Why Trumpkins Want Their Country Back Dismissing Trump’s fans as racists and thugs is too self-congratulatory, too easy. There’s something deeper rumbling. By Joseph Epstein
http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-trumpkins-want-their-country-back-1465596987
In an infamous remark that made her seem both a naif and a snob, the New Yorker magazine movie critic Pauline Kael said in 1972, after the presidential election: “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon.” Although I would sooner have my thumbs removed than vote for Donald Trump, I do know four people who claim that they are going to vote to make him president of the United States.
One is intellectually sophisticated, a product of Yale and the Harvard Law School, the author of many books. Economistic in his thinking, he tells me that he plans to vote for Mr. Trump because after eight years of economic slump under President Obama, he believes that the Republican soon-to-be-nominee and self-acclaimed successful businessman will shake things up. Two other of the Trump backers I know are themselves businessmen, happy Philistines both, who are not in the least put off by the essential Trump coarseness, the absence in him of the least tincture of culture, historical knowledge or humility. My last Trump voter is a man with experience of his own in politics, who worked in the George W. Bush administration and who so deeply loathes the Clintons, mari et l’épouse, that he would vote for a randy mongoose before voting for Mrs. Clinton.
But these are only four voters out of the more than 13 million who bestirred themselves to vote for Donald Trump in the nation’s primary elections. How to account for these millions? Progressives easily enough account for them as racists, fools, thugs, H.L. Mencken’s booboisie, but to a much higher power of ignorance than even Mencken himself, no slouch when it came to contempt for the common people, could have imagined. This interpretation of Mr. Trump’s supporters is, somehow, too easy, and too self-congratulatory.
Something deeper, I believe, is rumbling behind the astounding support for Mr. Trump, a man who, apart from his large but less than pure business success, appears otherwise entirely without qualification for the presidency. I had a hint of what might be behind the support for him a few weeks ago when, on one of the major network news shows, I watched a reporter ask a woman at a Trump rally why she was supporting him. A thoroughly respectable-seeming middle-class woman, she replied without hesitation: “I want my country back.” CONTINUE AT SITE
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