← LSE: Public lectures and events
LSE: Public lectures and events
Extra Innings: The Politics of Resentment in the 2016 US Presidential Election
00:48:14
Loading summary
Transcript9 lines
- [00:01]
A
One, two.
- [00:11]
B
Hello and welcome to Extra Innings from the Ballpark, a podcast from the US center here at the London School of Economics. I'm Denise Barron and this is the third and final of a three part series, a very special three part series which, which has sort of been like summer school, but so much more fun. You usually have to be here in London to gain access to the public lectures that the US center organizes. But with this series we've been bringing the academics to you, wherever you might be. This lecture from Professor Kathy Kramer is about the politics of rural resentment.
- [01:03]
C
So I guess everybody's ready to start because you've just like quieted down and so normally we like let it run for a couple minutes to let stragglers in, but. So I'd like. Speaking of.
- [01:15]
B
So to kick things off, we'll hear from Professor Peter Trubowitz, Director of the LSE US Center.
- [01:21]
C
I'd like to welcome everyone here this evening. My name is Peter Trubowitz. I'm the head of the International Relations Department and the director of the US center here at the LSC, which is sponsoring tonight's lecture by Professor Kathy Kramer. Professor Kramer is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and also the director Director of the Morgridge center for Public Service there. She's also a leading scholar of race, public opinion and rural America. She's published widely in these areas of research. Lots of many, many journal articles and also three very well received books. Talking about politics, informal groups and social identity in American life, with the University of Chicago Press. Talking about race, community dialogues and the politics of difference, also with the University of Chicago Press. And her most recent book, which she's going to be drawing on tonight, the Politics of Resentment, Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, also with the University of Chicago Press. So what's with like the University of Chicago Press? If you do American politics, it doesn't get any better than publishing in the University of Chicago Press. Professor Kramer is also an award winning teacher, having won multiple awards at the University of Wisconsin. She's also a native. Are you guys called like Wisconians?
- [03:20]
A
Wisconsinites.
- [03:21]
C
Wisconsinites. I should know. I mean, I know it's like cheese and it's the Green Bay packers because I'm a Giants fan. Anyway, she received her PhD from Madison and also she did her bachelor's there. So we really have the real McCoy here this evening. We invited Kathy. I think we were just talking about it. I think I invited her like this time last year, May at most June to talk about her most recent book, the Politics of Resentment, because it was very clear to me, as it was to a number of other people we just got in our bed early, that in our business, rare that somebody publishes a book that so clearly and incisively anticipates events that are about to unfold as she did, namely the rural backlash that helped put Donald Trump over the top in the 2016 election. And, you know, rural resentment, of course, is a topic of enormous importance in the United States, but it's also true on this side of the pond, where rural, urban and core periphery divides latent for so long have just come crashing to the surface in the UK but also in France and elsewhere. Tonight's talk, the title is the Politics of resentment in the 2016 US presidential election. The suggested hashtag is LSC uselects. If you haven't already, please turn your phone to silent and please join me in welcoming Kathy Kramer.
