The Danger of Dismissing Trump’s Madmen
I watched “Roger & Me” for the first time in over 15 years. Michael Moore’s citizen journalist documentary from the 1980s about the GM plant closures in Flint, Michigan portrays a city so devastated by the economic impacts of offshoring that it becomes post-apocalyptic: shuttered windows, rampant crime, and buildings in ruin. When it was released in 1989 it won the praise of numerous critics, took home awards, and turned Michael Moore into an instant icon for the progressive left.
This movie always has a place in my heart because I know that my family escaped the worst parts of that era by the skin of our teeth. I have friends in Orange County who recall childhood vacations to Disneyworld, or Hawaii. I recall vacations which consisted of a 2 day drive from Denver to Los Angeles, a stay in a Motel 6, then five nights sleeping on Grandma’s floor before returning home. If we were lucky we got Disneyland on the last day. We ate Hamburger Helper every night. We didn’t have much. But we had each other, and our parents worked until they got us to a place in middle America where we could mingle alongside the kids who grew up taking cruises each year and nobody would know the difference. It took them decades to get us there, but they did it. Just in time to see us into High School. Just in time to breathe a sigh of relief and then become terrified by 9/11.
I grew up throughout the Midwest but we moved to California before high school. I have plenty of friends back in Ohio and Denver who never had the opportunities that I’ve had. “Privilege” in the Midwest is a much more hyper-evolved form of economic survival. In Southern California there are literally thousands of potential employers (and even more thousands in Los Angeles and San Diego if you’re up for the commute). This creates options. Choices for how to spend 40 hours of a week earning a living. Yet in many parts of the country the choices in where you work are limited to small business ownership, highly specialized trades, or Wal-Mart. Tech has privileged this state with the economy in which many can walk into their Starbucks-fueled office each morning feeling like the sky is always going to be blue and the future will always present endless opportunities for advancement.
Watching “Roger & Me” in 2017 is like watching a case study on how a specific 80s Midwest culture grew into a movement which put Donald Trump in the White House.
Maybe it’s because I’m older, but it struck me how young everyone in the film is. The workers exiting the plant for the last time aren’t the kind of older, grizzled union workers seen in television or film. These were young guys with young wives and small children. The 6-year-old boy being evicted from his apartment for the umpteenth time has a father my age. The woman reduced to raising rabbits to sell for raw meat looks like she’s in her twenties. This isn’t just a story of older people who lost everything. It’s a story about people who had their bright American future snatched away in the salad days of their life. And while the world kept turning, the economies of the world shifted and transformed, the drinking water in Flint turned to poison while the rest of us assumed the problem went away. It became a relic of the 80s, buried beside ALF and hypercolor shirts.
I’ve heard numerous friends and family, as well as celebrities and people I follow on Twitter ask how anyone could possibly vote for Trump. The things he said. The lack of experience. The temperament. A list as long as a grocery receipt.
I think about the young folks in Roger & Me and who they are now, these 60somethings who suffered the Flint apocalypse. While some escaped, I imagine many continued to struggle for years, or decades, in Flint hoping every 4 years that the next President, the next Congress, the next leader, would bring back that future they saw flicker out when they turned off the lights on the factory line. The humiliation of losing their homes, the desperation of trying to find work to feed their families, and helplessness and unfairness of it all was surely embedded in their racial memory as the dream of Flint’s bright future became a light lost in a fog of harsh realities of the new world order.
Enter Donald Trump. A mix of “I’ll give you that future back” and “I’ll punish the people who did this to you” and I’m sure these people felt that while the dream was still far-fetched, at least they had something they’d never had before… a chance. Not because these people or their problems materialized from thin air, or emerged from the suburbs to the safe zone that Donald created. They rose from our ignorance of the mess they had been buried in.
There are racists within Trump’s base. And lunatics. And conspiracy theorists. But somewhere, peppered throughout his constituency is a percentage who already tried the Bush economics, who tried the Clinton economics, who tried Obama economics, and were still unable to find a solution to their problems. Whether that solution exists is a separate discussion, but the problem itself does.
If there’s a lesson that the progressive movement should take from the rise of Donald Trump it is that unless the tent that this “movement” is constructing is wide enough to take in those poor huddled masses of disparaged, shit-upon individuals; if it doesn’t at least attempt to reach out to the impoverished, the veterans, the elderly, or anyone else regardless of political or cultural affiliation, this movement will only sustain for long enough for the next generation of Flint to find a demagogue they can catapult into the White House in 20 more years. Regardless of whether Trump goes away, his followers and their problems will not.
Likewise, if the Right refuses to acknowledge that women are equal to men, that black lives matter, that gays and transgender individuals deserve equal rights, that the disabled require consideration (followed by action), and that the minimum wage is not sustainable, the water isn’t drinkable, and education is a necessity for all, it won’t be long before the Left finds its own tyrant willing to sell a dream of lost hope and vengeance in exchange for total mental obedience.
These problems will not stay buried. And whether Trump resigns, is impeached, or gets voted out, his madmen and their problems still exist.
