Pro-Trumpers and Egalitarianism
by John Spritzler
March 8, 2021
[The URL of this article is https://www.pdrboston.org/pro-trumpers-egalitarianism ]
Please see the Postscript June 12, 2022 at the end of this article, about the "Jan. 6 hearings" dominating the airwaves lately.
In order to see how pro-Trumpers responded to my pro-egalitarian message--"Let's remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor"--I went to a pro-Trump rally in the summer of 2016 to ask random people at the rally if they thought the message was a good idea or a bad idea. Here's what happened.
First, let me tell you about the rally. Officially the rally was one in support of the 2nd Amendment, called by the Massachusetts Gun Owners Action League (GOAL, sort of a local chapter of the NRA), in response to a move by the state's Democratic Attorney General to limit what kind of guns could be purchased. The rally was in front of the Massachusetts State House in Boston. It was a very hot day and there were several hundred people--three or four hundred I would guess--at the rally when I arrived, all listening to speeches by people standing in front of the State House.
All of the people were white. Almost all of them had MAGA caps. Many held American flags and had NRA insignia shirts. Most were, I believe, from more rural parts of Massachusetts, not the liberal city of Boston.
I came with a bunch of PDRBoston.org buttons that said "Let's remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor" and I also was wearing a T-shirt with those same words in a large font.
People were focused on the speaker in front when I arrived at the rear of the rally and everybody's back was turned to me. So I tapped random people on the shoulder and when they turned around I asked them, "Do you mind if I ask you a question about this button?" as I handed them a button to read. Everyone was willing to hear and answer the question, so I then asked, "Do you think what the button says is a good idea or a bad idea?" I asked fifty random people this question. What happened?
Forty-three of the 50 random people (86%) said it was a good idea and gladly accepted the button when I offered it to them; many pinned it on themselves right on the spot. A woman at the rally who had bottles of cold water (it was a very hot day), in appreciation for the message I was spreading, insisted I accept a bottle from her!
Four of the 50 people (8%) responded with verbal (though not physical!) hostility. One said that we have a capitalist society and people have a right to get rich. Another said, "Now we have a billionaire on our side" (referring to Trump being in support of the right to bear arms.) The other two said things similarly hostile to the egalitarian button's message.
Three people shrugged their shoulders and said they didn't know what they thought.
THINK ABOUT THIS!
Eighty-six percent of these pro-Trumpers thought the egalitarian idea was a good idea and most of them even pinned the PDR button with the egalitarian message on their shirt!
Only eight percent of the these pro-Trumpers were hostile to the egalitarian idea.
And yet, virtually nobody knows that there is so much support for the egalitarian idea among pro-Trumpers. In fact, not even the pro-Trumpers know this. How could they? The people who are leading these pro-Trumpers never talk about egalitarian ideas or goals. They talk about ideas such as the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms--ideas that anti-egalitarians as well as pro-egalitarians might agree with. This way, the pro-Trumpers who are pro-egalitarian never learn that they are a majority standing side by side with an anti-egalitarian minority who sharply disagree with them on fundamental values.
The Gallup Poll Co. certainly will not ask pro-Trumpers if they think the egalitarian message is a good idea or a bad idea. I discovered this when I offered to pay the Gallup Poll Co. to do a survey asking a random representative sample of all residents of the United States this question. I spoke with Gallup people about doing such a survey, but didn't say what the question was at first. Gallup was all willing to take my money and do the survey but as soon as we started talking about the details of the question--that it was the same question I had asked the pro-Trumpers at the rally--the Gallup people said they would not do such a survey. You can read the full story of this and see the emails between Gallup and myself here. The ruling class and its corporate elite absolutely do not want people to know that they are the majority in thinking the egalitarian message is a good idea.
Most (about 86%) pro-Trumpers would join and support an egalitarian revolutionary movement if they saw one (which unfortunately they do not see today, not yet). Yes, about 8% would be hostile to an egalitarian revolutionary movement; these are the pro-Trumpers, of course, who get prominently displayed by the mass media.
"Yes, Trump's an asshole, but he's OUR asshole"
Many and arguably most pro-Trumpers know that Trump is an asshole, and sure, they'd rather have a decent leader championing them in their hostility to the ruling elite that so obviously holds them in contempt and treats them like dirt. But they follow the only national leader there is who does champion them, despite the fact that he's an asshole. The Guardian has an article titled, "‘There are a lot of bitter people here, I’m one of them’: rust belt voters on why they backed Trump again despite his broken promises" that illustrates this fact vividly.
WHAT ABOUT RACISM?
First of all, many people who voted for Trump had earlier voted for Obama.