- [05:20]
A
Thank you so much. Can you hear me? I'm not sure if this is on. Is it okay? Okay, great. Well, thank you for having me, Peter and Sophie and Barnaby, thanks for your help. It's really an honor to be here. It's great to be in London. And I'm really looking forward to the conversations after I talk at you, because I know that I have a lot to learn about what's going on in the UK And I think we do have some similarities, don't we? And before I forget, I want to also acknowledge my dear friend Ben Toff, who is with us this evening. Ben is a former student at Wisconsin and is now at the Reuters Institute at Oxford for a year. And then he'll be joining the faculty at the University of Minnesota. But all the blood, sweat and tears that went into the book I'm talking about today, many of them were shed by Ben. So Ben did a lot of the work to make my book possible. So thank you for being here. And I just. Yes, thank you. So the topic I'm going to be talking with you about is not very uplifting. I'm going to acknowledge that right now. I'm going to try to tell you a few jokes along the way, so to lighten it up. But basically what I'd like to do is just explain my study, explain how I did it, because it's partly it's very important for understanding why I learned what I did. And then I'm going to talk briefly about Wisconsin in particular and how the resentment I heard played out for Wisconsin politics, but then also talk about the 2016 presidential election and then we can go from there. I have some implications at the end, but I'm very eager to hear the relevance that you see in the, in the viewpoints that I'm going to share with you. So pardon me, I'm just going to grab the clicker. I'm going to start off with two basic things that we're pretty sure we know as political scientists. And one is that, and not just political scientists, but social scientists and people observing the world in general know this pretty much to be true, that economic inequality in the US and other industrialized democracies has skyrocketed since the 70s and primarily because the top income earners, their incomes have increased at an exponential rate. These charts are not made by me. If you Google economic inequality, various scholars have documented growing inequality in a variety of ways. They're all showing the same thing, that just since the 70s, it is the top income earners whose income has gone up and pretty much everybody else has kind of been stable. So that's one thing we know pretty much to be true. Another thing we increasingly know among political scientists is that policy responsiveness in the US at the federal level and also increasingly we know at the state level is only responsive to the very wealthiest and not really responsive to middle income earners or low income earners at all. These charts are photographed from a book that came out by Larry bartels in the mid 2000s and he's since done a second edition of the book. It's called Unequal Democracy. And it was one of the first documentations of this phenomenon of if you look, and these bars basically represent the level of responsiveness. If you look at low income earners, it looks like our federal legislature, Congress is not at all responding to their preferences. Middle income earners somewhat top income earners quite a bit more. And then you might say, well, maybe the Democratic Party, the more left leaning party in the US is more responsive to people across the board. And Larry showed then actually no, when you divide it up by parties, the lighter bars, the Democratic left leaning party, same thing, same dynamic. I mean, a little bit better or a little worse or little less than worse with respect to upper income earners. But here we have this situation in which economic inequality is increasing, but it looks like we continue to vote in people who aren't doing anything about it. Right. That are basically responding to the preferences of very wealthy, wealthiest. So that's puzzling. But it's, it's, yes, it's puzzling. Why is it then that people aren't voting for More redistribution in terms of who they're electing into office. Presidential and congressional level too. That's sort of the puzzle I started with at the beginning of this study. And I really, it. It's a troubling phenomenon in democracy in the US and other countries as well. But I also find it troubling within the study of public opinion that oftentimes when we look at these two facts, we say, how can people be so stupid? Right. This is a nicer way of putting it. People are voting against their interests, presumably, but oftentimes, yes, we say, but how can people be so foolish? Well, where I start from is not with the question, what are people getting wrong? Or how can people be so stupid? But instead with the question, how are people understanding their world? Because I think that when you understand people's perspectives through which they're interpreting politics, you can understand so much better why they're making the choices that they are. So back in 2007, and here I'm just showing you North America so I can point out where Wisconsin is. No reason why you would know, but Wisconsin is what's known as a Great Lakes state, and it's an upper Midwestern state here. And maybe in the 2016 presidential election returns, it's become a little bit more familiar to a lot of people, but there's Wisconsin right there. What I did back in 2007 was to carve up this state, this is Wisconsin, into a