So now we know what happens when you sneer at voters as ‘garbage’. When you view them as ‘deplorables’. When you treat them as the dim stooges of demagoguery, the playthings of powerful men. When you brand them ‘low information’ and chortle in your coffee houses about how Donald Trump is ‘preying’ on their ‘hazy understanding’ of political affairs. What happens is that they don’t vote for you.
Kamala played the ‘fascist’ card, breezily unaware of what a grotesque slight it is to the voters
The past 24 hours in the United States have been nothing short of extraordinary. This is the revenge of the deplorables, to borrow the slur Hillary Clinton used in 2016, the first time Trump rose to power. Half of Trump’s supporters belong to a ‘basket of deplorables’, she infamously said. They’re ‘racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic’, she sniffed. Voters rose up against those elitist defamations in 2016, and they rose up against them again yesterday.
That Clintonite disdain for the lower orders has infused so much of the discussion of Trump voters these past eight years. You see it in the haughty media sending its reporters to mingle ‘among America’s “low information” voters’. You see it in the claims that Trump is tapping into the masses’ ‘deep-seated fear of racial otherness’. You see it in the idea that he is ‘preying on low-information voters’. Shorter version: he’s exploiting you cretins.
You glimpsed it in those smug celebrity endorsements of Kamala Harris, which always came with the subtext that no decent person in full command of his mental and moral faculties could ever vote for a monster like Trump. You saw it among the complacent centrist dads of the new podcast empire who were certain Kamala would win because they cannot conceive of the existence of human beings who think differently to them.
And you saw in the commentariat’s enormous folly of calling Trump a ‘fascist’. Not only was that bandying around of the f-word ahistorical and juvenile, a temper tantrum disguised as analysis. It was also a sly indictment of the millions of good Americans who were planning to vote for Trump. It implied that they were either so dumb or so wicked that they were willing to usher Hitler 2.0 into the White House just to own the libs.
Kamala herself played the ‘fascist’ card, breezily unaware of what a grotesque slight it is to the voters of the working class to depict them as the brainless or heartless facilitators of a new Nazism. Deplorables, easy prey, fodder for a fascist – they really thought such Ivy League gloating over the ‘low information’ little people would be a vote winner? It seems they did.
Alas, it was not. Of course it wasn’t. The Kamala camp’s seeming desire to consolidate a new bloc of correct-thinking graduates, ethnic-minority voters and those parts of the working class still willing to take a punt on the lame Dems appears to have fallen flat.
She may have won over the credentialled elites – more than 60 per cent of voters with an advanced degree went for Kamala, as did more than 50 per cent of those with a bachelor’s degree. But she lost huge numbers of Latinos and even some of the female voters who went for Joe Biden last time. And, of course, the non-university educated, which is to say the working class. Just 37 per cent of those who never attended college voted for Kamala, while 62 per cent went for Trump.
This is a rebellion of the subaltern, a ballot-box insurrection against the turbo-smug coastal elites and their patrician ways. Ignore the mournful tones of every BBC reporter today. Never mind the noisy weeping of centrists on social media. Be sceptical of the million thinkpieces coming very soon that will write off this vote as ‘white man rage’, or the reactionary yelp of the unenlightened, or mass misogynist fear of the prospect of the first female president.
No, this is people saying: We matter. Our voices matter. Our communities matter. Our families matter. We are not deplorables, we are not idiots, we are not ‘rednecks’. We are citizens and we matter. The only question now is whether the complacent establishment will double down on its mockery of working people and damn them for falling for demagogic trickery all over again, or listen to them for a change. I hope it’s the latter. But something tells me it won’t be.
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