Why Trump won

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I live and work in the Silicon Valley/New York tech media bubble,
as do most of my friends and many of my relatives.

They’re stunned tonight. There’s talk of vomiting, of grabbing
their passports. 

I just got back from four days in the deep red Trump country of
eastern Tennessee to attend a wedding, and I’ve been
visiting every year or two (or three) since I met my wife in
1996. 

I didn’t grow up there, but I enjoy my visits there. Our
relatives there treat me well. I love them like you love
relatives who you know you’ll never talk politics with.

And I think I sort of understand where they’re coming from,
even if I disagree.

Here are some observations that may help my friends who
never left the bicoastal bubble — and all of you around the world
who are looking on in shock — understand how Americans just
elected somebody who 61% of Americans in a recent poll said was
not qualified to be president. 

• One relative worked in a photo processing lab for more
  than 20 years and used that job to singlehandedly support her
  family. She was laid off a few years away from retirement. The
  company was cutting costs thanks to competition from digital
  imaging technology that made film obsolete, and hers was one of
  the jobs to be cut. She got nothing extra. No pension, no
  retirement. We tell people like her that they’re supposed to
  retrain, get educated, get new jobs. How does that work, exactly?
  What do they do for money while retraining? Who’s going to hire a
  60-year-old trainee from the local community college or trade
  school anyway? What happens to all those communities where these
  jobs disappeared before the current generation could get hired in
  the first place? 
• Her husband, fortunately, had worked his way up to a good
  position in the local paper mill, the main employer in that area.
  He retired with a full pension and had enough to buy a nice house
  with some land attached, and she’s able to live on what they had
  together before he passed away earlier this year. But those paper
  mill jobs — good working class jobs that could set you up with a
  nice retirement — are the kinds of jobs that those of us in the
  new information economy and on Wall Street and in
  D.C. denigrate and say are going away and never coming back.
  The people who live in these places aren’t stupid. They know that
  globalization is making it more economical for companies to ship
  these jobs overseas, and they know that the people who run these
  companies care more about the numbers than about the people
  who work and live in these communities. 
• While I was there, we conspicuously talked around politics,
  not wanting to ruin what was supposed to be a joyful occasion.
  But one evening, a relative explained how a few years ago,
  hundreds of huge trucks kept going by with loads of something
  (ore? scrap? she wasn’t sure) from one of the old copper mines up
  in the mountains a few miles away. “They were shipping all that
  stuff to China!” she said, indignantly. Sure, this is global
  capitalism at work, and it’s efficient — if there had been US
  demand for whatever was being shipped, it would’ve been sold here
  (it’s cheaper not to ship it). But her point was that we were
  taking something that somebody felt was valuable and shipping it
  away, where it would do no good for the local economy and create
  no jobs.
• I’m so used to seeing homeless people on the streets of San
  Francisco, it felt depressingly familiar when I saw a
  vagrant holding a sign by the highway in Athens, Tennessee.
  But it was the first time in 20 years I’d seen a homeless
  person there. People have always had jobs, or churches, or
  at the very least too much pride to show their desperation like
  this. It’s awfully hard to convince people that we need to open
  the country up to Syrian refugees “when we can’t even take care
  of our own,” as one relative put it. 
• Tennessee has a fairly progressive Medicaid system
  called TennCare, which started in the 1990s. It offered insurance
  to people who didn’t have it and enrolled all recipients in
  a managed care (HMO-type) plan to keep costs low. Our relatives
  there have often expressed their hatred for it. They have all
  worked their whole lives and didn’t understand why
  freeloaders who’d never held a job should get the same benefits
  that they had to work for.

Don’t get me wrong — people there are flawed, just like people
everywhere. There’s plenty of alcoholism and drug abuse in the
community. People openly use racist terms and aren’t
particularly ready to embrace non-white non-Christians.
There’s a lot of cultural ignorance — I once heard somebody refer
to “one of those Mongolian Jews” and still have no idea what he
was talking about. (He said it with a neutral descriptive tone,
not angrily or critically, for what it’s worth.) The preacher
conducting the wedding pointedly referred to marriage as “between
one man and one woman.”

I don’t excuse or condone any of those things. I think they’re
wrong. 

But when you ignore the troubles of huge swaths of America and
condescend to the people living there for decades, eventually
they’re going to get fed up.

Hillary Clinton is the personification of the ruling class. Her
husband was president when the forces of globalization started
slowly ripping these communities apart. She’s a career
politician, and even if some of the criticisms against her are
unjustified, she seems just sneaky and condescending enough to
give off a whiff of guilt, of complicity.

Electing Donald Trump president over her was the biggest
imaginable “f— you” they could have sent to the unseen ruling
classes, those forces who have changed their lives over the last
few decades without their permission or consent, and reaped
the benefits while their communities have slowly fallen
apart. 

Now we’re all going to suffer for it. 

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.