“Make Liberals Cry Again”

It was less than a few weeks before the elections, and my wife and I were driving to a nearby town when a pickup truck came up next to our car.  We noticed it was emblazoned with pro-Trump banners.  But what we saw at the back of the truck when it pulled ahead of us was more telling.  In big letters the banner proclaimed “Make Liberals Cry Again.”  I turned to my wife and said “Perhaps, we are the reason Trump is so popular.”

In about two months, Donald Trump will no longer be president.  But those who voted for him, and more importantly, his loyal base will still be with us.  Although their candidate lost, I want to tell them that all Americans, conservatives and liberals, have reasons to cry, but not entirely for the reasons the banner intended. 

So, if Trump’s supporters want me to cry, although my candidate won, I will.  I will first cry for the moral bankruptcy of the Christian Right (mostly Evangelicals) that against all evidence chose to entrust its religious political agenda in the hands of a man whose personal behavior as a civilian and politician has little to do with Christian values.  If history books are any guide, it’s not the first time that religious zealots succumb to the rule “the purpose justifies the means” in order to advance their agenda.  Trump promised to deliver the Supreme Court and support the Christian Right’s agenda and to its members nothing else mattered.    

I will also cry, for the blue collar, working class, and rural Americans who have been abandoned by Democrats and Republicans.  The Democrats bought too much into the idea that opening markets and trade across the globe would be good for all workers.  They signed up to the global mobility of capital before they had a chance to build the safety net and skills upgrade needed to ease the new competition.  That was a policy failure.  The Republicans though deserve a lot more blame for deliberately distracting working class and rural Americans with the vision of an old America and moral and cultural wars while their world and social fabric around them were deteriorating into decaying towns, low paying jobs, work without fulfillment, and social isolation and degradation. 

The Republican establishment feigns surprise to Trump’s success, as if he is not the natural culmination of their Southern Strategy going back to their own Richard Nixon.  That was the strategy that played the race card to lure voters in Southern States away from their support of the Democratic party.  Instead of celebrating the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, Republicans used them against the Democrats.  Then they doubled down by turning the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, that legalized abortion, into another cudgel to wield against Democrats.  By the time Donald Trump appeared on the political stage, race, religion, and guns (let’s not forget them) had been already served in his political platter.  All he had to do was to add a few more scoops and then mix in anti-immigrant slurs and fearmongering.  

I will cry for the ideological blindness of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party that still preaches the virtues of unfettered capitalism, free of regulation and full of individualistic behavior unconcerned of any negative social spillover consequences.  Don’t they see that millions of working-class Americans (including their white base) are rejecting this strain of capitalism?  These economically disadvantage Americans do not care about deficits and debt, nor do they care about the virtues of international trade.  What they care about is keeping their old jobs, the economic and social vitality of their towns; and access to good education and health care.

I will cry for the American plutocracy that is more interested in amassing personal wealth and competing in grandiose donations than accepting to share more fairly the gains of economic growth with all others for the well-being of the American society.  Why would a society need generosity out of concentrated wealth if it had the resources to take care of its needs?  If, for example, there was more support for living wages, easing the transition of workers to new jobs, promoting healthy habits and environmental safety and accepting labor unions as partners instead of strangling them out of existence.  Should there be support for these socially-minded policies, we would have less poverty and financial insecurity to worry about, healthier populace, better-trained workers and a greater consensus in the pursuit of meeting the interests of all stakeholders.  If corporation and the wealthy did not resist to pay their fair share of taxes that their peers of past generations paid, the government would have the resources to step in and take care of the detritus left by the creative destruction of capitalism.

And I will cry for the educated and professional elites, conservative and liberal, that often seem to have less in common with their fellow Americans in the fly-over country than with their peers of the global elite.  The sea of red dots we see in the voting landscape of America outside the urban and suburban areas is where the other America lives.  It is the country of rodeos and agricultural fairs.  It is the land of country music and square dance, and the country of Friday night high-school football games.  It is the land that feeds us and gives its sons and daughters to defend us.  It is the country of rural and working-class people who do not think a college degree is needed for a better life as long as American capital keeps investing in people and not just profits.   

Finally, I will cry for the fact that white America has yet to come to grips with what the legacy of slavery and the ongoing under the radar discrimination has done and is doing to the lives and opportunities of our fellow black Americans.  Coming from another land, it took me years to educate myself about the racial past and contemporary reality impacting minorities of color in America.  If we can understand how the lack of opportunities, adequate services and of a safety net can bring personal plight and social disintegration to working-class whites in the American heartland, and how unfair it would be to make their condition the core of prejudice and stereotyping, then we should have no difficulty to understand how unfair it is to do the same to any other group of people, no matter what their race or background.

And now I ‘ll wait for you, Trump voter, to tell me what you would cry for.