bunch of different regions, depending on political leanings, demographics, economics, type of agriculture, type of industry. And then I sampled communities in each of these regions. A big place and then a smaller place. And then I chose a bunch more additional places because at that point in my career, I knew that the thing I was really fascinated in was political understanding and how people view the political world, what lenses they're using to view the political world and to study that. There was no better way for me to get at it than to listen to people talk to people that they normally talk to in the places that they normally hang out in. So I knew that I wanted to sample communities throughout the state and find groups of people, groups of regulars meeting and invite myself into the conversations. Back in 2007, I wasn't looking for a rural versus urban divide. I, quite naively now I can say that, did not know it existed, even though I've lived in Wisconsin for a good part of my life. Instead, I was interested in how social class identity matters for the way interpret people, interpret politics. So once I'd sampled these 27 communities, I called up A local newspaper editor or a member of the University Extension Service, which is basically an arm of the state university system in which there are people living in each of the 72 counties in the state. Anyway, those folks, newspaper editors, know their communities really well. And so I was able to call up and say, you know, where in such and such Wisconsin do people go on a normal basis that I could get access to, that I could just walk in and say, hi, I'm Kathy, can I talk with you? Can I listen to you? And they sent me to places like this. This is just a series of photographs of some of the different places I visited. Diners, restaurants in a lot of small communities, gas stations or service stations because it's really the only place where you can. It's not a private place and there's some kind of beverage being served, coffee, not, not necessarily alcohol in the morning. But typically these were places where people were gathering together over some kind of food or drink to visit with one another. When I had. That's a loon. That's just because I think it's cute. You encounter a lot of things like that in Wisconsin. It's a long story. There's a big fiberglass factory in a town that makes a lot of these large creatures. And I have a series of photographs I collected along the way. Anyway, back in 2007, say, for example, someone has said, okay, in such and Such Wisconsin at 5:30am There's a group of people who meet every morning over coffee. They'll be there, just show up. And so I would drive out from Madison in my foreign made car, which, that'll become more clear later why that's so important and take a deep breath and walk in and say, hi, I'm Kathy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Do you mind if I join you this morning? Yes. They would laugh, they would laugh. I mean, they would say, sure, we have nothing better to do. Why not? And they look at me like I was a little bit nuts, but they were curious, you know, what is this all about? And then I would give them a business card that said I was a political scientist at the university with my contact information. And then I gave them a small token of my appreciation like a pen or pat of post it notes or a football U.S. football schedule. So something that was saying thank you for giving me your time. And then I said, do you mind if I turn on my recorder? I had a digital recorder. Typically people didn't mind. Just a few of the groups over time have. And then I would say, what are your Big concerns in this community. And we would go from there. And most of these groups I've been back to multiple times, some two times, some now as many as I've lost count in the last few months. But six or seven times between 2007 and 2012 was the bulk of the work for the book that I wrote. But when my book came out, I also wanted to revisit these groups and give them a copy in person. And like everyone else in the world, I was super curious about the presidential election. And so I've been back to many of these groups in the past year or so. But here's what I found, here's what I heard about a year in to the conversations. I wasn't looking for a rural versus urban divide, but about a year in visiting, it ended up being 39 groups across these 27 communities. It was undeniable that in the smaller places there was this very pervasive intense resentment toward the cities. And here's what it sounded like. For one thing, Wisconsin, here's now with some cities plotted on it, has two main cities to it. Madison is the state capital. And it's also where University of Wisconsin, Madison is this flagship public university. And then Milwaukee is the main urban center industrial center in the state. And the metro areas kind of span this part of the state. And this in Chicago is right here. So this part of the state is pretty urban, pretty metro. The other cities or places on the state are more medium sized cities. So 50,000, 80,000 people. Not large places in, in the scheme of things. But in Wisconsin, most of the population is here. And people in these smaller communities had a map of the state that they would describe to me. They would basically say, see, there's Madison and Milwaukee and then there's the rest of us. And they even had nicknames for Madison and Milwaukee. Sometimes they called them The M&MS, which