One Reason Hillary Lost, Pt. 2

I want to pick up where I left off in my previous post, One Reason Hillary Lost. This is a subject that's important to me.

I said in that earlier post that Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump for many reasons. The one I highlighted was that she did not "grok" the white working class ... and Donald Trump, even though he's a billionaire, did.

To "grok" somebody, in terms of their attitudes and general mindset, is "'to understand [them] intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with [them]' and 'to empathize or communicate sympathetically [with them]." Hillary could not do that with America's white working class — particularly the men in that group. So that group went overwhelmingly for Trump.

The members of the white working class that most concern me are the "hillbillies" that J.D. Vance has written about in his 2016 bestseller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. They come mainly from people of Scots-Irish descent who live in southern Appalachia (though many of their families moved to northern cities to find work during WWII).

I come from a family background about three-eighths Scots-Irish. Though none of my forebears lived in the South, many lived in the Ozark region and elsewhere in Missouri. My grandparents were occasionally poor but most of the time occupied the middle part of the economic spectrum. One of my great-great-grandfathers was a wealthy slaveholder in central Missouri prior to the Civil War.

Even with that sort of thing in my family background, I'm not entirely sure I can tell you why I grok the "hillbillies" J.D. Vance writes about. In fact, my own father used to laugh at and about the "hillbillies" he encountered in the Ozarks during his formative years, saying for instance that they all had one leg shorter than the other so that they could easily run along mountain ridges. My Uncle Preston — the husband of one of my mother's sisters, who became a millionaire in St. Louis — used to joke that he was born a "hillbilly," but I have no idea how true that was.

Anyway, I grok the white Americans who have been derogated as "hillbillies" far better than I do the other members of the white working class who lack a college education and whose jobs have disappeared or are at risk. But I do know that both groups feel like they're outsiders in their own land, and both cohorts voted overwhelmingly for Trump. So I feel justified in saying that Hillary does not grok either cohort, having once said that half of Trump supporters constitute a "basket of deplorables."

Democrats — of whom I am one — have in my lifetime taken up the causes of numerous other groups who have felt like outsiders in their own land. Notable among these groups have been African Americans. When Democrats hitched their wagon to the civil rights movement in the 1960s and '70s, white people in the South who were once Democrats switched to Republican. Many of the newly Republican southerners who resented the Democrats' civil rights agenda were working-class, and some of those working-class southern whites were "hillbillies."

President Richard Nixon, through his first term, "pursued a Southern Strategy with policies, such as ... desegregation plans, that would be broadly acceptable among Southern whites, encouraging them to realign with the Republicans in the aftermath of the Civil Rights era." That was in the late 1960s and early '70s. After the realignment, Democrats and white working-class southerners were like oil and water: they didn't mix.

White working-class southerners get derogated as not only "hillbillies" but also "rednecks," "rubes," "yokels," "hayseeds," "bumpkins," and the like. Other social groups that get derogated by the use of equally ignorant, equally stereotypical terms have drawn much sympathy and support from us Democrats, but white working-class southerners have not. The reason: White working-class southerners are often the ones whose utterances have been known to slander African Americans and other cohorts that Democrats strive to help.

There's a conundrum here. Democrats believe they are the first to support any and all victims of slandering and stereotyping, but they look the other way when the slanderers and stereotypers themselves get slandered and stereotyped.

This is quite understandable. It's human nature to find it hard to hate the sin (racism, say) yet love the sinner (white working-class folks whose culture has long promoted racism). But it's wrong to give in to that difficulty.

One reason it's wrong was illustrated by Election 2016. Our Democratic champion Hillary Clinton couldn't pick up enough electoral votes to win the presidency because (I'd say) she has tin ear when it comes to the white working class, many of whom vote in the South, and many others of whom, though once southerners, today vote in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. These are states that went to Trump this year. Quite a few of states like these once voted reliably Democratic. Hillary desperately needed them to vote her way if she were going to win. They didn't. She lost.

Another reason having a tin ear for "hillbillies" and other members of the white working class who have often been racist in their outlook is wrong is that it perpetuates the wide gulf that currently separates many Americans from many other Americans. Democrats and Republicans bemoan the gulf, but neither party seems willing to do what is necessary to bridge it. Democrats are not the only ones at fault, true ... but they are at fault. Specifically, Democratic elites are at fault. These elites, because they are elite "somebodies," cannot really hear the voices of the "nobodies" who cry out that they have become strangers in their own land.

Democrats — elites and ordinary folks — need to open their minds, hearts, and ears to the likes of the "hillbillies" whom J.D. Vance celebrates, despite all their flaws, in his book.