How to Explain Trump: A Personal Message From the Texas Plains
By
Bernd Reiter
Despite lies, lawsuits and gaffes: Why is Donald Trump popular with so many Americans? Our author searches for traces in rural America.
As a professional political scientist, I am often asked how I can explain Trump, particularly when I travel to Europe, where I am from, or to South America, where I conduct most of my research. Explaining Trump is not an easy task. “How can so many Americans support a guy like him?” is the question I am asked most.
Several factors have helped me get there. First, I found the books by Isabel Wilkerson, Caste, as well as Ashley Jardina’s White Identity Politics extremely insightful and helpful in explaining the Trump phenomenon. Both authors stress the importance of the “magical year of 2042,” when whites are projected to no longer constitute a majority in the US. Both authors focus their analyses on the fear white Americans have of a time when they lose control of American politics. Jardina, trained as a political scientist at the University of Michigan, the American Mecca of statistical analysis, presents a myriad of data measuring white fear and white responses to their perceived decline on the national political scene.
The power of a theory
“Replacement theory” is the headline under which this fear is currently discussed. Replacement theory stipulates that black and brown people, Muslims, or other non-white, non-Christian groups will impose their culture and politics onto Europeans and their descendants in the Americas. Both Wilkerson and Jardina demonstrate the power and suggestiveness this idea has on some white people in the US.
Replacement theory stipulates that black and brown people, Muslims, or other non-white, non-Christian groups will impose their culture and politics onto Europeans and their descendants in the Americas.
Berkeley-based sociology professor Arlie Hochschild has also written an insightful book, Strangers in their Own Land, where she seeks to capture the thoughts and motivations of poor white Trump supporters in Louisiana, a state suffering devastating and livelihood-threatening environmental problems caused by consecutive Republican governors and their attempts to attract highly polluting businesses to the state. Hochschild asked working-class whites who suffered the consequences of such policies why they still support Republicans. Her central finding is that many of them felt left behind.
They believe in the American dream and work hard to achieve it – but they are still poor, while they witness some groups, apparently favored by the state, rise.
Blacks like the Obamas and some Hispanics, but also members of different LGBTQAI+ communities, are surpassing them. To those poor Louisianan whites, the success of others can only be understood as the result of government support, such as Affirmative Action (a set of policies and practices within a government or organization seeking to benefit marginalized groups). It is not seen, and probably cannot be understood, as the result of effort and merit. If effort and merit were the cause – how come their own efforts are not bearing fruit?
These poor whites feel left behind, standing in line for decades, as Hochschild puts it, and thinking that some people are skipping this line, pushing themselves in front of them. In the zero-sum logic they apply, this automatically means that they now have to wait even longer to achieve their goals of affluence.
They believe in the American dream and work hard to achieve it – but they are still poor, while they witness some groups, apparently favored by the state, rise.
Hochschild, Jardina, and Wilkerson go a long way in explaining Trump, and I highly recommend reading their important books.
What I can add to this discussion grows out of a particular circumstance of mine: I have been living in one of the most Republican cities in the US for the last four years. My wife and I both accepted jobs at Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, North-West Texas. Since the fall of 2020, we have been living in the Texas Plains, in a solidly Republican neighborhood. To be sure, Lubbock County supported Trump in the 2019 elections with 65.4 percent. Within Lubbock, some neighborhoods, mostly Black and Hispanic, but also the one next to the university where most college professors live, voted Democratic in the last elections, but our own neighborhood is solidly Republican and pro-Trump. Trump flags and signs abound.
Suburb life
We live among affluent, mostly white, professionals in what would be considered a suburb in a bigger city. As Lubbock is relatively small with no real urbanity to it anywhere, the whole city feels like an agglomeration of different suburbs. Ours is typical: relatively newly built, with single-family houses, each one with a backyard and integrated garages.
Here are some of the things that make our neighborhood special: Every holiday, all houses are adorned excessively. During Christmas time, our whole neighborhood looks like Disney World, as almost all houses boast not only colorful light shows on their roofs; there are also inflatable Santas, reindeer, and plastic-made Christmas trees on almost all front yards.
The ‘good old days’ live on. Families are wholesome. People are Christian. Holidays are celebrated as an act of defiance against change and the erosion of ‘American values’.
Independence Day, Memorial Day, and Veterans Day are celebrated and marked with vigorous displays of American flags, in some houses more than one. Thanksgiving will see the whole neighborhood flooded with pumpkins, and on Halloween, the whole neighborhood opens its doors to children going from house to house in elaborate costumes, while their parents watch them from their cars.
In short: In my neighborhood, the “good old days” live on. Families are wholesome. People are Christian. Holidays are celebrated as an act of defiance against change and the erosion of “American values.”
The “good old days” are mostly referenced as the 1950s or the 80s, at least as far as I can tell from the dominant aesthetics. White women’s hairstyles relate back to the 50s, resembling cotton-candy sculptures held together and fixated, I imagine, with copious amounts of hairspray after hours of applying hairdryers and round brushes. The 80s seem to play a role insofar as Reagan is held as a hero, ending Jimmy Carter’s socialist agenda and making America great – maybe for the first time. Somehow, the 60s and 70s are brushed aside – as hippies, gay rights, and anti-Vietnam protests did not reach Lubbock. Not really.
