Donald Trump supporters are not the bigots the left likes to demonise

John Harris in The Guardian

Last Tuesday, at about 3pm, I parked my rental car outside a polling station in the suburbs of Indianapolis, and began to talk to the droves of people going in and out. There was only one subject I really wanted to hear about:Donald Trump, and his jaw-dropping progress to being the presumptive Republican nominee.

As he said himself, a win in the state of Indiana would seal the deal, and so it proved: he got 53% of the vote, which triggered the exit of his two supposed rivals. Meanwhile, the global liberal left seemed to be once again working itself into a lather, which was easily translatable: how awful that a man routinely described using all the boo-words progressives can muster – misogynist, racist, fascist, xenophobe, or “xenophobic fascist”, as George Clooney understatedly put it – could now be a resident of the political mainstream, and a serious contender for president.

Though calling him a fascist surely demeans the victims of the real thing, Trump has some extremely grim views, and the idea of him in the White House has an obviously terrifying quality. But for those who loathe him, a problem comes when the nastier elements of his rhetoric are conflated with the supposed instincts of millions of his supporters, and familiar stereotypes come into play. “Not all Donald Trump supporters are racists, but most racists are Donald Trump supporters,” says the liberal online outlet Salon. “The unusual geographic pattern of Trumpism … corresponds to the geography of white racial resentment in the United States,” offers a contributor to the political website Vox. “They vote for him because he is a racist bigot,” reckoned one eloquent tweeter I briefly corresponded with.

George Clooney: 'There’s not going to be a President Donald Trump'


Caricatures of rednecks and white trash are obviously in the foreground here. Worse still, such judgments are often arrived at through polling data, guesswork, and a large measure of metropolitan prejudice: in keeping with one of the most baffling failings of political journalism across the globe, too few people think of speaking to the voters themselves.

So to Indiana, where, with my Guardian colleague John Domokos, I spent the best part of five days following the Trump campaign. No one mentioned his assuredly unpleasant ideas about excluding Muslims from the US, nor his absurd proposal to build a wall between America and Mexico, at the latter country’s expense. Indeed, when I saw Trump speak at a rally in the Indiana town of Evansville, he made no reference to what he has said about Muslims, and dealt with the fabled wall in a matter of seconds.

Instead, he talked at length about two of his pet themes. First, he banged on about the free trade deals that he says have blitzed US industry as companies have moved abroad, luxuriated in newly low labour costs, and imported their wares back into the country. Second, he fed that specific story into a general sense of national decline.

‘Clinton’s enemies malign her as someone who enthusiastically supported the trade deal to end all trade deals: Nafta, in 1994, which the Carrier workers put at the centre of their predicament.’ Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty

All of this is very real. From the dreadful state of the roads to the palpable sense of communities reeling from the military adventures that began in 2001, time spent in the US quickly reveals a country that collectively feels it has taken no end of wrong turns, and must somehow sort itself out. It is one of the more overlooked stories of the 2016 election that Trump’s views about this malaise intersect with the insurgent campaign still being waged by that great left hope, Bernie Sanders. There are, in other words, two anti-establishment figures doing their thing on either side of the political divide, with great success.

Trump calls DC Republicans to heel



But in the case of Trump, his positioning fuses with his hyperactive, barnstorming TV persona, and creates something with particularly populist appeal. The presentation is pure political vaudeville, used in the service of anti-politics: rambling (and often very funny) oratory, cartoon political incorrectness, self-obsession so extreme that it comes out looking endearingly self-parodic. But at the core are oomphy words about something built into his audiences’ daily reality: stores full of goods made overseas, and jobs that feel increasingly under threat.

His proposed solution, his detractors say, is probably beyond the reach of a president, and in the short term would presumably hit his supporters’ wallets like a hammer, but it’s simple enough: if any company dares move overseas, he’ll whack their goods with such high tariffs that they’ll soon come running back.

At the polling station, all of the above was reflected in the reasons people gave for supporting him. Just to make this clear: obviously, there are voters with bigoted opinions who think he’s their man. But equally, almost none of the Trumpites I met seemed to be the gun-toting zealots of liberal demonology: they explained voting for him in very matter-of-fact terms, usually with explicit criticism of the current political class. “Jobs, outsourcing, bringing jobs back to our country,” offered one of his supporters. “We’re getting aluminium from China – we don’t need aluminium from China. Hell, we make it right here,” said another. There was also much more nuance than you might expect. “I hate the way he talks about women, but I love the way he handles things,” one woman told me.

Indiana has one particular case study Trump talks about. In Indianapolis, a company called Carrier recently announced the imminent closure of an air-conditioning factory, with the loss of 1,400 jobs. Its operations will be shifted to Mexico. In Indianapolis, average wages are over $20 an hour, but once the move over the border is complete, pay will be more like $3. Talking to workers, it seemed that they were split down the middle, with some – like the local branch of their union, the United Steelworkers – supporting Sanders, while others favoured Trump.

Again, the latter option was often framed in terms of difficult choices, and some degree of hesitancy. A Carrier employee called Brad Stepp described his fear of the future, and why Trump represents “the lesser of three evils”. He was well aware of the absurdities of a high-living billionaire claiming to have the back of American workers, not least in the context of Trump’s recent(ish) claim that people in the US are paid too much. But he had made his choice. “We need somebody that’s tough,” he said. “If he can’t stop Carrier going, maybe he can stop other companies doing the same thing.” In the midst of all this, one character sits in a very uneasy position. Unsettled by their popularity, Hillary Clinton has been trying to echo some of Trump’s and Sanders’ pronouncements on trade and jobs. “I won’t support any agreement unless it helps create good jobs and higher wages for American workers,” she says, offering to be the president for “the struggling, the striving and the successful”. Her enemies, by contrast, malign her as someone who enthusiastically supported the trade deal to end all trade deals: the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994, which the Carrier workers put at the centre of their predicament. In fact, politics being politics, the details of her record matter less than broad-brush appearances. And here, the story for her adversaries is a cinch. The establishment has failed; she is a card-carrying member of that establishment; ergo, she has failed too.

Herein lies a vulnerability that should chill the liberal left to the bone. Five days after I got back from Indiana, polls suggested that the presumed contest between Clinton and Trump will be much closer than some people imagine. For those who yell at him and his supporters from the sidelines, that news ought to give pause for thought: before it’s too late, maybe it’s time to stop hysterically moralising and instead try to understand not just how mainstream US politics has so awfully failed, but how it might somehow be rescued.

Chav-bashing – a bad joke turning into bilious policy

It started as snobbery, but this week the idea that the poor are to blame for their plight may well become law

• 
• • John Harris
  • The Guardian, Monday 7 January 2013

'In almost everything we now hear about economic disadvantage, to be one of the economy's losers isn't about being a vicitm of forces beyond your control, but character failings'. Photograph: ALIKI SAPOUNTZI / aliki image li/Alamy

Six years ago, I wrote a piece for the Guardian about a phenomenon that had been bubbling away for a few years, and had started to become inescapable. It all seems rather quaint now: Prince William allegedly taking part in a "chav-themed fancy dress party" at Sandhurst; Oxford colleges hosting "chav bops"; the privately educated creators of Little Britain entertaining their devotees with comedic representations of the so-called underclass. But there it was: to be living on an estate, and in receipt of benefits, and possibly out of work, was to not just to be fair game for Oxford undergraduates, the future king and a certain kind of TV comedian, but the butt of a huge national joke. Some of us wondered where exactly what was briefly known as "The New Snobbery" was headed.

We now know. Its cultural aspects were merely the tip of the iceberg – as the Labour party engaged in the rebranding of social security as "welfare" and its ministers raged against "benefit cheats", something poisonous was being embedded at the core of our national life. While the Conservative party grimaced through a fleeting modernisation, it sat there, ready to be picked up by a Tory-led administration and taken to its logical conclusion.