Secondly, Trump's appeal to white working class people was that he did NOT accuse them of being guilty for (and benefiting from) systemic racial discrimination against non-whites. In contrast, liberals such as Hillary Clinton (noticeably more than Obama did when he ran for president) told--and tell--white working class people that they are indeed guilty because they benefit from systemic racial discrimination against non-whites--that they enjoy "white privilege" (and the word "privilege" as everybody knows means a benefit.)
Well, the fact is that on this question, Trump's appeal was based on the truth and Hillary Clinton (and the liberal establishment) were--and are--telling a lie.
If you don't understand this, I suggest you read Martin Luther King, Jr.'s explanation in a speech he gave (read and listen to his speech here and also read the articles linked to near the top) about how Jim Crow laws harmed, not benefited, the poor whites. MLK, Jr. explains what many people today don't grasp--because the ruling class works hard to prevent them from doing so--, that among ordinary people AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL. Also read "Is It a "Privilege" Not To Be Discriminated Against?"
Of note, the article linked to above (and again here) about how lots of white voters switched from voting for Obama in 2012 to voting for Trump in 2016, argues that these white voters switched because of racism. But the article seems to very wrongly equate racism with a) not agreeing with the liberal mantra about ordinary white people benefiting from the racial discrimination against blacks that people like Hillary Clinton called "white privilege" while accusing ordinary whites of wrongly enjoying it; and b) not agreeing with liberal wish to let lots of illegal immigrants into the country (read about this issue below.)
The ruling class has worked very hard to persuade white working class people that anti-racism is code for anti-white. This is precisely what Affirmative Action was designed to do, as I explain here. The liberal wing of the ruling class has been using its false framework on race (i.e., the lie that racial discrimination benefits working class whites) to deliberately drive whites into the waiting arms of racist white nationalist leaders whose pitch is that they are merely defending whites against unfair attacks on them carried out in the name of anti-racism. I discuss this in some detail here.
So yes, it is true that many pro-Trumpers are very confused about race, and unfortunately do believe that anti-racism is code for anti-white, and do not know the truth about the fact of systemic racial discrimination against non-whites (read here how the War on Drugs is designed to make them think that blacks and Hispanics are "criminal races") and do not know that such racial discrimination harms ordinary whites as well as the obvious non-white victims. Many pro-Trumpers therefore, unfortunately, do not understand how poisonously divisive of the have-nots is the veiled racism* of Donald Trump and also the failure of his followers to condemn that racism. An egalitarian revolutionary movement would make the truth about these things widely known. So yes, we have work to do. But the notion that most pro-Trumpers don't want to know the truth and would be hostile to it is flat out false.
Most pro-Trumpers want the egalitarian goal that requires removing the rich from power. When they learn that racial discrimination against non-whites is used by the rich to foment fear and resentment and mistrust between ordinary whites and non-whites in order to destroy their solidarity and prevent them from being able thereby to remove the rich from power, then guess what? These pro-Trumpers will be ANGRY at the fact of racial discrimination, and will view the perpetrators of it as their enemy.
Yes, there are KKK-type racists (such as David Duke, and others) who view pro-Trumpers as potential recruits to the white nationalist organizations they control; this is why they support Trump. These racist leaders recruit by denying they are racist and insisting that their organizations are simply for defending white people against unjust discrimination against them that is done today in the name of "anti-racism." Read about how these racist leaders operate in "What do 'white supremacists' believe?" and read how liberal establishment leaders help them to recruit good and decent white working class people in "America's Liberal Establishment Has Done the Heavy Lifting to Recruit Working Class Whites Into White Supremacist Organizations."
Pro-Trump people are opposed to illegal immigration. Does that make them racists?
Here's something to consider regarding this question.
Cesar Chavez was born in Yuma, Arizona, to a Mexican-American family and began his working life as a manual laborer before spending two years in the U.S. Navy. Chavez was thus a Latino, and Hispanic.
Cesar Chavez--is famous as the organizer of a farm workers union whose members were mainly Hispanic. And Chavez opposed illegal immigration! Read about this in an ABC NEWS article that reports:
For a significant period of his storied career as a labor organizer, Cesar Chavez opposed illegal immigration.
He encouraged union members to join "wet lines" along the Arizona-Mexico border to prevent undocumented immigrants from crossing into the U.S. He accused immigration agents at the border of letting in undocumented immigrants to undermine the labor efforts of Latino farmworkers.
If anybody was NOT bigoted or racist against illegal immigrants from Mexico, it was Cesar Chavez! Chavez's opposition to this illegal immigration had absolutely nothing to do with bigotry or racism; it was opposition to the employers bringing in strike-breakers.