Reaganomics are also favored with regards to most Lubbock public attitudes and policies. Trucks are better than cars. Bigger trucks are better than regular trucks. Garbage is not separated and recycled by the city. Public parks are mostly abandoned and certainly not well-kept. Who wants to pay taxes for that, after all? There are no sidewalks, no bicycle lanes, and, of course, no functioning public transportation. Good people have cars, I mean, trucks. There are no places to walk to anyway.
Strip malls and drive-throughs dominate the cityscape. Sonic is booming in Lubbock, as are most other Americana eateries, such as Dairy Queen, McDonald’s, Burger King, Checkers, and Arby’s. You can get a donut at almost every corner. Fresh. There are tons of nail salons, my wife tells me. Only one yoga studio though. Yoga is for liberal Californians, after all. Mostly chain restaurants. Tons of taco places, but even more Christian churches. The quietest hours in Lubbock are Sunday mornings. Everybody is in church. After church, everybody goes to Cracker Barrel, a popular roadside restaurant chain.
Trucks are better than cars. Bigger trucks are better than regular trucks. Garbage is not separated and recycled by the city. Public parks are mostly abandoned and certainly not well-kept. Who wants to pay taxes for that, after all?
To the average, Republican, Lubbockite, Lubbock is fending off change; the kind of change that is changing America and the Western world, making it more diverse, more ecological, more heterogeneous, more inclusive, and less racist. In Lubbock, one can live in the good old days. Worries about ecological disaster are dismissed as left-wing conspiracies. Racism is treated as a thing of the past. People go to church. The only strangers are Mexicans who fix people’s yards and stay in their lane. They do not vote, and they do not impose their ways. Most don’t even speak Spanish. Queerness is not a thing in Lubbock and if it is, it remains at the margin, mostly unseen and unheard.
What Lubbock has taught me is that Trump is about the future of this country. Voting for him is about modernity. About which kind of modernity will prevail. In Lubbock, people try their best to hold on to the past. It is a past of family, church, sacred holidays, hard work that is rewarded, and Christian values. In this modernity, there is no place for queers, gays, Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Transgender people, and other odd folks. Lubbockites enact their future. By driving large trucks and not caring about the environment, they hope to perpetuate the days when we did not need to worry about any of these things. By sprinkling their lawns with groundwater, they hope to block out the possibility that water runs out in this semi-desert. For now, lawns are green, and most people are in church on Sundays, so all is still well.
Driven by fear and denial
Ultimately, voting for Trump is driven by fear and denial. Fear of change and denial of the need that something different needs to be done to secure the future. Maybe also fear of revenge by those minorities that have been oppressed for centuries. Particularly Blacks. Mexicans and their descendants are perceived as less of a problem, even though they account for some 40 percent of Texans. Mexicans came as immigrants, so goes the tale, so they tend to keep their heads down and do not make demands. In addition, by shifting attention to such issues as abortion, most Catholic Mexicans can be convinced to support white supremacy.
Of course, many “Mexicans” did not come as immigrants to Texas. They were there before the whites arrived. Of course, whites are only there because they killed and expelled Native Americans. Of course, groundwater is running low, and tornados are getting worse. But, for now, focusing with enough fervor on church, guns, abortion, and Christian holidays has allowed white Texans to hold on to a past that was never as great as they fantasize.
Lubbock was one of the cities with so-called "sundown laws”. These applied to neighbourhoods with a predominantly white population, where non-whites, especially African Americans, were advised not to stay after sundown. Today, the city is still highly segregated. The poor part of town is the black part of town. It is there where industrial developments have been housed: storage units for cotton; train stations to transport it away; energy and other industrial installations, all of them large, loud, and polluting. Groundwater is running out. The summer heat keeps breaking new records.
It is a fantasy that requires fierce ideological commitment to be dreamed today. And it is Trump who provides it.
About the Author
Bernd Reiter
Professor of Comparative Politics
Bernd Reiter is Professor of Political Science at Texas Tech University, USA. Reiter received his education in political science, Latin American studies, sociology and anthropology at the University of Hamburg (Germany) and at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. His research focuses on the topics of democracy, ethnicity and decolonisation.
A selection of books:
Decolonizing the Social Sciences and Humanities: An Anti-Elitism Manifesto. New York: Routledge, 2022
The Routledge Handbook of Afro Latin American Studies, with John Anton Sanchez. New York: Routledge, 2022
Legal Duty and Upper Limits: How to Save our Democracy and our Planet from the Rich. New York: Anthem Press, 2020
Culture Report Progress Europe
Culture has a strategic role to play in the process of European unification. What about cultural relations within Europe? How can cultural policy contribute to a European identity? In the Culture Report Progress Europe, international authors seek answers to these questions. Since 2021, the Culture Report is published exclusively online.