Sorry for
the long absence, due to personal and volunteer pressures.
One of the
contentions of reporters, analysts and the blogosphere has been that the Trump
revolution is largely based on the feeling among middle Americans, the white
working class, or whatever label they are given, that they are being
disrespected and ignored by the coastal and liberal elites. That’s certainly a plausible hypothesis. Groups both here and around the world have
found such disrespect to be not only linked to numerous forms of practical
disadvantage, but intolerable in itself.
There are
many means of demanding and obtaining respect.
When it’s a matter of direct oppression, as of racial and religious
minorities, or of a whole people by a military junta or a dictatorship, open
revolt may be a rational option. But
when the disrespect is more general, pervasive and unorganized, other means are
usually more effective.
Let’s take
a few examples. In the early twentieth
century, workers who felt disrespected by management unionized to gain
bargaining power. Starting soon after
the Civil War, formerly enslaved people and their white allies began opening
schools and colleges to educate black children.
Later organizations like the United Negro College Fund, and individuals,
worked both to strengthen those institutions and to gain admission to formerly
exclusionary universities. Immigrant
Asians likewise made great sacrifices to help their children pursue careers
that would gain them entry into the most prestigious professions, and their
children studied arduously to succeed in those paths. Each of those approaches clearly worked to
alter the minds of many in the majority about the respectability of the
particular groups.
Now it’s
true that some minorities – Irish Americans and Latinos, for example – have
gained respect through the ballot box.
But for the most part, those groups, as well as African Americans, have
put forward their “best and brightest” in those areas, at least for the past
three-quarters of a century.
Our “Heartland”
oppressed, however, seem to ignore almost all the principles of past
strategies. Of the 18 states with adult educational attainment above the
national average, all but Kansas and Utah are Democratic, while the bottom 13
are all Republican, and all between the coasts.
The 13 states with 15% or higher union membership include only two 2016
Red states, Alaska (oil workers) and Michigan.
Of the other 11, nine are coastal, and include every state from Maine to
Delaware except Maine and New Hampshire.
On the other hand, the 15 states with fewer than 10% unionization are
all Red.
These are
not accidents of history, but deliberate policies. Red states are consistently anti-union in
their legislation and actions. Nine of
the ten states with the lowest expenditure on public education were Red in
2016. (Interestingly, the three states
collecting the highest proportion of their school funding from the federal
government are South Dakota, Louisiana and Mississippi. The three lowest? Maryland, Connecticut and New Jersey.)
But enough
data. What is the strategy of the new
victim class, aside from threats of Second Amendment solutions or secession,
torchlight marches, and the like? It
seems to be to elect people, from Donald Trump to Roy Moore, who instantly
become laughingstocks to most of the nation aside from their rabid supporters. Depending on ill-informed, under-prepared,
irrational bigots who espouse views rejected by the majority of Americans, as
well as claims easily corrected by the simplest research, is surely a way to
gain respect, isn’t it?
Take Roy
Moore, a man who believes President Obama wasn’t born in the U.S., sharia law
is being practiced somewhere up north – “Illinois, Indiana, I don’t know” – and
doesn’t know what DACA is or who the Dreamers are when asked by a local radio
reporter. Surely he will take his place among the leading members of the Senate
for his knowledge, judgment, and perspicuity.
(Remember Sonny Bono, who was elected to the House, marveled at how
smart Barney Frank was, and died by skiing into a tree?)
In her book
Dignity: The Essential Role It Plays in
Resolving Conflict, Donna Hicks distinguishes between Respect, which is
earned by actions and character, and Dignity, which is owed to all human beings
simply by virtue of their humanity.
Accepting this distinction for the moment, the Trump revolutionaries,
and of course their leader and some of his now unruly former followers, seem
hell-bent on surrendering any claim to respect.
(Contrast John McCain, who brings
to mind Shakespeare’s famous line, “Nothing in his life became him like the
leaving of it.”) Going further, if
dignity is a two-way street, the refusal of many of these partisans to grant
dignity to other races, religions, genders, and nationalities makes it hard to
offer them the dignity they might otherwise deserve.