is a kind of candy. I don't know if you have it here. It's not great chocolate, but very popular. And they would say things like, look, you all think when you get up to say Wausau that you think you're in northern Wisconsin. Well, if Wausau is northern Wisconsin, then what's Ashland? They would say Ashland just feels completely ignored, totally off the map. So partly people were describing their sense of you all in the cities have this map of the world and we aren't anywhere on it. Right. But there was so much more to their resentment though. And basically what they were telling me is we don't get our fair share of attention we don't get our fair share of resources and we don't get our fair share of respect. So in a little bit more detail, partly what they were saying was Madison is where all the decisions on state policy are made and they're communicated outward to the rest of us and we don't have a say in how those decisions are made. There's little listening going on in reverse. And they had a similar story about D.C. they were also saying our taxpayer dollars basically sucked in by Madison State Capitol, spent on Madison or on Milwaukee and not on our communities in return. Their perception was we pay really high taxes and our communities don't see that money. And then finally was their sentiments with respect to respect. They were saying, look, it seems to us that all the decisions are made in the cities by these folks who, who don't know us, aren't familiar with our communities, don't understand us, and they don't actually even like us. They think we're uneducated, unsophisticated, sexist, racist, Islamophobic, homophobic. Those are my terms to describe the conversations. But they were saying, you know, they don't even like us. Well, that is what I mean. In my social sciencey term of rural consciousness. It's this combined identity as a rural person combined with this sense of injustice, this sense of resentment, right? This sense that I'm not getting what I deserve, I'm not getting my fair share and feeling as though something is off. So again, it's that lack of tension, that lack of money or public resources and the lack of respect that's to me that was interesting in and of itself and the many layers to it was pretty remarkable to me. Meaning just in this resentment you have this sense of being against cities and people living there. But then there's so much more to it, right? So partly they're talking about elites, me, people like me, people working at the university, public employees whom they perceived as having it really good compared to folks who didn't have a pension or didn't have health care insurance. But they're also talking about racial minorities, right? People of color in these conversations, sometimes when racism comes up, they're talking about Native Americans who are much more likely to be the racial minority that they have day to day familiarity with. There's 11 Native American reservations in Wisconsin, primarily in the northern part. But sometimes when they're talking about those people in the cities, they're definitely talking about racial minorities and their perceptions of say, who's receiving welfare benefits or not. But when their resentment, when they're expressing resentment toward the cities. These different aspects of city dwellers come into play so you can ignite one part of it and the others become meaningful or relevant to the policy debate at hand. And then there's also this, our partisan divide in the US and so now increasingly, we have layered on this rural versus urban divide, Democrat, Republican divide. Well, here's how it mattered for politics as I understand it in one respect, this resentment, I mean, it is itself a kind of carving up of us versus them. It's the sense of someone, some force, some group has done wrong to me to have me get less than I deserve, right? It also is in many respects about people's perceptions of deservingness and who in the population deserves public support, who deserves public money. And oftentimes those conversations are about hard work in their sense of who works hard in the population. So one thing that came up often as I'm driving out around the state in my Volkswagen Jetta, as a public employee, people would say to me, you know, so how is your healthcare plan? And I'd say, you know, as a state employee, we do have health care insurance. It's pretty decent. And they'd say, you know, I haven't been to a dentist in over a decade, or I haven't, you know, I haven't had health care insurance my entire life. And they were saying to me, how can this be fair that I am asked to pay taxes so that you, Kathy, and other public employees can have health care and a pension and I can't even afford my own? So sometimes their sense of injustice was translated in those terms. And another way in which this resentment really sets the stage for very divisive political messages is with respect to their sense that if you look around our communities, in these rural communities, it's. Something has, has gone wrong, right? Our kids aren't coming back. They go away to college and they don't return. There's no jobs here. Our farms are different, disappearing. Our shops on the main street are no longer there. Just in many different respects. They feel as though, you know, it used to be possible to live in a place like this and have a good quality of life and it's no longer possible. And for many of these folks, part of that too is the act of