http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/projects\/cp\/opinion\/election-night-2016\/the-unknown-country<\/a>, colleges across the country called out their grief counselors, people started wearing Brexit-inspired safety pins (another way of perpetuating fear and division), and riots, possibly pushed by MoveOn.org, are all over TV. The vitriol hurled at Trump voters by progressives is truly astonishing. It does not just show a hatred of half of America, but astounding ignorance about it. Racists! Half the country is racist! (And this claim despite Trump getting 29% of the Hispanic vote and 8% of the African-American vote, bettering Romney\u2019s performance.)
\nI did not vote for Trump. After he called John McCain a loser for being captured, that did it for me early on. I found his comments about women particularly disgusting.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t like what he said about Judge Curiel. I saw Trump as a thin-skinned narcissist, a bully, and a potentially dangerous loose cannon on foreign policy. May I be proven wrong. But I didn\u2019t vote for Clinton either, and when the election went for Trump, I felt a vast sense of relief: relief that the corrupt Clinton machine, supported by 80% of the media, had been turned out once and for all, that they hadn\u2019t gotten away with it yet again, that a progressive in the White House wouldn\u2019t continue to talk down to me for the next eight years.<\/p>\nI watched the last two weeks of the election in Michigan visiting friends and relatives and fishing for steelhead. I grew up in \u201cthe Thumb\u201d of the mitten and my wife\u2019s family lives in Grand Rapids. I think I have a fairly good sense of what motivated the rural American rustbelt to turn out in droves to vote for Trump. I chalk it up to two things: the stagnant Obama economic recovery and a backlash against the Olympian condescension of our leaders in both parties and especially the media. In two days, as I drove from Grand Rapids to Bad Axe, I saw that Trump lawn posters vastly outnumbered the ones for Clinton. Even fishing on the Muskegon River, I saw Trump posters on the banks. And then, both campaigns flooded Michigan the week before the election. Trump rallies had a huge attendance. You could almost feel the state turning from blue to red.<\/p>\n
People who live in the Michigan countryside tend to be independent. A lot of small farms still survive. They make their way in small businesses of their own or franchises. I fished with two guides. One was a high school teacher and coach, and one was a full time guide. Both were voting for Trump. One had a wife with several small businesses. They both thought Trump would be better for small business. Many of the people I talked to, including two old high school friends, one a civil engineer who had spent most of his career in the Middle East, the other a retired banker, were hoping Trump would get the economy moving. So, \u201cit\u2019s the economy, stupid,\u201d Bill Clinton\u2019s theme in the 90s, was very much on people\u2019s minds.<\/p>\n
But there was also an edge to a lot of this. People were sick of being called racists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and being basketed as deplorables\u2014one of Hillary Clinton\u2019s rare moments of candor. They were sick of a condescending political and media culture which insulted them as \u201cclinging to their religion and their guns,\u201d (presumably instead of their safety pins), sick of being told they were incapable of rational thought. I talked with several Trump voters who seriously said, \u201cI don\u2019t think <\/em>I\u2019m a racist,\u201d and would then lay out a mini-biography of their cordial relations with African-Americans, gays, and in the case of the engineer, the many Muslims he\u2019d worked with and considered friends. They felt bad<\/em> that they were being talked about in those terms. It was personal. But hoping to prove you are not a racist to a determined progressive is like hoping for a Lion\u2019s Superbowl victory. If you are not consciously racist, then you are unconsciously racist. If you are one of the 54% of white women who voted for Trump, you have \u201cinternalized misogyny.\u201d If you are white, you are the beneficiary of \u201cwhite privilege\u201d; even if you are an unemployed auto-worker or coal miner you are implicated in structures of oppression. People got sick of this, and they were not all white. I got a haircut in a Mexican-American barbershop in Clovis, California, during the primaries, and everyone in the place\u2014all of Mexican heritage except me\u2014were for Trump because \u201che\u2019s not politically correct.\u201d<\/p>\nThe progressive post-election theme is, \u201cSee! We told you they (white knuckle-draggers) were stupid and insecure and racist. \u201cRacism\u201d for many academic and media progressives is a mystical term. It is the progressive version of original sin, inescapable, and something whites must grovel about for the rest of their lives. They must rake their conscience for sins and confess them at diversity consciousness-raising sessions, a diversity which includes everything but white. This was the \u201cI\u2019m not going to grovel anymore\u201d election, the \u201cI\u2019m sick of being slandered\u201d election, not a vote for David Duke and the KKK.<\/p>\n
Way under-reported in all of this has been the vote of pro-life evangelicals and Catholics, a make or break issue for a lot of people. I went to a mass at a church in a middle class section of Grand Rapids. It had its own grade-school which feed students to Catholic Central, the mark of a substantial parish with a diverse congregation. The priest gave a homily, based on the torture and execution of the 7 brothers in Maccabees, under Antiochus Epiphanes. His point was that, if you want to know what people believe, watch what they do, not what they say. \u00a0Tim Kaine was never mentioned. But the priest’s point was that there was no line in the heart between “personal belief” and public policy. People just do what they believe, and the subtext was that despite everything Trump had said, Catholics had only one choice about who to vote for. Evangelicals, 83% of whom supported Trump, were more in agreement on this than Catholics.<\/p>\n
That this was the racist election, the misogynist election, the stupid election may provide solace to progressives who know nothing about the people they are slandering, but it provides nothing in the way of enlightenment. This election was complicated. If prejudice and racism is applying ugly labels to vast numbers of people you don\u2019t know, then the left is as prejudiced and racist as it accuses the right of being. Hats off to the few progressives I know who are trying to think about this election in a complicated way.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Craig Bernthal Most of the pundits I\u2019ve been reading on the Democratic side who have decided to explain this election chalk up the Trump victory to an America which turned out to be far more racist and misogynistic than they\u2019d ever believed. Among the most hysterical and bitter was Garrison Keillor in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1091,1090],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2v3","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11157,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/revolution-and-worse-to-come\/","url_meta":{"origin":9613,"position":0},"title":"Revolution and Worse to Come","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 24, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review When legal bloodhounds and baying critics fail to take out Trump, what\u2019s next? The Resistance wants Trump\u2019s head \u2014 on the chopping block. On the domestic and foreign fronts, the Trump administration has prompted economic growth and restored U.S. deterrence. Polls show increased consumer\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "North Korea"","block_context":{"text":"North Korea","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/north-korea\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10394,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/russia-didnt-interfere-in-u-s-election-to-help-trump-but-to-destabilize-america\/","url_meta":{"origin":9613,"position":1},"title":"Russia Didn’t Interfere In U.S. Election To Help Trump, But To Destabilize America","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 17, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0By Paul Gregory \/\/ Forbes.com \u00a0(Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB\/AFP\/Getty Images) A still unidentified Democratic Party donor paid for the factually challenged\u00a0dossier that almost sunk the Donald Trump campaign. 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Before the quixotic effort imploded, Stein was praised as an iconic progressive social\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12059,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trump-russia-investigation-rested-on-a-house-of-cards\/","url_meta":{"origin":9613,"position":5},"title":"Trump Russia investigation rested on a house of cards","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 14, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Please\u00a0read\u00a0the\u00a0following\u00a0article\u00a0by\u00a0my\u00a0colleague\u00a0Paul\u00a0Gregory\u00a0in\u00a0The\u00a0Washington\u00a0Times A review of the public record demonstrates that the Russia investigation rested on a house of cards assembled by high-level officials to prevent\u00a0Donald Trump\u2019s election or to ensure that his administration would fail. 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