Zito Goes Out Again and Finds That People Are Voting Republican
Nonfiction
Why Trump Voters Supported Trump
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THE GREAT REVOLT
Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics
Past Salena Zito and Brad Todd
309 pp. Crown Forum. $28.
Long before he decided to vote for Donald Trump, Jonathan Kochie, a bar owner in Luzerne Canton, Pa., worried about his country turning from the American traditions of hard work and variety. "Well, we got away from that and moved toward only some people'south traditions and cultures affair, and the other people just need to go away," he tells the authors of "The Great Revolt."
This sympathetic, frustrating book is function of the Great Correction, the post-2016 endeavor to understand the Trump voters whom the journalists, strategists and others the authors lump together as "the professional person left" failed to appreciate before Election Day. Salena Zito, a columnist, reporter and CNN contributor, and Brad Todd, a Republican consultant, use polling from Todd's firm to identify seven categories of Trump voters. At that place are blueish-collar workers, evangelicals, educated "Rotary Reliables," newbie "Perot-ista" voters and "Rough Rebounders," who saw actuality and a chip of their own stories in the twice-divorced "perfectly imperfect" Republican candidate. Amongst women, in that location are "Girl Gun Ability" voters and "Silent Suburban Moms" worried near security.
Whatsoever the taxonomy, though, the same grievances and issues run through the interviews in this book. The Trump victory emerges as an anti-establishment, anti-elitist protest vote, more rejection of Hillary Clinton than embrace of Donald Trump. The authors annotation that a town they visited in one of the 23 Wisconsin counties that flipped from Obama to Trump had been plastered with Bernie signs during the 2016 principal. And a woman running equally a Democrat for the United states of america Senate outperformed Clinton in Pennsylvania'due south "T" — the region between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia that James Carville memorably identified as "Alabama without the blacks."
Simply polls have shown Americans' faith in institutions shrinking for years. The populist fervor these voters express is almost as old as the nation: They see themselves playing by the rules but all the same getting screwed, disdained by elites higher up them and mooched off by freeloaders beneath. And like the 2010 Tea Party supporters before them, most of those polled in 2016 did non suffer financial hardship: 69 percent had not lost a job in the past seven years and did not have a family fellow member who had; 58 percent said the Obama years had brought more than job opportunities, non fewer, to their communities.
So what was different?
Manifestly, the sense of cultural disrespect that Kochie, one of the "Rotary Reliables," laments, an exasperation with what these voters come across as political definiteness. "Nosotros voted for ourselves, and that is the thing they missed," Kochie tells the authors.
Although Zito and Todd refer to "a culture careening leftward," we go hints and code about what they mean rather than context or probing. Interviewees mutter about the self-centeredness of protesters in Baltimore and Ferguson, and the laziness of workers who think "everything tin be gratis." ("The entitlement was crazy," says a Rough Rebounder.) They dismiss Trump's sexist hot-mic comments equally "only locker room talk." They echo the discredited notion the Tea Partiers spread about President Obama's "apology tour" through Europe. As for the authors, they criticize the Democrats for "multiculturalist militancy," promoting "sensitivity over the stigmatism of Islam" and the "quest for transgender rights and an ever-lengthening acronym to describe them."
The misogyny and racism of many Trump voters? The authors decline to consider either, dismissing them equally fictional stereotypes of coastal elites. The nearly maddening instance of this lack of context is when the authors mock concern executives for "cowering to pressure from liberal activists" when they resigned from the president's economic councils during "one week in August 2017." They neglect to bespeak out that this was the week after a march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., when President Trump insisted that the counter-protesters were as to blame for the deadly violence there.
Zito and Todd are right that journalists failed to understand the Trump voters. But they are then intent on gloating that they miss an opportunity for mutual understanding and promote new stereotypes instead. Many of those interviewed in this book welcomed Obama as a fresh perspective, just Zito and Todd seem unwilling to probe this kind of complexity. Ultimately, they fail to answer the question they set out: Was Trump an aberration or a remaking of American politics?
To that the best reply seems to be: November may tell.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/books/review/salena-zito-brad-todd-great-revolt.html
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