By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Like others who voted for Hillary Clinton, I was shocked and saddened by the election results. It took me a while to get my head around the idea that Donald Trump will be our next President. After a while, I had an opportunity to reflect. How could it be that I was so out of step with an electoral college majority of my fellow Americans?
I remember viewing the election maps on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News as I switched from cable station to cable station on Election Night. There were swaths of blue, representing states that had voted Democratic, along the two coasts of the mainland United States, and between them there was a gigantic polygon of red representing those states that had favored the Republican candidate. Only a few states, such as blue Illinois, were differentiated from the large red mass.
I belong to a very polyglot family. Through intermarriage, many races and ethnicities have been gathered together under the rubric of “family.” Asian, Mexican, Caribbean are just some of the backgrounds that have enriched the makeup of our diverse family. This makes me very proud. In our family, people of widely divergent backgrounds have learned about each other. Neither our differences nor our commonalities are impediments to loving each other.
That is why, I suppose, I was immediately put off by Donald Trump’s rhetoric. He wanted to build a wall to keep out Mexican immigrants, who he stereotyped as criminals and rapists. This certainly is not how I regard the ethnically Mexican component of my family. He also wanted to put a temporary ban on immigration of all Muslims, without regard to their countries of origin, ideologies, age, or gender.
Although Jews and Muslims have rivaled on the world stage – especially regarding my co-religionists’ rightful place in Israel our historic homeland—I know that even as we Jews differ on how to best address international disputes, so too do Muslims. There are those who would like to forget about their differences with the Jews and get on with their lives. I am of the opinion that many refugees, willing as they are to give up their former lives to embrace American citizenship, number themselves in this category. Instead of pushing them away, we should be reaching out to them. So there was another area in which Trump’s rhetoric repelled me.
I already had formed the opinion that Trump was xenophobic, well before the televised presidential debates. Then came the realization that Trump was misogynistic, that his contempt for women was not limited to political and media adversaries such as Carly Fiorina, Rosie O’Donnell, Megyn Kelly, and Hillary Clinton, but was, in fact, a more generalized male chauvinism, in which he perceived men by nature as being superior, and women important only in so far as they were useful or pleasing to those men. Given that he viewed women as inferiors–playthings at best—it was not surprising to me that he felt some form of punishment was required to deal with women who displeased him by making the extremely personal and often soul-shattering decision to have an abortion.
Where I erred in evaluating Donald Trump was in not asking the question why, all the above being the case, so many people liked him. Surely they all were not endorsing his xenophobia or his misogyny. Something else must have been afoot, something that, for his supporters at least, overrode Trump’s negatives.
That big red and blue map provided insight. There are two different Americas, it seems. One is coastal—whether on the eastern side or western side of the American mainland – and the other resides in the interior. Coastal America still is a land of economic opportunity—very largely characterized by new technologies and the digital revolution—while inland America, though no stranger to such developments, still pines for the factories, mines, mills , and agricultural price supports that brought its inhabitants such prosperity and feelings of well-being in years gone by.
While coastal America was reveling in the dot.com revolution that brought fortunes to college kids and changed the way the world communicates and does business, inland America—especially the so-called rust belt—saw its tried and true values of hard work, savings, and worship, increasingly eroded in a globalizing world. As coastal elites extended well-justified respect and concern for those who previously had been marginalized because of their ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, the people of the inland may have wondered, ‘well, what about us? Who cares about us? We have done nothing wrong yet America seemingly has turned upside down. Our factories are closing! We can’t get decent jobs. We are worried about keeping up our mortgages. Who will be our spokesman?”
In my view, where self-satisfied Clinton supporters—myself included—failed was in not recognizing the plight of the inlanders and in failing to dedicate ourselves to finding solutions that would restore their opportunities in life and their sense of dignity. There have been polls taken in which large percentages of Americans express doubt that their children will be better off when they’re adults than they, their parents, are now. This pessimism, this pervasive feeling that for many of our people the American dream is but a bygone illusion, should have alerted us that urgent work needs to be done.
Trump offered hope to the inlanders—hope, alas, that was based on scapegoating immigrants and Muslims. Where we coastal dwellers fell short was in failing to advocate convincingly for more positive alternatives for an economically desperate population.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com