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On a surprisingly warm Valentine’s Day weekend, my husband and I drove a couple hours northwest from Madison to Viroqua, Wisconsin, to help some friends tap their maple trees. It was a welcome break to be spending time in the woods in sunny weather, which came on the heels of a bitter, deep freeze, and to get away from scrolling through grim news in isolation.
Like most people in the blue bubble where I live, I have been transfixed and horrified by the brutality and destruction of President Donald Trump’s administration. The violent military occupation of Minneapolis, Minnesota, hit close to home. Our daughter lives and works in the Twin Cities and was asked by neighbors to come out and observe the scene after Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti just blocks from her home. She was also forced to leave her apartment for a while afterward, when federal agents, lobbing tear gas and flash-bang grenades, were stalking the area.
In the midst of so much horror, it’s hard to imagine having friendly, constructive conversations with people who voted for this lawless regime. So I was taken aback when our Viroqua friends told us about their amiable relationships in their politically heterodox social circle, and how they don’t harbor ill will toward the Trump voters whom they know. They spoke sympathetically about small-town Midwesterners who often feel excluded, overlooked by city people and national politicians alike. Many Republicans in the area are longtime locals, farmers who have lost their farms, clerks at Kwik Trip, and greeters at Walmart. Many Democrats, in contrast, are recent transplants from the East Coast, hipsters with trust funds who moved to this beautiful area to start organic farms, work at Organic Valley (the nearby large-scale organic dairy cooperative), or do white-collar jobs remotely while their kids attend the local Waldorf school.
It’s a vivid illustration of the conversion of the Democratic Party into the party of the wealthy and well connected, and Trumpism as a movement of people who feel left behind both economically and culturally.
Beth Macy explores this phenomenon in her brilliant book Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America. Returning to her hometown of Urbana, Ohio, Macy, who is also the author of the national best-selling book and Hulu TV series Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America, describes her painful efforts to reconnect with friends and family members after leaving her impoverished family behind and going to college on a Pell Grant, which propelled her into a successful journalism career and a middle-class life. All of the infrastructure of support that made her journey possible—great teachers at an economically and racially diverse and well-funded public school, a terrific public library, robust local newspapers, and a solid manufacturing base that allowed her mother and other family members and friends to find good union jobs—is now seriously degraded or totally gone.
Macy uncovers the roots of the anger, resentment, and paranoia that fuel conspiracy theories, distrust of elites, and the toxic politics we are all living with today. She connects the rise of QAnon and other online alt-realities to the collapse of local newspapers, which used to bring together neighbors in a shared understanding of their own communities. Now, with newspapers starving to death or dead, people in Urbana and other communities across the country are caught up in online national political debates but totally uninformed about what’s going on in their own communities.
Macy’s ex-boyfriend, Bill, who used to be a progressive, became disillusioned during President Barack Obama’s administration. “He hated that Obama had essentially reneged on a promise to change bankruptcy laws that would have helped struggling homeowners during the 2008 recession, while bailing out big banks and carmakers, and Obama’s support for unprecedented mergers in Big Tech and pharma,” she writes. “About that, Bill wasn’t wrong.” But his friends disowned him when he supported Jill Stein for President in 2016. He was intrigued by Donald Trump, but by the end of Trump’s first administration, Bill no longer thought he was a capable leader. “But as failed as his presidency was, and as bad as he may be, he is nowhere near as bad as the lying, cheating, murdering political, bureaucratic, and media forces arrayed against him,” Bill told Macy.
Bill railed against Hillary Clinton’s contemptuous laughter over the killing of Muammar Gaddafi, the contempt by elites for average voters, and the support of Democrats for global trade deals that destroyed jobs and local communities across the industrial Midwest, including in Springfield, Ohio, where he lives. Many of the things he says are relatable for readers of The Progressive, even if his descent into violent rage, paranoia, and QAnon-style conspiracy theories are not.
The alienation, tribalism, and artificial intelligence-fueled online conspiracy theories Macy describes are a recipe for despair.
But Macy, who recently announced she is running for the U.S. Congress against Republican Representative Ben Cline in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, is not giving up. She continues to work on nurturing good relationships with her family members and old friends whose politics she doesn’t like, but whose situation she understands. Now she’s taking that effort into a national political campaign.
Our friends in Viroqua, who are engaged in real neighbor-to-neighbor conversations outside the social media echo chamber, are not giving up, either. Some of the Trump voters they know are unhappy about the federal crackdown in Minneapolis, which has recently spilled across the border into western Wisconsin. They know that our friends’ children, kids of color who are well known and loved in the community, are now carrying proof of citizenship wherever they go, just in case.
I was struck by how, in spite of the toxic national political atmosphere, our friends seem hopeful and full of the energy people get from real, flesh-and-blood connections with other people.
That’s the energy that’s going to propel change. We saw it in the heart of the horrifying Minneapolis crackdown, where the strength, good humor, and fierce compassion of Minnesotans who refused to stop defending their neighbors and resisting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement lit a candle of hope for the world.
It’s everywhere people continue to connect with their neighbors and reinforce bonds of community, which promote empathy and sanity and anchor us when the world seems to be spinning out of control. That energy is really our only hope for surviving this bitter season and building something better, healthier, warmer, and more humane.