To the Moon, Alice: How Good People Might Have Become Trumpers
A cautionary tale is in order for those who believe that Trump’s victory was a product of latent or even explicit racism and sexism among the voters who supported him. It concerns the very different modes of communication, cultural narratives, and the very different norms of speaking that apply among people of different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. One of the very first sitcom television shows in the US was called The Honeymooners, about a working class couple living in Brooklyn in the early 1950’s. (Brooklyn at that time wasn’t exactly the hipster haven it is known for today.) The show is probably best known today as the basis of The Flintstones, one of these cases in which a satire becomes bigger than the source material it was drawn from (see the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.) But it also pops up briefly in Back to the Future, during an awkward moment when Marty, from 1985, recognizes the episode his mother’s family is watching on TV as a rerun, to the confusion of her family, who have never heard the term “rerun” before.
The lead character of the show, played by Jackie Gleason, was Ralph Kramden, an everyman working as a bus driver. Kramden is no more a figure fit for emulation than Fred Flintstone, more comic than heroic. He is short-tempered, frustrated by his lack of financial success, and often tempted into dubious “get rich quick” schemes. One of the signature lines from the show is something he says to his wife, Alice, whenever she frustrates him. Ralph, anger brewing, his eyes bulging, exclaims, “One of these days, Alice… Bang! Zoom! Pow! Right in the kisser! To the Moon!” At first glance, this strikes many of us as horrifying: this is a man threatening his wife with domestic abuse. This is not how college-educated, upwardly mobile people speak with each other in 2016, even as a joke. But further context shows us that this situation is more complex than the mere words first suggested. Alice, when so threatened, never bats an eye. She expresses no fear, and never backs down. Usually, she reacts with sarcasm or an eye roll. Indeed, Ralph is never seen to carry out his threat. Other characters are occasionally also threatened by Ralph in a similar manner, but likewise, they never take the threat seriously, often responding by mocking Ralph for his weight. And then, it becomes clear: Alice knows that Ralph will never carry out his threat, that his speech, while brusque, is just bluster. Ralph follows a predictable pattern; he’ll get frustrated, blow up (never violently), calm down when it’s pointed out how he’s responsible for a bad situation, and apologize.
I mention this not because I think Trump is a Ralph Kramden, or that his threats should necessarily be ignored as empty. Rather, when people speak of Trump as “connecting” with audiences, I think it has more to do with his manner of speaking. His rhetoric, taken literally by college-educated audiences, is horrifying in the way that Ralph’s exchanges with his wife are. But of course, we who are horrified are not the intended, target audience. Notably, Trump’s recent, post-election rhetoric has taken a very different tone; with his meeting with Obama, it was deferential and courteous. We might take this as an instance of “code-shifting,” when a person’s manner of speech alters to match that of a different socio-economic group. The caution I wish to raise here is in the “misreading” of Trump. Because people in different socio-economic groups follow different norms of speech, the risk of misunderstanding is everpresent. We watchers of politics tend to come from the same college-educated group that most politicians come from. So for Trump, although college-educated himself, to speak in this different style, a style very different than we are accustomed to from politicians, it is easy to mistake mere hyperbole and bluster for serious threat.
In no way should this imply that Trump can be taken lightly, especially where he’s proposed bad or immoral policy, or that he’s entitled to a benefit of the doubt. As a politician, particularly as a President, he should be subjected to the most stringent of skepticism and criticism. But this is true for any individual ascending to that office; indeed, the ones capable of sweet talk are precisely the ones to watch the most. I’ve described Trump as a bullshit artist, and I see no reason to revise this assessment. If there is anyone I wish to defend here, it is not Trump, but rather his supporters. The possibility, or probability, that they “read” Trump differently than we do, that their notion of disqualifiers might be different from our own, does not, in itself, imply that they are presumptively full of hate and bigotry. Particularly, as we saw in this race, it was fairly easy for them to “read” Clinton herself as full of hate and bigotry toward them.
The thing to remember here is that we as human beings tend to be story-telling animals. We see the world in terms of narratives, so much so that our very memories, research tells us, are often reconstructed in narrative form, often to the point of distortion. We are usually, if not always, the heroes of our own narratives. I don’t think it requires much imagination to see how Trump found ways to plug into certain widely-held narratives, whether consciously or not on his part. Scott Adams probably overstates Trump’s abilities in this regard, since the narrative he’s suggested would have only been possible if Trump had far more command of external events than would have been humanly possible (http://blog.dilbert.com/post/152955248046/i-answer-your-questions-about-predicting-president). Nevertheless, the “luck”, if you will, that his campaign and self-presentation managed to line up with certain narratives is a major component of his success. There’s the one that Adams proposes. There is also the one suggested by David Wong: the asshole as a hero for the masses (http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/): think Tony Stark, who is a millionaire given to bad behavior, or House, M.D., or most buddy-cop films. Common also is the narrative of a bad boy who finds redemption on the path to leadership, where the role itself remakes the person and irons out the more egregious rough edges while still leaving them with just enough of an edge to be funny yet effective. (Han Solo, Mal Reynolds). It’s emphatically not that people ignore those bad traits or see them as worthy of emulation; it’s more that they are “humanizing.” In Trump’s case, he may be a billionaire from New York, but between the way he speaks, and the fact that he is such a renegade from his class, makes it possible for him to work as a folk antihero of sorts. On that latter point: considering that Wall Street and most billionaires were staunchly for Hillary Clinton was, I think, enough for people, in their binary way of thinking of politics, enough to convince them that he was on their side, not that of his fellow billionaires.
Of course, it’s easy to say that things like narratives and speech patterns are irrelevant for political judgment. What matters are questions like policies, fitness for the job, and so forth. All granted. But I don’t think this is how most people reason about politics, to the degree they reason at all. (See “irrational voting.”) For most people, it’s about the narrative, and how well it translates into existing worldviews. Hillary Clinton lost mainly because she didn’t have much of a narrative beyond the fact that she’s a woman, and we’re overdue for a woman President. And anyway, her opponent is a monster, so vote for her. We’re stronger together if we just eat the shit sandwich, and give her this job she’s so desperately wanted for decades and is entitled to as a matter of right, because it’s her turn. Not much of a narrative there. And in terms of speaking, her attempts to code switch were awkward and painful to hear: “I ain’t no ways tarrrred.” That was where the authenticity gap hurt. Her one success that made her viable was the narrative that Donald Trump was a monster, a racist, sexist bigot who abuses women, and is crazy, who will set the world on fire if he gets annoyed by a tweet: “Bang! Zoom! To the Moon, Alice!” This narrative worked for urbanites and college-educated people who were offended by Trump’s manner of speech.
And who knows, it might have worked with even more people, except for one other countervailing narrative: the Boy Who Cried Wolf. The trouble, as many others have pointed out, is that the sorts of things said about Donald Trump: that he’s a racist, sexist, next-Hitler, have been said before about virtually every recent Republican candidate. It was said of Mitt Romney, it was said of John McCain (who was also supposed to be crazy and unhinged when he became the GOP nominee, but a heroic figure when he opposed Bush and co-sponsored McCain-Feingold). It was said of George W. Bush. The trouble is, that when the same narrative is used and reused too often to paint one’s opponents in a bad light, it fades in effectiveness after a while. We’ve heard that song before. As rhetoric, it begins to sound like a paint-by-colors playbook, self-serving and convenient. “The other candidate is a monster, so even if you don’t like me, you have to vote for me!” And when it is accompanied by bullying, as this was (“You’d only support him if you were stupid, racist, sexist and crazy yourself!”), it can even be counter-productive. Such bullying is rarely if ever effective in winning over hearts and minds.
So I think this is what made the critical difference at the end. It was ultimately about narrative and authenticity. And those are things that are very hard to focus group and tease out of polls, and to artificially construct. That, rather than mere bigotry, provides far more explanatory value for why the race turned out as it did.