In her essay in the New York Times (“In the Land of Self-Defeat,” Oct. 8, 2019), Monica Potts reflects on life in her hometown, Clinton, Arkansas, more than two-thirds of whose residents voted for Trump. Their basic concern, she says, is that “people like them, in places like theirs, are overlooked and disrespected.”
The most important way they believe they’re being “overlooked and disrespected” is by government taking their money through taxes and spending it on people and things that don’t benefit them.
From one angle, this attitude is understandable. Most of the folks in Clinton and the surrounding county don’t make enough money to more than scrape by. The median income there is $34,764, or about $12.00 per hour—roughly what a Walmart employee who unloads trucks and stocks shelves makes. They might agree that $10 to $13 an hour isn’t a lot of money, but they think it’s reasonable. Paying most people more than that would be “wasteful”—or even “evidence of government corruption.” In their view, government should be run like a business, lean and efficient, like Walmart.
County residents are willing to pay for services they see as necessary, like the sheriff’s department. The average salary for teachers in Arkansas is about $25 per hour, but that fact is left unmentioned. Related expenditures, like for a new library building, are considered luxuries. After all, most folks don’t use the library. So raising taxes to pay for a new building is a cost without a corresponding benefit. It’s “wasteful.”
If somebody says, “Well, I don’t have children and I never use the school, but I’m still willing to pay taxes to support it,” the anti-taxers just repeat their objections, or say nothing, or change the subject. Cognitive dissonance, if people experience it at all, has little effect on their beliefs and attitudes. For example, they believe their federal taxes are going to pay for welfare in places like New Jersey. Never mind that Arkansas receives about $2.6 billion more in federal funding than it pays in federal taxes, a net gain of about $865 per resident. Like 26 of the 30 Red states that voted for Trump, Arkansas is supported by taxes states that get less back in spending than they pay in federal taxes.
Never mind, too, that the state gets about one-third of its revenue from the federal government (it ranks 11th among the 50 states in this regard). The folks in Clinton are oblivious to the fact that their tax dollars come back to them in the form of payments under the Homestead Act and the G.I. Bill, through farm subsidies, Social Security, Medicare, Disability, home health care, Meals on Wheels, Head Start, and food stamps. (Walmart counts on food stamps to help those of its employees who don’t make enough to buy groceries). These benefits are accepted without question, if they’re noticed at all, which mostly they aren’t.
Commenting on Potts’s essay, one Times reader wrote that his in-laws got $300,000 a year in farm subsidies. They hate government, and insisted they'd never taken a penny from it. Either they don't see farm subsidies as coming from the government, or they convince themselves they "earned it," so the subsidies don’t count as "taking" other people’s money.) New schools, libraries, and music teachers, though, are wasteful. A new football stadium is a good use of tax dollars. So is their share of a billion dollars a day for military operations in Afghanistan.
How much responsibility are residents willing to take for their economic circumstances? Not much, Potts writes. They resent people who have enough education, creativity, and initiative to improve things. (Why does the County need a trained a librarian? “We were taught the Dewey decimal system in grade school. Never sounded like anything too tough.”) It seems lost on people that things like good schools, libraries, cultural centers, etc. attract employers, who in turn rely on them to attract educated young workers. Everywhere, reducing community services leads to increased poverty, turning some communities into ghost towns.
Another reader suggested the real problem is that, while the person making $42,000 comes in for criticism and resentment, folks have no problem with the person making $42,000,000. Unionization would help redress that imbalance, but private employers like Walmart oppose it vigorously. One reader cited a clerk in his department in a large corporate bureaucracy elsewhere who occupies the lowest rung on the pay-scale. This person is dead-set against unionization, even though she benefits from the health coverage and pension negotiated on her behalf. Still, she resents the union and readily cites apocryphal examples of how bad unions are. Worse, she’s absolutely certain of the rightness of her views, and nothing (facts, evidence, the benefits she receives) has changed her mind.
One reader remarked that Potts’s essay reads exactly as she recalled her upbringing sixty years ago in a community of “misinformed, inflexible, myopic citizens who judged anyone supportive of education, travel, culture and opportunities afforded by taxes to be irresponsible [while] anyone who explored their horizons [was] branded “uppity”, was asked “who do they think they are?”, or was treated to sarcasm: “Must be nice, wish I could do that.” People are angry that the world they remember growing up is fading. They want to return to what they were used to: for young men, graduating from high school and getting a well-paying job; for young women, getting married and having kids, maybe working part-time at some job that requires few skills. They aren't interested in education or libraries because such things represent the complex, intimidating world outside the confines of their familiar, slow-to-change little universe.
These are people who listen only to Fox News (which pursues the GOP strategy of scapegoating government) and each other. They love Trump because he expresses what they would say out loud if only they had the courage to be as uninhibited as he is. Anger, contempt for rules, rejection of responsibility—Trump is a perfect reflection of these people’s "me first" attitude. They’re okay with suffering instead of doing something to help themselves—as long as everybody else suffers, too. They refuse to see that universal health care, free preschool, free community college, family planning, and a dozen other ideas that Democrats support would help them—such notions are “Socialist” or “Liberal.”
