In response to the result of the 2016 presidential election and the outspoken reactions from the community, the Daily Bruin is running a series of submissions from readers. Click here to read more.
I was in the lounge Tuesday night watching the election on CNN with my friends, anxious but full of hope. Like many who are reading this, we are your run-of-the-mill liberal millennials, the backbone of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and self-professed champions of multiculturalism in the United States. We huddled together, hearts as one, waiting for that singular moment of victory – not just for the first female president, but for marginalized communities everywhere. We wanted so badly for this election to show the world that America, for all that it’s been criticized to be divided, racist and bigoted, was better than all of that.
And then, just like that, none of that happened.
I was baffled. For all that America preached about love and diversity, how could anyone explain the demographics my friends and I were looking at? How were we to reconcile the fact that more than half this nation endorsed hatred and intolerance?
It took me a while, but I then realized how different we were from the rest of the electorate. We are living in a little Californian bubble of a college-educated generation branded as the liberal elite. We’ve always been proud of calling ourselves liberals – for wearing our shiny badges of secularism, feminism and environmentalism. But how often do we admit that we, too, are part of the managerial elite?
We have focused on our oppression for so long – the institutionalized oppression of women, LGBTQ people, Mexicans, Muslims, black people – that we have forgotten about the white middle-class narrative: that one can be white and suffer, that one can be white and forgotten, that one can be white and oppressed. Let’s all keep in mind that the Democratic Party today was not what it once was before the 1960s, before it turned its back on the working class and organized labor in pursuit of social progressivism. Somewhere along the way, the left wing had forgotten about classism and the invisible majority.
So, while educated elites proclaimed international trade and economic interdependence as the panacea that will relaunch our economy, working-class Americans have bore the painful brunt of globalization as trade and capital liberalization destroyed employment and incomes. For a long time, they were silenced. They had let their anger brew. And, finally, last night, they made their voices heard through a white populist revolt.
Donald Trump may be a lot of things – you know the names – but what many liberal elites like you and I forget to realize is that he is also empowering. He has given a voice to the forgotten majority that has been left behind in a stuttering postwar economic recovery. He is not your traditional conservative – the policies he proposes have roots in liberalism and populism. Insulated by his immense wealth such that he has no reason to be corrupt, he echoes a common, longstanding desire for the rising tide to once again float all boats. Maybe America was never great, but his campaign is reminiscent of an America that was not victimized by corporate classism and metropolitan liberalism. There is no denying that Trump spoke directly to the people who have been left out of the political and economic conversation for too long.
So maybe a vote for Trump was not a vote for hatred. Maybe a vote for Trump was a vote for the common people not to be forgotten any longer. We have spent so long painting Trump’s supporters as fascist, backward and dogmatic because those words were easy to throw around. But the truth is that many who voted for Trump were the same people who voted – twice – for Barack Obama. When will we admit that the Trump train is powered by more than just intolerance? Time and time again, we have forgotten the anger of the silent, white majority. These are the people who have been diligently attending Trump rallies, and found their only chance of political representation in a man who just happens to be racist and bigoted. It takes courage and empathy to admit that for some people, Trump is the only way they can continue to put food on the table and send their kids to school.
This doesn’t change the fact that I am disappointed with this election’s results. I am hurt. I am betrayed. I am afraid for people in marginalized communities everywhere because I know a Trump presidency is a justification for hatred and bigotry to some people. He emblematizes a cultural and social setback in modern America, and threatens to undo all the progressive changes that we have fought so hard for. He is a man who endorses hate, and he will never be the president of my choice.
But I will, for once, will step down from my high horse of radical superiority, and acknowledge the people that have suffered in silence. I will stop shaming Trump supporters like they are all bigots, because they aren’t. They’re people like you and I who are capable, too, of feeling pain. But this is not the time to compare losses. This is the time to reach out in empathy and contrition to a forgotten community, and to remember and honor the cherished ideals that unite us as Americans.
Ng is an undeclared first-year student.
Surely the article worth reading among all the angry hate speeches going around these days
CA has a surplus of millions of blue voters. Man up and move to Florida, Ohio or Pennsylvania. The margin in Florida was a only a couple hundred thousand. If this is really that traumatic to so many people. With our system it’s the only way to spread the popular vote more efficiently throughout the electoral college.
Among other things, I am an opinion page writer – for myself on occasion and for others. Well done. For the past 25 years, I also was involved in a number of ways with rural communities (environmental issues and much else) and describe myself as a “classical liberal” and registered Independent. Working hard for a long time to understand viewpoints not native to my own sensibilities necessarily changed me — enough to leave the Democratic party. Essentially, while rural people produce the resources that we thoughtlessly consume, doing the “dirty” and physical labor that underpins our lives, we have no idea how painful their lives have become; the heedlessness with which we pile our environmental values on them, while giving them next to no help. We don’t publish their stories; we don’t even know that their stories that are disappearing all around us. And this resentment – this feeling (and fact) of being pushed off the land, their cultures, homes, and communities diminished and denied, is a global phenomenon. And the tactic of all reterritorialization is to marginalize and deny their realities. Why are liberals missing this? And rural communities – including America’s – are not all white (by a long shot) and not all uneducated. Your piece is intellectually and emotionally generous. And that is more justified than you may even know. I hope this level of introspection will continue among my fellow “elites.”
Exactly. I originally leaned left (not too far) but once I started seeing how hypocritical many of them were, I left the left. Granted, there are the same kind of people on the right.
There was a thing on campus just yesterday: a group had a board where you could pin a pin in 4 different squares. The prompt was “How do you feel about human nature in general?” The 4 squares were mostly good, neutral, mostly bad, and nothing. There were a lot of pins in mostly good and neutral. I, for one, would’ve pinned in the neutral zone, but this recent election showed us how bad human nature has become, so I put my pin in the “mostly bad” zone. Instead of looking at the good that people bring, people from both sides of the aisle have been bringing the bad out of the other side. “Everyone’s a racist/sexist/bigot” or “Hillary can’t be trusted” ringed all across social media. Instead, everyone should’ve been looking at “Hillary can bring equality to all groups of people” or “Trump can secure our country’s borders.” It’s time to look at the values that the other side brings and understand how it affects their voting pattern.
While it’s even possible to create an echo chamber here in the middle (where I assume you are aligned right now), it’s still vital that we listen to both sides,