Vice President Mike Pence has been working the Midwest, holding rallies touting the Trump Administration’s fantastic job-creation record and the great economy before the pandemic hit. Never mind that, during the pandemic, Trump’s bungling has not only tanked the economy and caused Depression-era rates of job loss, but cost the lives of tens of thousands of people who would not have died had the government taken COVID-19 seriously.
Will the reality-based community be able to save our democracy? We don’t know yet.
Denial is Trump and the Republican Party’s campaign strategy—along with a deeply cynical and racist call for “law and order,” meaning a violent crackdown on Black Lives Matter protesters who are reacting to police killings of Black people.
The law-and-order message is a convenient distraction from how disastrously Trump has governed. But as bad as things are, it’s not at all clear that Trump will lose.
Driving around western Wisconsin talking to farmers in a region where giant Trump banners wave over fields of corn, I came to the conclusion that, despite all the upheaval of the last four years, little has changed, politically, in rural Wisconsin since 2016.
Wisconsin farmers who voted for Trump in 2016 have since endured a record run of low milk prices, the highest rate of farm bankruptcies in the nation, and Trump policies that have made things considerably worse, including trade wars and tariffs that wreaked havoc on commodity prices (especially on Wisconsin cheese). The pandemic has caused even more economic pain. Yet many rural Wisconsinites I checked in with are once again planning to vote for Trump.
Part of the explanation is a deep cultural conservatism in rural areas.
It also doesn’t hurt that a lot of dairy farmers have received a huge infusion of federal cash over the past few months. After four years of terrible economic news, thanks to the CARES Act, U.S. Department of Agriculture programs, and other pandemic-relief aid, they are ending 2020 in their best financial shape in recent memory.
Some farmers I interviewed are Obama/Trump voters. And what they liked about Barack Obama in 2008 is the same thing they like about Trump. Even after four years in office, they see him as an outsider, not a slick Washington politician, someone who sticks up for America and for working-class and rural people.
We are living through this colossally incompetent administration, which has caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths by neglecting public health. On top of that, people are rising up from coast to coast against police violence targeted at Black people, including in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times at close range in front of his children. Trump came to Kenosha to praise the police, call their work “inspiring,” and vilify Black Lives Matter protesters as “criminals” and “rioters.” He even openly expressed his support for violent white supremacist vigilantes, including Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who shot three people, killing two of them, in Kenosha.
Former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, also visited Kenosha after the Blake shooting. It was the first time either of them had appeared in person in Wisconsin, during the campaign, to court this crucial swing state.
Biden and Harris met with the Blake family, making the case for a more humane politics and a deep look at structural racism. But neither of them matched the energy of the Trump/Pence campaign, which has been gleefully trolling the Democrats, recklessly holding in-person rallies of maskless Republican die-hards, and goading Biden for observing social distancing.
Trump and Pence loudly demand “law and order” and promise to crack down and knock heads, while the Democrats take a more low-key approach.
We don’t know yet which approach will work.
One of the reasons it’s dispiriting to talk to Republicans in rural Wisconsin who still support Trump is that appealing to those folks was one of the central arguments for the Biden nomination. It seems, from my own informal sample, that it’s not working.
Frankly, Black and Latinx voters and young people will need to come out in force on November 3 or else we are going to be looking at four more years of Trump.
As Harris put it, in her very brief public remarks after meeting with the Blake family: “Milwaukee, we need you!”
It’s been hard for many of us to grasp that Trump not only won in 2016 but could be re-elected. We’ve been in a kind of suspended state of disbelief ever since the day after the last election.
How did we end up with Trump? How can he be as outrageously destructive and incompetent and venal as he repeatedly proves that he is?
Well, it turns out he appeals to an ugly sector of American society. White supremacy, American triumphalism, crazy rightwing conspiracies, and just straight-up denial of the realities of the pandemic and our country’s decline are motivating voters to re-elect Trump.
Then there are the farmers I spoke with who just don’t trust politicians or the system and dismiss the media as an elite insider group. They feel their interests have long been ignored. That’s not without some basis in fact, and it makes it really hard for mainstream politicians like Joe Biden, or the media, to make a dent.
Against all of that stands a fractious coalition of the sane, the peaceful, the truly progressive, and the reality-based community. That includes the Black Lives Matter demonstrators Trump derides as thugs, who are calling on the United States to live up to its ideals. It includes the League of Women Voters and other groups who are going to court to try to prevent the outright theft of the next election as Republicans undermine absentee voting during a pandemic.
Will the reality-based community be able to save our democracy? We don’t know yet.
The good news is that as terrible as things have gotten, it has prompted a lot of people to wake up.
On April 7, in Wisconsin’s pandemic primary election, with all but five polling places closed in the city of Milwaukee, a foregone conclusion in the presidential primary, and only a spring state Supreme Court race on the ballot—usually a low-turnout affair—voters defied expectations and waited in lines around the block. They registered their disapproval of Wisconsin’s gerrymandered Republican statehouse majority, which had forced an in-person vote, by kicking out the rightwing hack that former Republican Governor Scott Walker had installed on the bench.
And this year, as door-knocking and other traditional methods of voter turnout have been canceled, activist groups including Milwaukee-based BLOC (Black Leaders Organizing Communities) and Voces de La Frontera are running highly effective voter engagement campaigns using social media and text messaging.
So there is hope.
And then there was the awesome spectacle of the sports walkout to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake and the entire horrific Republican National Convention promoting white vigilantism.
The walkout by so many beloved NBA stars, led by the Milwaukee Bucks, focused attention on Wisconsin’s Republican legislature, which usually operates in the shadows.
That legislature, which gerrymandered voting maps so it could hang onto control of both chambers, even as Democrats won every statewide race in 2018, has grown accustomed to doing whatever it wants. Its leaders thumbed their noses at Democratic Governor Tony Evers when he called special sessions to deal with matters of great public concern, from gun violence to the farm crisis to school funding to police reform.
This time, though, when the Republican leaders ran through their usual contemptuous routine, gavelling in and then refusing to take part in the special session on policing, the world was watching.
“Surely there are things to talk about right now, right?” Bucks guard Kyle Korver said. “Surely there are things our state needs leadership in.”
Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer agreed: “At the end of the day, it feels like there’s work to be done, and they’re not doing it.” So the Bucks themselves decided to lead.
And that’s really the only way we are going to get out of this mess.
We surely won’t be saved by the Joe Biden campaign. We won’t be saved by middle-of-the-road Republican voters deciding they like Biden because he’s an inoffensive choice.
The only thing that will save us is an uprising of people across the country demanding a better vision of society. That includes calling out the destruction, greed, and real evil of our current government and demanding better than they’ve been getting for years—because neither the farm crisis nor police shootings of Black people nor our unfair and unequal economy began with Donald Trump.
It’s going to take leadership by the people to make real change. And that’s something we are seeing take shape across the country—driven with greater urgency now that the Republicans are determined to pack the Supreme Court seat following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
This leadership of the people is not a sure thing. But it is inspiring. And it is our last, best hope. So be encouraged, progressives.
Forward!