A Somewhat Depressing Realization about the State of the United States

Doug once had an argument with a relative where she said, “Well, I know that!  I’m not a stupid moron!”  Doug said later that he wanted very badly to say, “Well, then, what kind of moron are you?”, but he kept quiet for the sake of family harmony.

Lately, though, I’ve been feeling sort of moronic myself.  I mean, I knew there was racism in this country — I’m not a stupid moron — but it took Trump’s election to show me just how bad it was.

A while ago I wrote that I thought Trump’s approval rating would eventually fall to around 35%.  I’d seen that number in other places — it’s the percentage of people who voted for Hitler, for example — and it seems to represent those who don’t or can’t or refuse to think rationally, who believe everything from secret cabals ruling the world to fake moon landings to the idea that the earth is flat.  Nothing you can say will ever change their mind; they are lost to logical thinking.

Turns out I was wrong about the numbers falling, though.  Trump’s approval rating keeps hovering around 42%, going up or down a little but never moving much from that baseline.  It even ticked upward a point or two after the impeachment hearings.

That’s a pretty amazing base of support.  It defies a lot of conventional wisdom, for example the idea that voters would want the person in charge of the nuclear codes to actually know something about foreign policy.  A lot of pundits have come up with a lot of theories to explain it, the most popular one being that these voters have “economic anxiety.”  But that doesn’t really explain all the hate, the debased discourse, the fact that the president insults people and his followers cheer him on — this is just our normal now.  Nor do they mind Trump’s many other defects —his slavish devotion to Putin, his bungled foreign policy, outright bribery and corruption, adultery, or something like 16,000 lies.  They don’t even mind the steel mills and coal mines closing, even though Trump promised to bring back those jobs, or farmers going bankrupt from trade wars with China, and if anyone had economic anxiety it would be the people hurt by these policies.

The only answer that fits all the facts, it seems to me, is that his supporters are racists, or racist-adjacent.  I really can’t think of any other reason.  And yet you hardly see anyone in the newspapers or social media or on television talking about this.  Maybe they don’t want to offend possible viewers or readers, or maybe they just don’t want to admit it.  (Though Leonard Pitts, Jr., shows us how it works in this Miami Herald article, where he gives us Trump supporters “explain[ing] themselves in their own words.”)

It is a hard thing to admit.  It’s hard to face that nearly half the people in this country are racists.  Some of them have probably thought this way all their lives, but back when we were all being polite to each other they kept it to themselves.  Others have noticed that the demographic picture is changing, that the white population in the US is falling while some minority populations are increasing, and they’re terrified.  (I remember a friend telling me that the percentage of whites would drop below 50% at some point.  He was very cheerful about it, as if he saw a coming utopia.  What he and I didn’t realize was that they were listening.  They know the numbers as well as we do, and they aren’t going quietly.)

This realization is pretty damn depressing.  I’d thought the US was better than this, though I did know it had its problems.  (I mean, I’m not a stupid moron.)  But it turns out that these are the people that I, that we, share the country with.  They’re the reason that Trump will not be removed from office, even though he is manifestly unfit to be president.  They’re why we haven’t done enough to stop climate change, why public education is such a disaster, why we have the worst and most expensive health care in the industrial world, why people are working on into their seventies.  They will do almost anything, give up almost any good, to be able to go on hating other people for the stupidest of reasons.  Hell, they might even give Trump his second term.