It’s the Self-Esteem, Stupid — Part Duh

I told you so.

Photo by Andre Mouton on Unsplash

My very first Medium.com article (written in 2018) attributed Donald Trump’s electoral success to his telling people that it’s ok to be who they are:

Donald Trump lets ordinary Americans like themselves. He says, expressly and by example, that it’s ok to be ordinary, ok to resent holier-than-thou scolds, ok to think women and non-WASP men should know their place. When was the last time a Democrat treated the salt of the earth crowd with the respect all self-respecting people demand (whether or not they deserve it)? … For all its cool, “woke” (as appropriated by Whites) just means “better than you” in a particular way. People needn’t be forgiven for defending the indefensible, but … we don’t have to condone an action to understand it. No one goes into the voting booth thinking “I’m gonna vote for the candidate who thinks I’m a benighted piece of shit.”

I argued in that article that Trump won in 2016 because of race and sex. Since I wrote that article, and now that Trump has won again, I am still telling anyone who will listen that Trump won again because of race and sex. Unsurprisingly, I get pushback from people who say my position is simplistic, that there are “more issues” than race and sex driving the electorate. To me, such arguments make a category error. As features of Trumpism, race and sex are…