We Just Didn't Know

[calimary]

45. This whole sordid era keeps underscoring something

I regret that I’ve been compelled to conclude. I keep coming back to what to me is the uncomfortable bottom line about trump supporters:

“Then what does that say about THEM?”

A friend who voted for trump while justifying “oh, I WANT a woman president. Just not THAT woman!” - once lectured me: “you have to understand these voters!” As though there were something high-minded about their horrifyingly tragic WILLFUL ignorance (even PROUD ignorance: “I know what I know! So go away and stop arguing with me!”). Or that there was something really noble and “heartland-American” about what I’d begun to suspect was a deep seated racism and misogyny and resentment for being forced to share “their” America with “the Other”. And, I feared, that “Other” president.

A while ago I began to suspect that the hatred and/or resentment of Barack Obama’s rise all the way to the White House was a deep-down inner disgust that there was a black guy in the Oval Office and he wasn’t the janitor. I spent a long time trying to beat back that suspicion. “No,” I told myself. “Couldn’t be that. These are those noble hard-scrapple ‘heartland’ Americans, simple, salt-of-the-Earth ‘God-fearing’ churchgoing folks who call it like it is, and just are misunderstood or so perennially beaten down and...”

And blah-blah-blah.

Bullshit! I was right about them the first time. That indeed WAS their problem. They really did hate the idea that there was a black guy in the Oval Office and he wasn’t the janitor. And, later on, they were hellbent on making sure there wouldn’t be a woman in the Oval Office who wasn’t the cleaning lady.

You totally nail it here, Nance. This IS what they are and who they are. And as we’ve seen many times by now, many of ‘em are out ‘n’ proud about it, too. This is America’s dirty little secret.

THEY are America’s dirty little secret. All they’ve done, as all this time has gone by, is to reconfirm that, over and over again.

“Heart”land America my ass.