looking around at the world and seeing that things are different. Whether we're talking about cultural diversity in the United States or just the sense of how people communicate and where the types of jobs available to them, there's a sense that it used to be the case that being A working class white person meant you were going to have an okay life, and that's no longer a guarantee. And so there's this, underlying all of this is this sense of status anxiety or status threat, which again is fertile ground for someone to come in and say, you're right, you're right, you do deserve more and things have changed. It also sets the stage for someone to say, you're right. Politics is extremely broken and there's a need for a massive change. We need to basically overhaul government and do things drastically differently. And at the same time is just that simple message of politics is broken is a sense that government is an urban thing. So for many people, even though there's public employees living throughout the state, roughly 10% of the workforce in any of these communities is made up of public employees, either local level, county, state or federal. There's a sense that the way those folks do their jobs is driven by urban decisions. So take for example, public school teachers. Those folks live right in these communities. But people were telling me, yeah, but you know, their decisions about what they're going to teach or what courses they're going to offer, those are driven by Madison. They're driven by decisions made down at the state capitol. So not only is there a sense that politics is broken, but there's a sense that government is this urban thing run by people who don't understand our concerns. So then we had Scott Walker, who ran for governor of the state of Wisconsin in 2010. And one way he made use of this resentment was very much with respect to public employees. Once he got into office, he passed a, he proposed and it was passed later on legislation known as Act 10, which was a budget repair bill that basically eliminated collective bargaining for most public employee unions and also required public employees to pay in quite a bit more to their pensions and their health care benefits. And these protests are what resulted. It was a very, very divisive policy. It led to a recall election which he survived. He was the first governor to ever do so in US history, and he's also since been reelected once. But it was a very divisive policy. But it was effective because to roughly half the population was saying in response to his messages, you get it, you hear what we've been saying. And what he was saying was, you're right to be so upset. Things are broken. There are some people getting way more than they deserve, and you do deserve more. And basically what he was saying is public employees are the haves and private employees are the have nots. And we need to Restrict public employees. We need to ask them to pay in, we need to not ask them, but we need to demand that they pay more into the pot as opposed to getting these sweet benefits that they've been getting. There's one other way that Scott Walker tapped into the rural versus urban divide that I found really striking and that was through federal allocation for a high speed train line between Madison and Milwaukee. If you've ever visited the U.S. you know that there's a serious lack of trains in the U.S. it's such a contrast to traveling here on the continent. Right? Well, there was a time when we were going to have a high speed train line between Madison and Milwaukee, the big two big population centers. The previous governor had fought for and been given an allocation of 810 federal dollars for the TR. And when Scott Walker ran for governor, he said, look, if I'm elected, I'm not going to take this money because this is hard earned taxpayer money that's not going to go to fix the roads that go up to small town so and so and small town so and so. But instead it's only going to affect those two areas. And so he held it up as an issue of I stand for you, all you real Wisconsinites, not for those people in the cities, which was remarkable because at the time he was Milwaukee County Executive, which is a whole other interesting story. But let's move on to Donald Trump. So yes, sorry, maybe I should refrain from showing his image. So sorry, I know it's disturbing a lot of people. So Donald Trump, here is how I interpret how he tapped into these sentiments to go back to the divisive messages. But birtherism, right, to begin with, years ago, before he was running for president, this notion that the sitting President of the United States was not actually a US Citizen tapped into this sense of status anxiety among a lot of folks, especially a lot of white folks, who were wondering what's going on in the world, that the US President can be a person of color. That's not all that that debate was about, but it resonated with people who had an anxiety about the cultural changes that they were noticing in the US Another way that he's tapped into it obviously is with the anti immigrant sentiment. The notion of building a wall of keeping certain types of people out taps into, you know, people's concern that there are some people in the population who are getting more attention than they should be, maybe more public resources than they should be, and we aren't getting what we deserve. We're hard working Americans. How can it be that we're not getting what we need to get