I was fortunate enough to change before my first election, but I could have easily become a trump supporter. I was raised in a conservative household in a conservative town, so it made sense that when I was young, I was quite conservative. I would have been furious if you had called me racist but looking back on myself I cringe because I was. A stereotypical white person who ranted against welfare even though my family was a recipient of it because I was convinced that “lazy” people took advantage of it and, if not for them, we’d be able to get more to help us get on our feet.
I am horrified by this, but when I was 17 Donald Trump was once again running his yap about running for president and I thought that was an awesome idea. What this country needed. No more politicians! There is no coherent reason for this, just a vague sense that everything sucked and no one in Washington cared. That was 1996, and I’m horrified to admit this as well but later that year I was rooting for Bob Dole because fuck Bill Clinton. Why? No reason. I mean, it’s Bill Clinton. Everyone hates him!
I did have some moderating influences in my life in the form of my maternal grandparents who were very active Democrats (my grandpa boycotted radio stations that played Rush Limbaugh; my grandma thought Limbaugh should be charged with treason). They were working class folks, grandpa worked at the plant, grandma was a nurse, they were both proud union members. Neither had a high school degree but both were intelligent and thoughtful. They made a good life for themselves on those union wages. Bought a house on some land to raise their kids in the country, took vacations often, didn’t have a lot of debt and lived quite comfortably.
Irony of ironies, I figured that’s why they were Democrats. They could afford to be. Of course, the reality is that they couldn’t have afforded NOT to be.
This is not to say that I viewed myself as a republican, either. My dad was a staunch republican and I thought he was a selfish asshole, therefore all republicans are selfish assholes. At least on this point, I haven’t changed my mind all that much with the passage of time (though I do have a softer view on my dad now that I’m an adult).
The 17 year old me would have rejected this analysis out of hand, but the only reason I believed what I believed, incoherent as it was, was because of the culture I grew up in. It was full of “of course I’m not racist but….” remarks, war is patriotic, peace is for sissies, welfare is for the “lazy” people who are also somehow stealing our jobs. A consensus had been reached, and this was just the way it was. It was obvious, and everyone knows it.
Here’s the part where it might get frustrating for my audience: if you were hoping for some insight into how a person like that can drastically change, there is none here. It’s too specific to apply almost anywhere else except for one universally understood motive: I was selfish.
At 17 I wasn’t very religious, but I was fire and fucking brimstone about abortion... until a pregnancy scare right around my 18th birthday. Then overnight I was thinking “y’know maybe it’s not murder so much as a reasonable choice to make in certain circumstances.”
So I budged quite a bit on that issue and started to listen to what other people had to say about it rather than dismiss their arguments out of hand. I realized that maybe things aren’t as black and white as I wanted to believe.
But also around the same time as my pregnancy scare, I was struggling with an even larger issue: that I absolutely adored the man who got me pregnant but I was not and never would be in love with him.
It would be a couple more years before I came out of the closet, but in the interim I heard a LOT of republicans making horrific comments about the gay community and that was enough to make me decide I would never, ever vote for one of them. They had lost me forever.
This still didn’t mean I was a Democrat, I simply saw them as the lesser of two evils and I still wasn’t registered to vote. I didn’t plan on ever doing that as I just didn’t see the point. Then this happened:
I was, very fittingly, 19 years old when I read that book [Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony] and, put very simply, it radicalized me. The person who turned the first page of that book was a shifty, directionless, disaffected, and hopeless young lady. The person who clung to very last word of the very last page was a focused, passionate, dedicated woman.
Reading about the women’s suffrage movement influenced me more than anything else had at that point. There was no way in hell that I could justify not voting after realizing how hard my foremothers fought to give me that right.
So I made my journey from likely trump voter to Yellow Dog Democrat, but the scary thing is that had I not had a pregnancy scare, or had I gotten pregnant and wanted to be a mother, AND if I wasn’t gay, I don’t think I would have made that journey. I don’t think I would have gotten there without both of those things being true.
Because despite my suspicion that everything was rigged and the whole system sucked, I was comfortable. You couldn’t have told me that at seventeen or eighteen, but the reality is that I was. It was always easy for me to get a job. It was always easy for me to get promoted. Of course I never thought I made as much as I should have, but everyone thinks that (and that IS usually true).
And as much as I cringe to admit this, I know that trump would have spoken to me. I know that I would have rejected the idea that my bigotry was a motivator, but that would have been true. The seventeen year old me was threatened by the idea that whites could become a minority. Of course I couldn’t articulate why at the time but it’s obvious to me now. And before my pregnancy scare, I was less concerned about “baby killing” and more concerned with how irresponsible women were. Sluts should have consequences for being sluts.
The underlying theme being so clear now: I was the only person who ever suffered for MY mistakes but no one else did. I saw myself as a victim and trump would have spoken to that.
Of course, it’s always possible that I could have changed between now and then in some other way, but if I had followed a traditional path there would have been no reason for me to. Because, again, despite feeling like a victim of something I couldn’t name I would have been comfortable. Even after my supposed awakening I rejected feminism for years, and during all of my twenties and up until several years ago I would have completely rejected the idea that I had any privilege whatsoever.
I’ve always realized that had I been born straight I probably would have never been a voter or, if I had become a voter, I would have voted for republicans. But after 2016 I realized that it would have been worse than that.
One night in late 2016 I was wrapping up an evening shift at work and listening to the Rachel Maddow podcast. It had been rumored that trump was going to soften his immigration stances and he was expected to make a speech about it that night. Of course, no such softening happened. trump railed harder and more explicitly than he ever had before, and he’d already been openly hateful and racist.
Maddow played a fairly long clip from that rally on her show that night and it filled me with absolute dread. First, because it was terrifying that this sort of rhetoric was in any way acceptable for a major party candidate. But what chilled me even more- what made me cry on the walk home- was the way the crowd went absolutely crazy for it. I knew at that moment that trump was going to win. Because the people cheering cared a lot more about cruelty towards brown people than other people cared about making sure that could never happen here.
And I shuddered at the thought that I could have been one of those people. Not just conservative, not just reliably republican, but outright racist and proud of it, yet offended when someone calls me racist. Easy to be swayed by a demagogue, easy to manipulate, easy to make any excuse in the book for supporting someone so obviously reprehensible, unstable, and unintelligent. The sad fact is, it would have been easy; much easier than the journey I took away from that.
I’m not going to end this with advice on how to handle trump supporters because I don’t have any, but I will take a slight detour here to wrap things up.
Midway through September I had nearly forgotten about my revelation earlier that month, that trump was going to win. I told myself- and I truly believed- that Americans would not accept the idea of a trump presidency. Right up until the night of November 8th, 2016, I believed we would reject trump and his demagoguery and even up until midnight of that night I could not believe what was happening.
And for many months after he took office and implemented one cruel policy after another I would tell myself “this isn’t America.”
Earlier this year I had a lightbulb moment that should have come a lot sooner: this actually IS America, just the one I’ve never had to see because even today, despite being gay and being a woman, I am comfortable. Just as I never had to really accept my own racism until my mid-thirties, I never had to accept the racism so prevalent in so many others. I didn’t want to believe that it was true of us as society, so I didn’t.
And sometime a couple of weeks ago when the NYT published yet another story trying to explain trump voters to the rest of us, I thought yep, this is America. The explanation is staring you right in the face but you don’t want to accept that, so you’ll continue to search for a reason that’s more comfortable for all of us.