then we have to demand of them, the rest of our elected officials, and of ourselves that we do, in fact what Harris calls “taking our country in a whole new direction.”

This will take lots of time and effort, but that’s the responsibility we carry if we are, indeed, determined to “breath free.”