ahead? Another way that he tapped into these sentiments was through his rapid, you know, his calls for rapid change. The slogan of draining the swamp or doing things drastically differently in D.C. right. Bringing in people who aren't from the D.C. establishment was part of that appeal. Another one was talking about Hillary Clinton, his opponent, when, you know, the chance of lock her up at his campaign rallies, also tapped into this sentiment that whoever is in charge is not listening to people like us. They're not paying attention to people in communities like ours, to people like us. And so in the end, Hillary Clinton was a great foil for that kind of argument that you're right, things are broken. We need people in there who are completely different than whoever has been running the show for the past few decades. And finally, with respect to status anxiety, that notion of making America great again, in my mind very much taps into that, that sense that there was a time when the nature of things had a better order to it or there was a better way, we had a better quality of life. And now that seems to, for many people, have changed pretty drastically. So then we get to the question of, you know, what do we do now? And before, as I've gone along, I've been a little bit remiss in not sharing with you, in their own words, what these sentiments sounded like. So I want to give you just a few examples before I wind up here with some implications to backtrack a bit and talk about just what rural consciousness sounded like. I want to just share with you some brief conversations. Share just two brief conversations. And the first one is among a group of women who, some of them are retired, some of them are working, and they're meeting in the far northwest corner of the state in a tourist community. They get together once a week over breakfast, basically to visit with one another. And I'm asking them, this is back in the mid-2000s, I think, 2008. I'm asking them their attitudes about the University of Wisconsin Madison and the names I'll use I've made up. But Theresa says, as a former educator, she's a former public school teacher. She said I resented highly comments such as, there is no education north of Highway 8, which is east west highway that runs about through the northern third of the state. She said, these kids, we send them such absolutely excellent and well prepared students. The attitude that we are the hick area of the state was painful. Hick, like country bumpkin area of the state. And I asked her, so where did you get that from. From recruiters? And she said, well, from professors. And I said, really? When they would visit or. And she said, yeah, or publish in newspaper articles or other, you know, and that was a little distressful because I think northern Wisconsin feels a little far away from Madison. Anyway, we keep waving our hands and saying, yoo hoo, there's another half of a state up here. Up north is not Wausau, that city in the center of the state that I pointed out. Here's another example. A different group of women. Some of these are stay at home moms, some retirees, some people working. But this is in a tiny, tiny community in the middle of the state. And they meet in the basement of a church once a week because there's actually no gas station in this country. Community. So the church is kind of the place where people gather. And I'm asking about the university again. And Martha says, or I say, what do you think the University of Wisconsin Madison does not do? Well, when you think about it. Martha says, represents our area. I mean, we're like, we're strange to Madison. They want us to do everything from Madison's laws and the way they do things, but we totally live differently than the city people live. So they need to think more rural instead of all this city area. And Donna says, we can't afford to educate our children like they can in the cities. Simple as that. We just don't have the advantages. Ethel says, all the things they do based on Madison and Milwaukee, never us. And Martha says, yeah, we don't have the advantages that they give their local people there, I think a lot of times. And it's probably because they don't understand how rural people live, what we deal with and our problems. So to try to lighten the mood a tiny bit, I'm going to give you one more example that I think is kind of funny. So, and it's probably. This is one of the more humorous conversations I came across, but I share this example with you because all of what I said is pretty sobering. But I think it's really important to understand that here I am, this academic from Madison driving out in my Volkswagen Jetta, and so I walk into these groups and a lot of times I represent what they are resenting. Right. In many ways I'm just a symbolic representation of this dynamic. And my experience with these folks was a delightful one, I have to say. They were kind and funny and compassionate and warm and welcoming. And that is a really important part of this story too. So a lot of times when they're telling me how much they're mad in Madison, resentful, angry toward it. They're telling me in jokes like the following. So this is a community again, in the center of the state, very small town. It's a county seat, actually. It's one of the lowest income states counties in the state. And this group, they play dice. Every morning they play a dice game. And the first time I went to visit with them, they stopped playing