The fact is that there are about 1.1 million illegal immigrants working in construction jobs in the U.S. Read this article about how the residential construction industry in Massachusetts, for example, is based on illegal immigrants--paying them much less than would be paid to American citizen construction workers and forcing the citizen workers to compete for jobs against the lower paid illegal immigrant workers. Citizen construction workers have every right to be angry at this attack on their livelihood.
The point is that the ruling class does in fact use illegal immigrant workers to lower the wages of citizen workers, and not just agricultural workers, and it is not bigotry or racism for citizen workers to express anger at having their wages lowered this way.
The other point on this topic is that the sensible response of citizen workers to illegal immigration is to join with illegal workers in fighting against the ruling class's practice (both political parties, for many decades) of doing things in Latin and Central America to FORCE people there to have to illegally immigrate to the United States just to survive. Thus Cesar Chavez responded to the problem wrongly. He should have required the illegal immigrants to join the farmworkers union, and only opposed their entry into the United States if they refused to join it.
But wrong though he was, Cesar Chavez did not oppose illegal immigration for racist reasons. Likewise, just because pro-Trumpers oppose illegal immigration, that does not mean they are necessarily racists, even though the liberal media would say they are racist for this reason alone.
DIVIDE AND RULE
The ruling class--the billionaire plutocracy--uses its mass media and pundits and politicians to divide-and-rule us. One of the great divides currently in play is that between those who voted for versus against Trump. The ruling class wants each group to view the other as its immoral fundamental enemy. Let's not let the ruling class get away with this Big Lie.
Postscript June 12, 2022: The mass media is now saturating the airwaves with hearings about the January 6, 2021 pro-Trump attack on Congress, characterizing it as an "attack on our democracy"--a flat out lie since we do not have a democracy, only a fake democracy that is in fact a dictatorship of the rich with the trappings of democracy only.
These hearings are for the purpose of divide-and-rule, to turn one half of the population even more passionately against the other half, and thereby prevent the growth of a movement that champions the values and interests of the vast majority of the general public against the ruling billionaire plutocracy: a movement that has egalitarian revolution (see "What Is An Egalitarian Revolution" for details) as its explicit goal.
The "January 6" hearings apparently aim to prove that Trump wants to be a dictator. Maybe he does. But what Donald "Our wages are too high" Trump, the individual, wants is not what the great majority of pro-Trumpers want, and we should never forget that key fact.
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* One type of Trump's veiled racism takes the form of denying that blacks and Jews and Muslims are individuals; he often refers to them rather as an undifferentiated homogenous group--an 'other' to be viewed as different from 'us white people.' Thus, as illustrated in this Politico article, Trump refers to black people not as "some blacks" or "most blacks" but as "the blacks." He refers to Jews by telling a Jewish audience that he is a "negotiator like you folks" (a racist stereotype of Jews.) Trump referred to Japanese people as "the Japs." Politico also reports,
"With the country rattled by the San Bernardino shooting in which a Muslim husband and wife massacred 14 and wounded 21 others, Trump’s came out on Monday with a doozy of a statement, calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
Most famously, at the start of Trump's presidential campaign he attacked Mexico saying, “They are not our friend, believe me,” before disparaging Mexican immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” The racism is the characterization of Mexicans as rapists, followed typically with the veil: "some are good people."
Here is another example of Trump's veiled racism. White supremacist Neo Nazis held a torch-lit rally in Charlottesville,VA in 2017, chanting Nazi slogans including “Sieg heil” and “blood and soil” and giving the Nazi salute, and protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Trump declared that their demand to keep the statue of General Lee was a good demand because "Whether you like it or not, he was one of the great generals." In this way Trump reinforced the pro-slavery narrative (known as 'The Lost Cause') that says (falsely, as I show here) that during the Civil War the pro-slavery Confederacy government was the beloved representative of all the Southern whites whether they owned slaves or not. This false narrative--which is veiled racism because it glorifies the slave-owners and their Confederacy--is dividing us along race lines today, as indicated by the large number of Confederate Flags that are flown by numerous and typically poor white people.
The veil is an integral part of Trump's racism. Another example of this is what Trump said of the Charlottesville Neo-Nazi rally:
"There were very fine people on both sides, & I'm not talking about the Neo-nazis and white supremacists because they should be condemned totally."
The liberal press published only the first part of this statement, "There were very fine people on both sides," without Trump's explicit condemnation of the Neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
This is what's going on. The liberal media says Trump is an un-veiled explicit racist. Trump tells his followers the liberal media is lying about him and that he is not a racist at all. The result is that people who read the liberal press think Trump is an un-veiled racist and people who listen to Trump think he's not a racist: in other words the result--intended by the ruling class--is great hostility between each half of the have-nots against the other.