I have never voted Republican in a national election (I may have in a local election; I can't remember) and Trump was absolutely the worst candidate the party has ever put forth.
But what struck me from the beginning was how many demographics I seem to share in common with Trump voters, starting with being a poor "underprivileged" white person. Yet with all my grievances, it never occurred to me to blame my problems on minorities or immigrants.
I'm 66 and have seen my economic prospects dim, certainly beginning in adolescence. When I was 14 my father (a university professor) died, which catapulted me and my mother out of the "professional upper middle class". At first it was not really noticeable. Really, the only things that changed were that I went to a (very mediocre) public school instead of a private school, and we stopped taking summer vacations. Since I had hated the private school I went to, and since at 14 nothing seemed less appetizing than taking a vacation with parents, I did not miss either of these things. My mother still took me to the theater and we lived in a very large, well-kept apartment (one thing she kept was her biweekly cleaning woman) where elaborate meals were served every night. The house was full of books, and the conversation was erudite.
I spent what now would have been referred to as my "emerging adulthood" pretty much off the map (remember "turn on, tune in, drop out"?) so I did not go to college, squandered the modest amount of money my father left me, and abused alcohol and drugs.
When I finally rejoined the human race, full weight, at, say, five years' sobriety at the age of 30, it was a very different ball game. Reagan was now President, the tax code was skewed toward the wealthy, the city had been taken over by the finance industry, and rents were skyrocketing, so as an Assistant Editor (a job that once would have been considered "middle class" and that should have paid, in 1980 dollars, what my mother was making in 1964) I was definitely "poor". I pinched pennies. I couldn't afford a "yuppie" wardrobe, but mostly went to work in jeans, unless I had a meeting with someone from outside when I wore one of my two pairs of wool trousers and a blazer from the Salvation Army Thrift Shop. One night every two weeks I went to bed hungry, until the next paycheck arrived.
Fast forward to this election. With each passing week I had new reasons to loathe Trump (and despise the Republican politicians weak enough to support him) but I immediately latched onto how many demographics I had in common with his core supporters, although there were many I did not. I am white and poor, but rather than living in a blighted area of the rust belt, I am living in a city that once had been home to many people like me (roughly, the single, genteel poor, living - and dying - in studio apartments, including the now-demolished SROs) but that now has been taken over by what I call "the overclass": not just people in finance, but people of younger generations, who had come here to "make it", had "made it", had multiple graduate degrees, are much taller than I am which is compounded by their wearing very high heels (I'm thinking of women), have bad manners (I can't tell you how many times I have been pushed out of the way by someone sprinting for a cab I had been patiently waiting for or racing down the subway stairs), and to whom I feel that I am mostly invisible. Yes, I (barely) managed to get a college degree, by going at night between the ages of 30 and 40, but I am as much a nobody in the sea of M.A.s and Ph.Ds in which I am drowning as someone with a high school diploma is, say, in Michigan.
Like Trump voters, my primary identification is class, not gender, or even the fact that I am LGBT. If someone were to ask me "who are you"? I would say a low-income, albeit college educated, single, urban dwelling senior. Although I voted for Hillary, I did not get a surge of exhilaration at the thought of a woman president, and when she lost, I was devastated because I saw that as a blow to common sense and humanity, not because we do not have a woman president. I don't know that if I had a little girl I would think automatically that she should think she should be President. Nor would I think that automatically if I had a little boy. That is a very rarefied stratum of society and few people inhabit it. And no one, male or female, should feel like a failure because s/he does not.
As for some of Trump's supporters feeling that "feminism" (I am putting the term in quotes because it is really only one kind of feminism) has been a factor in their downward slide, I suppose I sometimes wonder about that too. The sort of feminism represented by Hillary Clinton as role model is mostly about highly successful, ambitious, and disciplined women being able to achieve the same things as highly successful, ambitious, and disciplined men. It isn't really about the rest of us.
And yes, maybe I do miss "women at home". I was not married to a man, so my place never would have been in the home, and I think we should be more flexible in saying that maybe in a particular marriage the woman is more suited to a high powered career and the man is more suited to child-rearing. But do I wish there were women at home in your average apartment building? As Sarah Palin once said "you betcha!" If there were women (or men) at home in my SO's building, for example, people who visit the sick, check in on the elderly, comfort the bereaved, and do the work of "caring" not for a living, but where they live, she might not be almost definitely headed for a nursing home.
And I share some of Trump voters' nostalgia for the way America was in the 1950s. Not because it was "whiter" but because it seemed so much less Type A.
Will I survive Trump? Most likely. Particularly because I live in New York, where Andrew Cuomo has already made a reassuring public statement. http://www.towleroad.com/2016/11/andrew-cuomo-new-york-gays/
So I may live somewhere where I feel poor, irrelevant, and invisible, but for now, I live somewhere where I feel safe.
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