dice while they talked with me. And at the end of the 45 minutes we were visiting, they basically said, look, if you want to come back, you have to bring your money and gamble with us or we're not going to talk with you. And so I did. And then on my third visit, I was gambling with them and winning over. Yeah, over and over. But I'll come back to that. Also on this day, there's a horse auction going on in town, and they're asking me, have I been to the horse auction? So Henry says, why don't you buy one of them horses? I've got a trailer. And I say, well, I'm not sure where I would keep him because I know that I live in one of the cities. I live in Madison. I have a very small lot. I don't have room for a horse, much less a trailer, you know. So I said, I'm not sure where I'd keep him. And Henry says, oh, you can keep him in Madison. That's where they keep all the bullshit. So then he says, well, basically all you gotta do is buy the front end of the horse. They got the back end in Madison. So that was very funny. But now we're rolling dice this whole time, and I'm winning and winning and winning. And so I'm so super uncomfortable because this is maybe three years into my study, and I've heard in this community and other communities and, you know, 15 communities in the state that you all from Madison, you come in, you take all of our money, you leave with it, you know, so I'm really uncomfortable. So I'm trying to joke along with them to probably just make myself feel better. And I say, well, I come and I ask for your thoughts, and I take your money. And Richard says, oh, I tell you what, that's good though, because we have so little of it. And I say, well, it all goes to Madison anyway, right? Ha ha ha. And Howard says, we expect nothing less from Madison. And Richard kind of leans back in his chair and he says, well, at least it won't cost any postage to get it down there now. So, yeah, so a lot of times, you know, what they're telling me is super sobering, but it was pretty delightful to. To receive it. Okay, so what do we do now? And I say what now in the sense of just scholars, but people who believe in democracy or want to, you know, what happens now? One thing that I am wondering, and I'm sure many of you are too, are, you know, what are these folks saying about Donald Trump right now? And I will confess I have not had the time to do as much fieldwork since the election as I would like, but I have done some. And my questions are basically, you know, help me understand how you're viewing this president and do you think that he's working on your behalf? And what I have found most shocking was, and this is from the week immediately following the election, what I found most shocking is that, and this is just two groups, so take it with a huge grain of salt. People don't expect me to do anything for them. Here's what I mean. So I am. This is a different group now. This is a group of people meeting in a warehouse in a tiny town about an hour and a half driving north of Madison, very rural area. And these folks get together every morning over coffee. And I said, how do you think he's going to improve life for people around here? And I have to, I think to give you the full dynamics of this, I'm going to represent the speakers with my hands. So there's four different people, and when I move my hand, it's a different speaker. So this is me. How do you think he's going to improve life for people around here? We're not sure. Nobody knows. Well, what are you hoping for without knowing what his plan is? I don't think. Sorry, different person. I don't think no matter what president gets in, it's going to change any lifestyle around here for us. You don't? No, I don't think no matter what president gets in, it's going to change any lifestyle. I mean, I'm hoping one thing, he gets in there and he quits spending and controls the spending. Okay. Because this country can't just keep going deeper and deeper in the hole. Yeah. The spending and the deficit is what is really killing us. So that was Friday morning after the election. Election was a Tuesday. Over the weekend, I holed myself up in one of my favorite spots in the state and processed what had just happened to our world and tried to make sense of this conversation. And the Monday after the election, I went to A logging community in the northwest corner and basically asked the same question. This is a group of folks who meets at a gas station every morning and it's a very, very low income community. And I said, so I would love to know, what do you think he's going to do for folks around here? We're used to living in poverty. We're used to it. It ain't never going to change. How many times we got to tell you that? But you don't listen. I say, I know, I hear it, I hear it. We're used to living in poverty. Okay, but you think he's going to drain the swamp, but it's still not going to help people around here? No. Well, I'm not saying it, but you got to try something. And why? Because this country has got to change. It's wrong. And when you got guys around these programs that are driving around $60,000 pickup trucks, it's not fair to people who have gone to work all the while. And when they go out and do things like he said, he's pointing to someone else around the table. The comment he just made about someone living off a disability, it's not right. The illegal aliens are coming in and doing the jobs that those people should be and not paying taxes. You got to