Wisconsin before the 1994 midterms
The roots of Trumpism (Part 7)
I was Imperial Marshal of the Wausau Gala 1994 Labor Day Parade. It was a bright, cool, sun-drenched day with a hint of fall in the air.
Perched on top of the back seat of an open convertible — a bright-green 1958 Buick — I waved to the few people who sat in lawn chairs along Main Street. Behind the convertible was the Wausau High School Marching Band, and behind them the Wausau Fire Department. Then came several groups holding banners: “Local #311 SEIU” and “Proud to be from Pipefitters Local #44” and “International Union of Electrical Workers Local #353.”
It seemed like far more people were in the parade than watching it.
I was there because Congressman David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, asked me to be. He and his committee doled out money to the Labor Department. His wish was my command.
Bespectacled and sharp-nosed, Obey looked like an owl perched next to me on the convertible’s back seat. He waved at anything capable of waving back. I admired him enormously. He was a progressive lawmaker in the tradition of Wisconsin’s Robert “fighting Bob” La Follette. He’d won some important battles for working people over the years. He was tough and cranky.
“I’m worried,” he said to me out of the side of his mouth, then waved to a middle-aged woman in a lawn chair, who smiled and waved back. “How ya’ doin’ Gladys?”
“That bad?” I asked.
“I’ll do okay. But — geez — we’re gonna lose a lot of good people.” Another wave. He called out, “Hi ya’ Gert!”
“Think we could lose the House?”
“Yup.” Obey waved to a bald man holding an American flag, and yelled, “‘at-a-boy, Henry!”
“What’s the problem?”
“Lot of things. NAFTA. Health care bill gone to hell. Gays in the military. Guns. Whitewater. This dame Paul Jones. Hillary. Baseball strike.”
“They’re gonna take it out on the Democrats?”
“Working folk out here don’t much like your boss,” he said quietly. He turned to wave — “Hi Frankie! Good to see ya’!” — then back. “‘Specially men. Hey Arch! How you doin’?”
“What do men have against him?”
Obey didn’t say anything for a few minutes. He continued to wave and shout to his constituents, many of them people he’d known for decades.
Then he turned directly to me. “Factories closing. New jobs pay shit. Guys have to take women’s work in fast food, retail, hospitals, hotels. Their wives have to work harder, longer hours. These guys are angry. Humiliated. Furious. They thought Clinton would change all that, but it only got worse. NAFTA and global trade scares the hell out of them. Then he wants to take away their guns! He wants to put gays in the army! He doesn’t stand up to a bitch from Arkansas who accuses him of hanky-panky. He puts his bossy law-school graduate wife in charge of health-care reform, which crashes. Get the picture?” He turned back to the lawn chairs. “Hey, Emma!”
“Not sure.”
He looked at me as if I was the dumbest kid in the class. “Emasculation! Blue-collar men already lost one testicle before Clinton. Now they’re both gone. And they blame us.” Then another wave. “Beatrice, you look beautiful!”
He got elected twice. And Obama got elected twice. I'm tired of hearing how poorly the white workers of middle America have been treated. Their grievances don't add up to justifying their deplorable behavior and attitude. Black people, as a voting block and as a demographic, don't go around weeping and whining like these white crybabies, and the blacks were ENSLAVED for 400 years. And then semi enslaved for another hundred years. And keep getting gunned down in the streets. And women were left out of the equation of democracy by the constitution and had to fight to just be allowed to participate, and have just had their personal rights ripped away after only really having them for 50 years. These bellyaching whites are just a bunch of Rambos who believe they could have beat the Vietnamese if they weren't hamstrung. They are clinging to a manifest destiny view of history that tells them they are entitled to be on top and have dominion over everything and everybody.
Obey was right; when the Democratic Party abandoned the working class for neoliberalism, it pushed the white, male working class into Trump's open arms.
That doesn't mean we should go back to gay-bashing and force women to stay barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen any more than that the racism fostered by working-class white male insecurity means we should relegalize slavery.
During the Civil Rights Movement, I saw a poor, white, Southern sharecropper interviewed on the TV news as to why he wanted to maintain segregation. He said, "If you're too poor to have a dog to kick around, you gotta have something." As long as the the US is structured hierarchically in such a way that those near the bottom of the hierarchy will accept and even welcome being exploited and abused as long as they have someone "below" them as their "dog to kick around," the ideals of democracy-- liberté, égalité, fraternité, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness--will remain fantasies used primarily to manipulate and exploit those at or near the bottom but incapable of becoming reality.
White males, especially working-class white males, are in trouble and are giving up (women outnumber them in post-secondary education; they figure highly in the statistics of "deaths of desperation") because they have been taught for generations that they are entitled to a dog to kick around purely by virtue of being white and having a penis (why else accept jobs that barely pay enough to support their families and that wear them out physically before they reach retirement?). That isn't enough to grant them privilege anymore, and they don't know how to cope or to compete in a society based on competitive hierarchy.
"Toxic masculinity" is most toxic to men. Like feminist women, they have to learn that patriarchy is their enemy, not their friend, and to ignore it. Like POC, they have to learn that white supremacy is just another way to exploit them and is therefore their enemy and abandon it. They (and not just white working-class males) must learn that the idea that the US is a "classless society" is a lie, that the rich and laissez faire capitalism are their enemies (and that, no, they are not going to become billionaires anytime soon), that wealth does not trickle downwards.
The grievances of white working-class males are valid--American society has exploited and abandoned them--but the solutions the right feeds them are guaranteed to keep them in that condition.