Just before the election, I read a good, conservative piece about why the author was holding his nose and voting for Kamala Harris ("Why Trump may be about to stage the biggest comeback in U.S. history," by Andrew Sullivan in The Times of London).
I shared it with a friend, adding I found it refreshing considering all The Hill, HuffPost type, fluffier articles I had been reading—the freebies from Apple News.
My friend read the article and did not have the same reaction. I said I'd read it again, which I did, and then I excerpted the parts that resonated with me just days before the election.
The Democrats also missed a critical new reality in American politics: It's about class, not identity.
The Biden-Harris messaging was directed to women, "queers", African-Americans and "Latinx" people. Trump's messaging was about how well working-class people did before COVID, and how they could prosper again.
"Harris is for they/them. Trump is for you" was a potent message. And if the polling pans out, Trump could assemble the most multi-racial coalition since Nixon, winning record numbers of black, Latino, Muslim, and gay votes.
I have a trans son whom I love, support, and enjoy being around. However, the way in which his identity has evolved within the last five years speaks precisely to what Andrew Sullivan touched on.
To elaborate, my son is 18; at the age of 12 or just as he was entering middle school, the wheels began to fall off.
He struggled mightily with keeping friends he had known since kindergarten and with keeping away negative thoughts. He was diagnosed with major depressive disorder, anxiety and experienced terrible panic episodes.
My wife and I were able to find decent psychiatric care and therapy, especially since we decided I should quit work as a teacher to stay home for our struggling child.
We cannot put an exact date on any transformation but, a first indication was his dyeing his hair and then going by a different name at school.
Indeed, we did not know about the name until his teachers no longer referred to his dead name when talking to us about him or in school emails. Then he sprung the name change to us at home, asking us to call him Noel.
A rose by any other name, I supposed, and so I abided by his wish. It took my wife substantially longer. Shortly thereafter, he came out to us as gay and then trans.
Considering all we had been through in those tough middle school years, including his being bullied at school for his political beliefs, it really was no surprise. However, the response of the behavioral health medical establishment was.
When we talked to his therapists, psychiatrist, and clinicians (we ran through a good many), they all invariably said the same thing: You have to validate his feelings for the sake of his mental health. You have to use his preferred pronouns.
There was no explanation for what had changed in him.
Ultimately, it wasn't tough to do but the logic wasn't there. Our child had never presented as male—he was quite small and underweight (due to underlying chronic health concerns) and we parents searching for an explanation for why he would choose to change his gender identity were disappointed by the response from his many caretakers.
They had nothing to say that would make sense. You simply have to accept his choice and validate the way he feels about himself by playing by his rules. We parents quickly got on board but, obviously it would take others longer.
I think it is equally obvious why the voting public might take issue with this prescription. If something looks like a duck and acts like a duck, it's a duck. To say otherwise not only goes against logic, it goes against everything you've been taught growing up.
Identity politics or acceptance of every permutation of self is a really hard sell to those who often see things in black and white—the working class. After a long day's work of falling behind even further, who has the extra bandwidth to consider new, extreme ideas?
This is not to say they wouldn't be accepting of the other if they met them on an individual basis (see the movie Will and Harper which in one scene provides a glimmer of hope, although other scenes do not.)
Indeed, hasn't good old homosexuality been normalized and effectively codified into American culture? Gays in the military. Dick Cheney's other, less famous daughter is gay. Pride days and weeks and ready acceptance at work and in public roles? That's all 2010-2013 stuff, right?
You can't take dormant, uncomfortable ideas—the "wokeism" that burst onto the scene most notably after the death of George Floyd in 2020—shove them down people's throats and not expect them to have the same reaction we parents did initially to the idea of validation.
Validation isn't an explanation of what in the world happened to our child; it's a prescription to treat the mentally ill, the anxious, and those who suffer gender dysphoria, among many others.
At the same time, it invalidates what the majority of middle America seems to feel. They're not taking that medicine.
Now it seems clear, not only are they repudiating the forced acceptance of wokeism, but also they are asserting themselves as their own sort of marginalized young and older white male group.