cut them. You just got to cut the strings so they don't got all the free money. So they start, if they're hungry, they'll start going to work. You got that right. Now I agree with that now. And I'm on the other side of the fence. I vote mostly Democratic, but I would hate the giveaways. I just can't stand it. So I'm still in sort of the making sense mode and I need to do more fieldwork to understand that. But I think what they're telling me is we don't expect Donald Trump to really change life in our community, but at least he's going to stop the flow of resources to these groups of people who don't deserve to get all of our hard earned taxpayer dollars. And I think what that means is, as the world is, I'm overstating it the case. Many journalists are asking me, you know, so do people notice, like who he picked to be on the cabinet? Do people notice that he did such and such? Do people notice that he's not draining the swamp or that he's actually not proposing policies that are going to improve their lives? I don't think that that's the standard by which people are going to judge him. And I think that's useful to know when we think about, you know, what's going to happen in the midterm elections, what's going to happen in 2020. We'll see. Another thing I want to bring up is you may, everything that I described, you may be saying to yourself that sense of not getting one's fair share of attention, resources that you need in order to get ahead, not getting one's fair share of respect, that's not exclusive to rural areas. Right. And that if you scrape away the details, it sounds very much like what we're hearing among people in our cities in the United States. So then the question, and this is an old question, this question of then why isn't it the case that lower income people across the board in the United States see common cause and ask for something different in their leadership? Right? And you know, basically the answer is racism. And that's how it works, Right. Racism is a very effective tool for keeping people from forming coalitions. But I think it's helpful to notice it partly because even among national level politicians, there is a debate right now, especially within the Democratic Party, of do we focus our attention on white folks in rural areas and turn away a bit from the attention we've been giving people in the cities? And it seems to me that it's a little bit odd. That isn't an entirely different question. Meaning what do we do to address the fact that so many people across the board feel unrepresented and feel as though they're struggling to make ends meet? How do we do things differently? So it's not a question of do we focus here or do we focus there, but how do we do things differently to make it right? This is probably the most daunting thing where I look around at what's going on in so many other places in the world, right? The uk, France, just probably those are the most prominent examples at the moment. But my big worry is, you know, is it always the case that democracy is going to tend towards this us versus them politics in which we're being sold policies and candidates on the backs of whom we should be against in the population as opposed to being sold policies or candidates on the merits, on what they're going to do specifically in terms of change? And I want to read you briefly something from Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address just to conclude my comments because it's been a good reminder to me of several things. So I'll read it to you and I'll say my two cents. This is taking place in 1861 on the brink of Civil war, and Lincoln is standing on the east portico of the capitol in Washington, D.C. and he says, I am loath to close we are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature. So here I find myself hoping for the better angels of our nature, oftentimes these days thinking about how can we do politics differently other than figuring out who it is in the population that we hate or that we resent or that we are against. And I'm often looking to our leaders to change their tune. But just before that paragraph, Lincoln said, in your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countryman, and not in mine, he's about to become President is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it. So I think at the same time that it is time that we ask more of our leaders. It's also a moment when just ordinary folks need to step up and quit teaching to each other who it is that we are against and whom we should hate. And that's my hope for democracy that we somehow figure that out. But we have a pretty long way to go. So with that sober note, I will thank you and open it up to your comments.
- [47:19]
B
So that's it for this series of summer lectures. A big thank you to Kathy Kramer. The Ballpark is produced by Denise Barron, that's me, with contributions from co hosts Chris Thielsen and Sophie Donselman. This event was part of our America in Global Perspectives series and is supported by the British association for American Studies and the US Embassy in London. Our theme tune is by Ranger and the Rear Rangers, a Seattle based gypsy jazz band. Look them up@rangerswings.com they're the cats. Meow. The content and opinions expressed in this podcast not reflect those of the the US center or the London School of Economics. Tune in next time when we'll be getting back into our usual swing of things with a new episode. Thanks for listening.