Back in the early years of the Iraq war, I remember being struck by two polls. One found that around 40 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in 9/11. The other asked how many American believe the world was created in the last 6000 years—again, around 40 percent.
In a Washington Post piece on Tuesday, I encountered this not-so-magic number once again. This time, it was the percentage of Americans who approve of the job Donald J. Trump is doing.
What is the deal here? Why are such frustrating ideas shared by this large, stable slice of the populace?
It’s interesting that each of these positions seem to have been arrived at very differently. The Hussein opinion from crass manipulation and insinuation out of the mouths of George W. Bush and others in his administration, exploiting post-9/11 fear and patriotism to drum up support for the Iraq War. New Earth Creationism from long-standing fundamentalist tradition. And the belief in Trump from… what?
It’s easy to just say ignorance. After all, some of the people interviewed for the Post article have some pretty ignorant things to say about Barack Obama’s nuclear weapons treaty with Iran.
But one thing these voters are not ignorant about is their own hometowns.
“Everybody is in a holding pattern. We’re waiting for the factories to return, but I know they will,” says a Trump fan who grew up in East Liverpool, Ohio. “… For the first time in many, many years, I’m optimistic.”
They’re not wrong about the hollowing out of Middle America, exploding income equality and the ever-increasing concentration of wealth in just a few regions. They’re not wrong about the disruptive nature of globalization, which has brought plenty of good and bad to the country—just none of the good, it seems, to East Liverpool. They’re not wrong to mistrust Wall Street, or to yearn for something radically different than the status quo that has upended their world in the last half century.
And they aren’t bamboozled by GOP tax cuts. Yesterday, Democrat Conor Lamb defeated Republican Rick Saccone in a Western Pennsylvania district that went for Trump by a 20-point margin last November. Much of the selling point for Saccone revolved around the recently enacted tax cuts.
But the Tump supporters in this district don’t love laissez-faire Capitalism the way New York bankers do, and they don’t necessarily believe in Paul Ryan-esque small government. They know that most of the tax cuts benefit the rich. They would probably gladly trade them for a TVA-style investment in Greene County, if it meant lots of jobs.
These are long-standing truths of American populism that neither party does a good job of tapping into anymore. Trump gives it more lip service than anyone else, and they love him for it. Yet his presidency so far has shown an unwillingness or inability to follow through on his economic populism in any meaningful sense. This could be a huge opportunity for bold liberals, if the terms and outcomes were framed correctly.
