Working people supporting Trump, Sanders
The case for Donald Trump is harder to figure, but only because the guy is such a gas bag. His comment the other day after President Obama spoke at a mosque — “maybe he feels comfortable there” — was another in a long line of ugly innuendos he has used to poison the political well.
To the extent that the Donald Trump campaign for president is about the white working class, his second-place finish in Iowa is to be regretted.
Ted Cruz, the winner in Iowa, has a different agenda altogether.
To the extent that the Bernie Sanders campaign has the same or nearly the same focus, his close second in Iowa to Hillary Clinton is all to the good
He’s pushing Hillary, and she seems to be responding.
We are splashing about in murky waters here. The liberal intelligentsia may well quake at dwelling very long on white anxiety, not when the permanent black and brown underclass in America remains on such shaky ground.
Do black lives matter? You bet they do. As Bill Clinton recently said, all of us — whites and blacks — have grown weary of looking at videos depicting young black lives being snuffed out for no apparent reason.
But white lives are on the line, too, and there are signs that a great many white Americans have passed the point of no return. The 40-percent increase in deaths related to suicides, drugs and alcoholism among middle-age white males in the last decade is the most shocking of these developments.
As for conservatives, many of them may very well feel uncomfortable confronting topics which, to a great extent, spring from the very core of the conservative creed: free-wheeling, no holds-barred, bottom-line capitalism.
It’s no an accident that scores of young men (and women) are stocking shelves at Wal-Mart. Thirty, forty and fifty years ago their fathers and grandfathers toiled for middle-class wages in Pittsburgh steel mills, Mon Valley machine shops and Fayette County coal mines.
Some of these jobs disappeared through obsolescence or depletion; others as a result of a growing global economy; but many went the way of (free-trade) treaties signed by Washington and supported, actively, by Wall Street.
Elites in both parties have, over the years, welcomed a more robust world economy and with good reason. A world in which there is an expanding number of both producers and consumers is, almost by definition, a safer, saner world.
(As much as we would like to punish Russia, for instance, for its actions in Ukraine and Syria, it does not serve our interests to be punitive to the point that the Russian economy is crippled and Russian society is destabilized.
The recent troubles in the Chinese economy pinpoint the problems that can engulf the entire world when one large country appears to falter, although growing at a six-percent clip a year, the Chinese economy is hardly hamstrung.)
Back to the main point: internationalists, including many political leaders, can, and do, react positively whenever an Indian steel mill or a new factory opens in Vietnam, conscious that we’ve taken yet one more step in building a stable, peaceful world, which, after all, has been the overarching goal of American diplomacy since the end of World War II.
But that is little comfort to American workers forced to the sidelines or to U.S. communities, including many in western Pennsylvania, facing the specter of mass unemployment.
This is exactly what has been happening across the country for the past 30 to 40 years, almost without let up. It is always bracing to discover that conditions in small towns, say, in the Southeast are just as bad as they are here. I spoke the other day with a longtime acquaintance from Durham, N.C., who told me that outside the university-research triangle of Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill, the rural villages of north central North Carolina continue to limp along.
The story is the same everywhere. From Maine to Oregon, Minnesota to the Gulf states.
Enter Sanders and Trump. Bernie’s great appeal has been to college-crowd and Boomer whites, responding to his call for Wall Street reforms, greater income equality and a wider and stronger social safety net, including “health care for all.”
Many of those who attended college in the late 1960s thought of themselves as “radical” and “revolutionaries” without actually being such.
Bernie has given this crowd — the kids who simultaneously opposed the Vietnam War, supported the Civil Rights movement, and pioneered the sexual revolution — reason to hope again.
If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the young white activists of the 1960s, not to worry. Many are rooting on and working on behalf of Bernie Sanders. Little wonder the Sanders campaign has deployed Simon & Garfunkel in a TV ad, the best of the campaign to date. Folk-rockers Paul and Art are throwbacks to the ’60s and early ’70s, and the crusade by middle-class white kids to remake the world.
Still in all, he’s spoken to worries that grip blue-collar whites, including the loss of economic security and what many perceive as a breakdown in community and family life. A great many Trump supporters feel in their heart of hearts that they are losing ground, and that the country they love is no longer number one.
The Donald’s can-do personal history and his promise to “make America great again” has resonated with a wide swath of white Americans.
It’s such a powerful message that he appeared to be on the verge of breaking up the GOP’s ideological logjam, busting through decades of demographic profiling by the right’s political pros, by bringing white evangelicals onboard with more secular members of the party.
Heck, people who could care less about a George Will-style conservative litmus test were also threatening to hop on the Trump Express.
Then came Iowa.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail .com.