The most obvious explanation for this obtuseness is that Republicans, for all their talk of morality and family values, have been engaged in a systematic campaign of distortion to make Americans with low incomes and little education feel alienated. If people feel aggrieved, it’s because there’s a “well-financed, truth-challenged propaganda machine” at work. Republicans and Fox tell them what they want to hear—about abortion, threats to gun ownership, declining morals and religious belief, malfeasance by Democrats and government bureaucrats—which keeps them agitated, incensed, and resentful.
Like Potts herself, many of those who read and replied to her essay have concluded that there’s no reaching these people. They’ve made a lifestyle of victimhood and aren’t interested in the work needed to make things better. Few of them spend time or effort trying to solve shared problems. Instead, they’re preoccupied with what happens to them personally in the course of each day.
For people who feel their culture and way of life is being attacked and who believe they aren’t represented in government, Trump is the perfect antidote. He appeals to their gut, not to facts and reason. He plays on their fears and stokes their rage. They stick with him because he spends all his time and energy pandering to them, which gives them the illusion that they’re “somebody,” that they “count.” When people say that Trump speaks to them, they mean it literally, not figuratively. They follow him because they can understand the words that come out of his mouth, in contrast to the words that come out of the mouths of people like Barack Obama. They like guys who talk tough and use simple words, as every Republican president from Goldwater to Bush II has done. But isn’t the man dishonest and unethical? It doesn't matter. Nobody in Washington is honest and ethical. Better our dishonest, unethical guy in power than yours.
And yet. Is it entirely the fault of folks like those in Clinton, Arkansas that they’re unable and unwilling to act to improve their situation, instead preferring to complain, refusing to raise their taxes, and venting their discontent by supporting Trump? In some ways—such as their attitude toward education—folks who support Trump aren’t all that different from their forebears who pushed the frontier west from the Appalachians before and after the Civil War. Trump supporters reflect the anti-intellectual strain that runs through our nation’s history. Most Americans have never had much use for “book learning,” especially if it wasn’t intensely practical—like the “three R’s.” That dovetails neatly with the Republican Party’s dream of a pure capitalism without constraints, the dream that anyone can make more money than he needs in America, if only he and everyone else are completely free to do as they please. The typical Trump supporter can relate to the idea of being left alone to make money. After all, that never hurt anybody, did it? We just need to get government off our backs and out of the way.
Skepticism about the value of knowledge continues to make itself felt in the failure of local communities everywhere to demand that their schools teach people how to think critically, not just about the way the world works, but about their own blind spots, evasions, illusions and delusions, defense mechanisms, and so forth. The late historian Paul Gagnon argued that democracy asks people
to accept the burdens of living with tentative answers, …to accept costs and compromises, to take on responsibilities as eagerly as they claim rights, to honor the interests of others while pursuing their own, to respect the needs of future generations, to speak the truth and to do the right thing when falsehood and the wrong thing would be more profitable, and generally to restrain their appetites and expectations—all this while working to inform themselves on the multiple problems and choices their elected servants confront.
We need this knowledge of how to live in a democracy in order to “ward off panic, self-pity, and resignation.” Achieving success in doing so, however, requires that we strive to
develop a sense of shared humanity, to understand [our]selves and “otherness,” to question stereotypes of others and of [our]selves, to discern the difference between fact and conjecture, to distrust the simple answer and the dismissive explanation, to respect particularity and avoid false analogy, to recognize the abuse of historical “lessons,” to consider that ignorance of the past may make us prisoners of it, to realize that not all problems have solutions, to be prepared for the irrational and the accidental in human affairs, and to grasp the power of ideas and character in history.
The recrimination, name-calling, caricaturing, impugning of motives, distortion, and flat-out lying that characterizes contemporary public discourse makes it painfully apparent that the quality of life in our country, and perhaps even democracy itself, may not be sustainable unless we are able to put aside mendacity and ruthless partisan battle in favor of reasoned discussion. In a democracy, “ordinary people” are expected to comprehend and judge the intentions, plans, decisions, and actions of those whom they elect to represent them. As Gagnon says, “we…need an audience prepared and willing to listen to complications.” We can’t be such an audience without making an ethical commitment to the value of good-faith listening and comprehending.
Isn’t this exactly what every professor and teacher is supposed to instill in students—the ability and willingness to listen to, and to judge “complications”? If educators are expected to meet a high standard of clarity, precision, complexity, and nuance of thought and speech, why does the influence of their professional norms on the quality of public thinking and discussion seem so weak? Why aren’t they more successful in teaching their students to make sound judgments in matters of public policy? What’s preventing them from teaching college students—in particular, those preparing to teach in high school as a career—the values and skills those students ought to acquire? What is happening in schools and institutions of higher education keeps students from developing the intellectual skills and attitudes that democracy requires of them?