Tag Archives: Political Revolution

I was hoping it wouldn’t happen, but I knew it was possible. And now it has happened. Donald Trump has been elected to become the 45th president of the United States of America. Many people, including my political junkie boyfriend, had assured me that Trump wouldn’t be elected, but I know some Trump supporters and saw how nothing he did dissuaded them from their backing of this man.

So here we are, on the verge of a Trump presidency. As a liberal Sanders supporter, I’m dismayed, of course. But Trump tapped into a disenfranchised group that I know very well, the white working class (aka “Rednecks”). I can say that, as I have redneck roots. I’m a proud farmer’s daughter, and the granddaughter of a hillbilly maternal grandmother and a bootlegger paternal grandfather. So I know these folks because I come from them, live among them, and to some degree still identify with them. Most are good people who value family, hard work, church, and country. But they have felt left behind by an increasingly less religious, more educated, and more liberal nation. While I embrace the simple lifestyle and love of nature and animals that my rural background has engendered in me, I have long been opposed to the religiosity, jingoism, and narrow-mindedness of many rural people. Now these very people have united to usher in a Trump presidency.

So why did they elect Trump? While he does embody the machismo that is so valued by the white working class, he doesn’t reflect their lifestyles or religious values. But that’s not why they elected Donald Trump. The main reason the white working class elected Donald Trump is found in the class title itself: white working class. Many members of the white working class are no longer working. Their jobs have been outsourced to foreign countries or have been replaced by automation. The jobs available pay so poorly that they have to work two or three of them just to feed their families. Some have given up on trying to find work. The world they used to know, where good-paying factory jobs were plentiful, is gone and they are ill-prepared to survive, much less prosper, in this new world. So they elected a man who promised to bring their old world back. For all the racist rancor of the campaign, I don’t think most Trump supporters are racist. They just want their jobs back, or at least they want an economy that doesn’t leave them out in the cold (sometimes literally out in the cold, as many people became homeless after the Great Recession).

The working class, regardless of race, has been poorly served by both political parties. The Republican party is the party of big business (or at least it was; who know it will change after this election?). The Democratic party was supposed to be the party that stood with the working men and women, but it has been beholden to big business for many years, too. This left the working class unrepresented by either party. For better or worse, Donald Trump filled that vacuum.

So far, Trump has been conciliatory after the election, reaching out to all Americans. I’m heartened to see this. I was also encouraged to see that the first meeting of President Obama and Donald Trump apparently went well, and that the two men were respectful and gracious to each other in their statements to the press afterwards. While I believe that Bernie Sanders would have been a more effective champion of the working class, that isn’t who they chose. We have a political revolution, though not the one I was wanting. In any case, the people have spoken, and now it is our duty as Americans to unite around President-Elect Trump and try to move forward as a country. We don’t have to stifle criticism of Trump’s policies, once articulated. But let us move beyond the vitriol and name-calling of this past election, and indeed the last several elections. Let us try to restore civility to our body politic and be respectful of each other, even when we disagree. Since the election, Donald Trump, President Obama, and Hillary Clinton have called for reconciliation. We owe it to each other and to our country to follow their examples.