Why do People Support Trump?
I've searched for a reason such a large minority of this country supports Trump. This is a guy who has routinely stiffed vendors, cheated on his wives and thinks mainly about himself.
The only one that made any sense to me is that his support comes from less educated Whites who had the factory jobs trades and higher paying service jobs (like police and firefighters) to themselves, but are now competing with people of color for good living wages.
When Trump says Make America Great Again, he is appealing to the people who have lost out when equality moved toward the goal of justice for all. He wants to roll the country back to where it was in the late fifties, when people of color were essentially a lower caste.
At least, that is what I thought until I read David Brooks’ recent column in The New York Times entitled What If We’re the Bad Guys Here?
Here are some excerpts:
The story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.
The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.
The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other, and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”
The meritocracy isn’t only a system of exclusion; it’s an ethos. During his presidency, Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over nine hundred times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn’t go to Harvard Law) must be stupid.
I’ve concluded that the reasons people support Trump are a lot more complicated and some are frankly logical. Here is a link to the full Brooks column: