Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Thursday
I recently listened to Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered (2018), which as suggested by the title deals with economic uncertainty (including houses that are falling down). The novel toggles back and forth between 2016, with Trump’s presidential campaign as backdrop, and 1874, when debates about Charles Darwin are raging. While Unsheltered is not one of Kingsolver’s best novels, it’s nevertheless worth reading, with its mixture of social commentary, love of nature, and concern about struggling families. I write about it today because of its insightful depiction of a Trump supporter.
Kingsolver notices aspects of Trump fandom that political scientist John Stoehr focuses on in his Substack blog Editorial Board. I appreciate Stoehr for the way he disputes conventional political wisdom about what drives MAGA. Trump, he contends, is giving his supporters exactly what they want from him, even when he makes their lives harder. Forget about them ever seeing the light and voting Democratic, he says. What they like is how Trump does even more damage to the people they hate:
It’s not that Trump voters were mad at Biden, because he didn’t do enough about inflation. I think they were mad at him, because he did more than any president to expand the economic pie to include all those who are usually left behind, especially Black people.
In other words, it didn’t matter that Biden delivered on his promise to expand the economy from the bottom up and from the inside out. As far as MAGA was concerned, the problem was that he succeeded. “Sad as it is,” Stoehr writes,
the fact remains that when Black Americans are doing well for themselves, too many white people in this country start feeling like something is wrong, something is being taken from them, someone somewhere is cheating them, even when they are in fact thriving. It’s white-power’s zero-sum. If America includes “them,” it excludes “us.”
This, by the way, is the central point of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which to my mind is the best explanation of how race works in America.
Kingsolver’s Nick Tavoularis is a prime example of our caste system at work. A refugee from the Greek civil war of 1946-49, Nick comes to the United States self-identifying as White. This means that, although a lowly immigrant, he can see himself as superior to all people of color. Or as he calls them, wetbacks, spics, monkeys and chinks.
It doesn’t matter that he lost his factory job in the 1980s thanks to Ronald Reagan’s anti-union laws. The real culprits, as he sees it, are the Mexican immigrants. To which his daughter-in-law Willa sarcastically responds, “I see. Illegal Mexican immigrants invaded your plant, wrestled the white guys to the ground, escorted them out, and then told the company, ‘Sure boss, we don’t need any union wages.’”
Given Nick’s working-class background, Willa can’t understand why he is drawn to Trump. Her daughter Tig has it figured out, however. Here’s their conversation:
“I sure don’t get it. He loves this billionaire running for president who’s never lifted a finger doing anything Nick would call work. Why that guy?”
“Because rich white guys are supposed to be running the world. Papu thinks this dude must have put in the time and gamed the system to get his billions, because that’s how it works in America. So it’s his turn to be president. What Papu can’t stand is getting pushed out of the way by people he doesn’t even think should be voting, never mind getting jobs or benefits or whatever.”
“Never mind the White House.”
“Definitely that. He thinks they’re cutting into the line ahead of him. How can black and brown people get to have nice stuff and be in charge of things? Or women, God forbid. When Papu didn’t get his turn yet?”
Tig observes that Nick is not alone:
There’s a lot of white folks out there hanging on to their God-given right to look down on some other class of people. They feel it slipping away and they’re scared. This guy says he’s bringing back yesterday, even if he has to use brass knuckles to do it, and drag women back to the cave by their hair. He’s a bully, everybody knows that. But he’s their bully.
What Kingsolver wrote in 2018 is even more evident today. Here’s Tig again:
Really it’s just down to a handful of guys piling up everything they can grab and sitting on top of it. And a million poor jerks like Papu still hoping they can get into the club.
Willa imagines that it must be exhausting to Nick “to keep track of individual grudges against so many disparate objects, people, and doctrines.” Wouldn’t it be easier, she thinks, “to have some unifying theory of hatred that covered everything at once.” But her daughter is more tolerant, observing, “I can be nice to Papu. He’s basically over.”
The irony, as Democrats pointed out during the 2024 election and as is becoming painfully evident to many Trump supporters now, is that they are reliant on many of the welfare programs that Nick has contempt for. By the end of the novel, Nick’s family has enrolled him in Medicare and Obamacare behind his back because it’s the only way his emphysema and diabetes will be treated. They also sneak his ashes into the historical cemetery that he requested but which they can’t afford.
They are forced to these measures because they are going through their own hard times. Iano is a political science professor who is working for peanuts as an adjunct professor after losing his tenured job when his college folded. To his horror, he discovers that their family medical insurance plan won’t cover his father. Willa, meanwhile, has lost her job with a magazine; their adult daughter Tig has returned to live at home; and their son, who has graduated from Harvard with a mountain of college debt, leaves his son to be raised by them after his partner commits suicide. Nick’s obliviousness to their sacrifices on his behalf is not unlike the way that Red States ignore how many of their programs are financed by Blue States. While others pay the bills, they listen to rightwing radio complaining about freeloading people of color.
Will hard times change their mindset? Stoehr contends it won’t make any difference. The more the Trump faithful suffer, he says, “the closer they are likely going to bind themselves to the president.” Their suffering, he says, “will be taken as proof of their patriotism and devotion to the cause of justice, and because their savior will be the only one who can relieve them of it.”
As regards liberals and progressives, Stoehr faults those who “can’t or won’t see the role of racism in politics.” One only has to read Unsheltered to see how deep the problem goes. Our best hope, Stoehr goes on to say, is not that Democrats will win over people like Nick. Racist resentment cuts too deep for that, and for many years into the future there will be immigrants—including Hispanics, South Asians, and others–who keep America’s caste system going as they self-identify as White. The hope, he says, is that not every demagogue will have Trump’s drawing power so that the Nicks of the world will refrain from voting.