Tuesday sees the Commons vote on the welfare uprating bill, via which the government wants to cap increases in working-age benefits at 1% and in the process portray Labour as – to quote the Observer's Andrew Rawnsley – the party of "skiving fat slobs". Throughout the coming year, the grim provisions of the Welfare Reform Act will be upon us, snatching away money from hundreds of thousands of people, and commencing the uncertain era of universal credit. It is a token of the government's agenda that in moving in on just about anyone who receives state help (apart from those electorally vital pensioners), they are simultaneously lionising hard-working families while snatching money off them – which is the basis of Labour's creditable opposition to the bill, though that does not quite let them off the hook. Most of the opposition seem incapable of challenging the "strivers v skivers" dichotomy, and are therefore leaving one modern shibboleth unchallenged: that even with swaths of the country economically dead, to be on out-of-work benefits is to be degenerate, and unable to grasp the soul-cleansing wonders of toil, however low paid.

Meanwhile, the same people who rage against the nanny state have become its loudest advocates. Last week, in partnership with a thinktank called the Local Government Information Unit, Westminster council came up with a report that was seemingly based on a neo-Hogarthian caricature of people on limited incomes – again, many of them actually in work. The text said this: "The increasing use of smart cards for access to leisure facilities, for instance, provides councils with a significant amount of data on usage patterns. Where an exercise package is prescribed to a resident, housing and council tax benefit payments could be varied to reward or incentivise residents." To translate: they should be able to pack anyone who is obese and on benefits off to the gym, on pain of having their money cut.

Just before Christmas, the Tory backbench MP Alec Shelbrooke issued a private member's bill proposing that all benefits aside from pensions and those covering disability be delivered via a "welfare cash card" that would only cover "priority purchases" and outlaw "luxury goods such as cigarettes, alcohol, Sky television and gambling". He was echoing noises made by people at the top of government: in June 2012, in a speech on future welfare reform, David Cameron floated the idea of paying benefits "in kind". Iain Duncan Smith is working on the same idea for "problem families". This is nothing to do with practical policy: it is about grandstanding on the basis of crass stereotypes, and the Victorian idea that only the affluent should be allowed pleasure – not to mention a weird definition of "luxury".

Last week came my favourite outburst so far. Free-market oracle John Redwood said in response to news that bookmakers are situating the majority of their addictive fixed-odds gambling machines in areas where most people don't have much money: "I put it down to the fact that poor people believe there's one shot to get rich. They put getting rich down to luck and think they can take a gamble. They also have time on their hands. My voters" – he's the MP for Wokingham, in Berkshire – "are too busy working hard to make a reasonable income." Note that distinction between people who are poor, and those who are "too busy working hard", as if he has not bothered to think about who it is who empties his office bin.

In almost everything we now hear about economic disadvantage, there is the same belief, embodied in such government schemes as the Work Programme, that 40-plus years of deindustrialisation matters not, and to be one of the economy's losers isn't about being a victim of forces beyond your control, but character failings.

This, it's often said, is what the majority of the public believe, but perhaps things are more complicated. Last week, the TUC put out the results of a survey by YouGov. On average, people apparently think 41% of the social security budget goes to those who are unemployed, and 27% is spent on fraudulent claims, whereas the true figures are 3% and 0.7% respectively. However, while 48% of people support the welfare uprating bill, 63% think benefits should go up in line with wages, prices or both. In other words, many people are confused, and their answers depend on how you phrase the questions. Funny, that.

You will not turn this unprecedented tide of nastiness and bigotry by using statistics. If it can be stopped, that will happen via arguments built on emotion, and a conversation about exactly what kind of country we ought to be. A shame, perhaps, that Rowan Williams has left Lambeth Palace: he did a pretty good job of opposing a lot of what the government was doing to the benefits system, and apparently brought most of his church with him. A pity, too, that whereas past attacks on the welfare state sparked revolts that were expressed culturally just as much as politically, people who write TV dramas, plays, songs and novels seem to have little interest in what's happening.

Over the next 12 months, some of the fundamentals of Britain's future will become clear. In the meantime, consider the words of writer and artist John Berger, written 20 or so years ago, but pertinent today: "The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied but written off as trash."