Flyover States
After This
As someone who calls Nebraska, a deeply red state, home, I am sometimes too sympathetic towards President Donald Trump’s supporters. At times, I’m too willing to assign the best intentions even to the most extreme of them. Other times I’m too unforgiving. I’m sick of trying to rationally explain why they think and act and vote they way they do, even when none of it seems to deserve an explanation or make sense.
Regardless, I realize that just because I grew up in Nebraska doesn’t mean I know everything about Trump’s constituency, and neither does my reading of polls and studies about them. It takes effort to try to understand both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of this demographic, and I hope that columns like mine, one that I’ve tried to make as research-based but approachable as possible, help us accomplish this. This effort is especially necessary at places like Harvard, where so much of the student body—and the school’s most visible culture—is made up of well-off, liberal students from highly educated families in the Northeast. Republicans are rare and Trump supporters are next to nonexistent. Harvard needs to be a part of the discussion about a region and a people who, for several decades, were largely dismissed as politically irrelevant, but now demand our awareness and commentary, for their sake, and for our own. Our agency as Harvard students is powerful, and we should use it to benefit their communities and make us more informed and worldly. At a school whose motto is “truth,” we owe it to ourselves to learn as much as possible about the world we live in.
Back Home
Last year, I drafted a unpublished column about how to deal with Trump supporters in your life. It was pithy and deflective, written weeks before election night. I mostly wrote about handling friends’ and family members’ pro-Trump posts on Facebook, which often tended to be offensive or factually incorrect. I grappled with whether or not it was worth it to respond to these Facebook posts, to argue with our grandmothers about politics. My advice was to ignore it—it wasn’t worth it to engage in heated political battles with our friends and loved ones. Instead, we should wait for this period of political insanity to subside, and engage in other forms of activism to expedite the process.
A year later, political bedlam is the norm, and it hasn’t become any easier to deal with family and friends who support President Donald Trump or other contemptible politicians like Roy Moore. Since the inauguration, Trump has provided an overwhelming amount of evidence showing that he’s incompetent and dangerous, and yet many still stick by him. It seems impossible to convince them of Trump’s incompetence.
Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite Your State
Last week, President Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida hired 70 foreign workers, legally employable through H2-B visas. Trump has been highly critical of companies relocating overseas to cheapen labor costs, and of Obama-era immigration policy he believes were too lenient, but his team justified the move by claiming that “no one else wanted the jobs.” A spokesman for CareerSource, a company that connects businesses seeking employees with those seeking work, disputes that, writing that more than 5,000 Floridians were available to fill the positions. Furthermore, the hotel has faced criticism in the past for making the hiring process for Americans exceedingly difficult—applications from locals had to be sent in by fax, and no phone number or email was advertised. In August, Mar-A-Lago requested permission from the Labor Department to hire foreign workers before it even began advertising in the country.
So much of Trump’s platform rests on the idea that immigration is bad for the country: From the proposal of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border to ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, he has shown ideological opposition to immigration to be a hallmark of his presidency (though apparently, different rules apply when his companies are involved).
Heaven Help Us
While on the campaign trail in August 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump spoke to an auditorium full of evangelical pastors in Orlando. Over the course of the roughly 30-minute speech, he touched on topics from Secretary Hillary Clinton’s emails to the job market, but he spoke most passionately about Christianity in America and its supposed decline. He said to the crowd, “You’ve been silenced like a child. You’ve been silenced, you’ve been silenced. Strong, brilliant, great people that want to do the right thing.” In the same speech, true to character, he bragged about ditching the professionally written speech for the event, claimed to have a heart as big as “almost” anyone in the room, and stated that “nobody’s gotten rich by betting against Donald Trump.”
Since the middle of the 20th century, Midwesterners have prioritized moral character when evaluating politicians and presidential candidates. Most of this is driven by religion—the Bible is still an authority in the homes of millions of Midwesterners, and evangelism, the most right-leaning sect of Christianity, thrives in Midwestern states like Indiana, South Dakota, and Missouri. Driven by faith, these people feel morally obligated to vote for those who promise to uphold traditional family values.
Nebraska’s News Feed
Even before 2016, American presidential elections have been influenced by the Internet and social media. President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign revolutionized social media as a way to raise funding—the campaign collected record-breaking amounts primarily from small donations from a wide variety of individuals. President Donald Trump’s campaign also repurposed social media, but, in this case, much of its effectiveness was out of Trump and his team’s hands, and the results were far more disturbing.
By calling most major news sources, whose credibility had never been seriously called into question, “fake,” Trump encouraged right-leaning and independent voters to look elsewhere for their information. Alternative websites such as Breitbart and InfoWars existed before the 2016 election cycle, but their popularity has since skyrocketed, and other sites like them have grown en masse since the explosion of Trump-like rhetoric in the country. Biased news sources exist on the other side of the political spectrum as well, but they are not nearly as radical, and their content is not as violence-inducing as alt-right sites tend to be.