Indeed, they have been at the center of blame for the last four years. There is no political center anymore as the world clearly falls apart in late-stage capitalism and with climate catastrophe steadily advancing.
These extremes that threaten our livelihoods and very lives are forcing everyone to be extreme in their reactions—if you wanna save the world, you are an extreme progressive; if you wanna save yourself, you're an extreme individualist.
We have another child, Gary. He is the opposite of Noel. He's 21, white, and not college-educated. He hated high school and, despite earning a partial scholarship to a community college, went right into the workforce.
He still lives at home because he can't afford to rent or buy on his salary and most of his friends have either left town or are at college. He has had a girlfriend but she went off to college too.
We worry he won't meet any women throughout his twenties (not too many women are car guys who go to meets and race on dirt rally courses for kicks.)
And he certainly doesn't spend his free time watching the news for edification. Kids these days want to be entertained (when I was teaching I called it, "edutained.")
Remember COVID? School didn't matter, rules didn't matter. Kids could get away with whatever they wanted. We forget what everlasting damage and toll that period has on the young voting public.
Where then, do young white males get their information? They get it from podcasts, TikTok and YouTube. There's a gap in their knowledge even from your basic high school requirements like government class and history. The gap has been filled by bro culture.
And while this media may not be overtly political, they wholeheartedly orient young male followers toward cultural topics they embrace. The personal is no longer political. Or, to update that 1960s slogan—lifestyle personalities are political.
What they (podcasters) do largely share is a natural distrust of authority, a belief that most politicians are lying to them, and a vested interest in glomming on to whatever can help their personal brands.
Those are qualities that draw them to Trump and his continued insistence that he's a bomb-throwing outsider coming to Washington to drain the swamp.
They are also qualities they share with their dedicated audience, made up largely of young men who have constructed their own identities in large part around the personalities of the online creators they follow.
It is a model of political engagement that is not political at all. Any morsels of political ideology are cloaked entirely within a lifestyle that these content creators are selling— and young men are buying.
Trump brought these sorts of characters directly into his campaign—from the Nelk Boys rallying with him to Dana White taking a victory lap. It made his politics look more like a lifestyle—and thus more like something many people could understand.
My wife just shared with me the texts Gary and she have exchanged about the election. His knowledge of the issues surrounding this election is incomplete at best.
We don't know what influencers he might follow. We figure he gets his information from his two co-workers and other car enthusiasts who occupy his social circles but those may not be the only sources.
But boy do these young guys want to be entertained! If it's not funny, it's not for them. Maybe this insistence on humor is a defense mechanism to the attempts at forced acceptance of becoming woke.
They're tired of being told what's wrong with the world and what's wrong with the spaces they occupy in it. Young white American males, for the most part, work and want to be left alone to do that.
Gary buys tools and toys for his jobs and, despite our efforts at trying to teach him basic credit fundamentals, we were horrified to find upon opening up some of his snail mail (he certainly never would) that he has run up a few thousand dollars of debt to a tool retailer.
I mean, it's way less than college debt, but because he is just starting out, he pays 24.99 percent interest.
Therefore, Gary is the prototypical Trump voter. We talked him out of it this time but we're not so sure next time around.
Indeed, the only opinion he said to us prior to the election while we were wringing our hands as to how to get Gary to vote blue was: "Trump's funny."
We worry he'll wake up one day when he's thirty, unmarried, in too much debt, and angry at the world. Everyone should be worried about this future.
As for Noel, surprisingly, he took the Trump election better than we parents have. He said he was expecting it. The only thing he was upset about was how, had Kamala won, we parents would not be protesting her whereas he would.
He's a principled leftist and wants to tear the whole thing down. Gary is a car guy who enjoys work and funny videos and, now the election's over, probably will enjoy ignoring politics for as long as he can.
After all, who's ready for midterms?
Tony Peters, a pseudonym to protect the privacy of his family, is a retired educator in Michigan. Other names have been changed in this article to protect their identities.
All views expressed are the author's own.
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