Many observers try to portray Trump supporters as uneducated, illiterate, right-winged rednecks from the Mid West or farmers and legions of journalists were traveling to remote places in the forgotten USA to produce documentaries about stupid Trump voters. The best you can get in this documentaries are some middle-class Trump voters and entrepreneurs who vote for Trump as a pro-business man and businessman who wants to reduce the taxes, don´t like his morally questionable and vulgar performance, but: It is the economy, stupid! The Trump supporters are in fact not just a bunch of angry white men or illiterate uneducated rednecks, KKK and militias, but also academics, power consciousness Republicans, Evangelicals and the Christian right, small business and big business people, especially from the old industries (steel, coal, oil, gas, defense industry), but also some of the new industries, nationalists and neocons who believe that Trump will give the USA the power spirit in the coming confrontation with the rising world power China back as Reagan did when confronting the Sovjetunion and the more.

Even Trump’s order-loving, white suburban housewife in Suburbia may be a chimera, but she still partly exists and is Biden’s propaganda of the multicultural, well-integrated, harmonious suburbs is just as pure wishful thinking:

“Trump really did not invent the figure of the white, wealthy housewife as a representative of all suburban women. It is as American as apple pie, baseball, the highways and the suburbs per se – which means that its image is soaked in the myths and fabrications of white America as it manifested itself in the boom of the post-war years. In cinema and television, the glossy paint of the 1950s has been peeling off the suburbs for decades, instead being shown as places of existential boredom, domestic violence and moral depravity, if not of sheer horror. Starting with David Lynch’s gruesome dismantling of Americana, the suburbs were recoded in pop culture: the housewives became „desperate“.

The reality of most women in the sprawling suburban settlements has as little to do with Trump’s housewife as it does with the haunted protagonists of the fictional suburbia. The focus on the white middle-class mother – both as a desirable voter and a cultural trope – hides the experience of millions of non-white, poorly paid women in the suburbs, and thus the economic reality of suburban life. 52 percent of all US Americans say they live in a suburban neighborhood; the pure white nuclear family behind the picket fence does not have the majority in these residential areas. Suburbia as a stubborn postulate of cultural hegemony does not correspond to what most suburbs look like.

However, the notion, as recently promoted by Joe Biden, that the suburbs are now fully integrated, progressive panaceas, ignores the fact that tough segregation and economic inequality are still a reality, brought about by decades of racist housing policies. Trump’s praises of the white suburb are not successfully countered with liberal fictions of a post-racist America. Likewise, while Trump’s conservative, paranoid suburban housewife is an outdated archetype, the actual political weight of reactionary white women is not fiction. We must not forget: According to polls on election day, 53 percent of white women voted for Trump in 2016.

But one thing is certain when we look at the typical American suburban woman in 2020: She is not a full-time housewife. In 2017, 69.9 percent of American women were employed. Now, in the wake of Corona and in the face of a historic labor market crisis, women, especially of color, make up the majority of employees in some of the hardest hit industries like hospitals and education. In August the unemployment rate among women was 9.1 percent (among men it is 6.9 percent). Urban and suburban voters are employed, marginally employed and increasingly unemployed; the classic housewife hardly matters.

As for the rich white suburban women, who still occupy an above-average amount of space in the cultural image reservoir: They are mostly career women. Think of Laura Dern as the neurotic tech magnate on Big Little Lies, who goes broke because of her foolish husband; or previously Annette Bening as a broker in American Beauty. Even Betty Draper from Mad Men, the great housewife of Trump’s nostalgia, tried to make money as a model. The indecently rich, mostly white stars of the reality series The Real Housewives all have jobs, in fact. In real life, the fact that the fictionalized rich white housewife joined the workforce has not changed the fact that social and property relations in the suburbs are organized according to the rules of racial capitalism. Whether traditional housewives or lean-in big capitalists: Little has changed in the idea of ​​the white, heterosexual, wealthy woman as pars pro toto. „

https://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/unbekannt-verzogen

It may be that the classic white suburban housewife from Suburbia is no longer available in this quantity, but it remains to be seen how these other new suburban women vote, especially since 52% of white women voted Trump despite potentially having a woman, Hillary Clinton as the first female US- President after a black Obama, Trump’s sex scandals and openly displayed sexism, especially since the voting behavior of minority women and men is not particularly addressed by the Democrats, but one assumes that minorities and women automatically follow the identity politics of the neoliberal democrats, choose racial and gender identity rather than voting based on class and value issues what may be a mistake. It is also interesting, when it comes to economic questions, that Hillary Clinton like Joe Biden or Kamala Harris always only emphasize the middle class, but are only seen as speakers of big business and Wall Street, while billionaire Trump and the social democratic Bernie Sanders also speak of the working class and Trump especially advocates for an economic nationalist people’s community between the upper and lower classes against China and immigration and external enemies, which can win a much broader support of voters. Therefore in his propaganda, he is really inclusive in his rhetoric and tries to unite and not to split the country.

And it is by no means the case that Trump has few voters among the minorities, even if they tend to vote more for the Democrats. There are quite a few blacks who have made it to wealth and the middle class, who rather want to distance themselves from their gangster-rapping lower classes, do not go back to the roots, also want to have vandalism by parts of the Black Live Matters movement answered with law and order, and so do the African-Americans make up only 10% of the US population. In addition, Trump is also promising tax breaks for these black classes and such rich rappers like a 50 Cent are calling for the election of Trump because they fear Biden’s millionaires tax. In addition to other order-loving and tax-saving black middle classes in Suburbia and other „Prince of Bel Air“ and „Whats up, Dad“ – middle and upper class blacks, the first black, Democratic President Obama has already been completely forgotten, as have many black working classes members , who saw job growth through Trump’s economic policies before the corona crisis that led Trump to say that he had done more for the blacks than Abraham Lincoln. These blacks also forget those parts of the Trump supporters who would like to reallocate the blacks back to the cotton fields of the South as scalves or exterminate them in a white power manner.

The Latinos are not a uniform group either. Especially the Venezuelans, Cubans and Colombians are more for Trump, because he fights against the socialists like Maduro, Castro and supports the Colombian right, gives tax cuts, has in his Republican party some Latino representatives like Marc Rubio, promotes conservative and anti-abortion and pro-religious right positions as many are Christians and conservative, while with the Mexicans it is mixed. Many Mexicans who already have legal residence status and are in the second or third generation of the United States do not care about the fate of the Mexican and Latin American refugees and immigrants, insofar as they cannot use them as cheap labor, as do white entrepreneurs who also are against migration restrictions. They are in the country, now good Americans and after me, the Flood and it doesn’t matter anymore, besides, like many successful blacks, they want to distance themselves from the supposedly criminal and unsuccessful parts of their species in order not to become vulnerable themselves. Mexican workers partly have solidarity with the Latinamerican immigrants, but partly also see them as new wage dumpers and new competition, as many precariously employed white low-wage workers. So even here it is a mixed relationship which is not automatically against Trump.

But this doesn´t want to be an analysis of all layers of Trump supporters, but to repost an article by Daniel Pipes which makes clear that there are also educated, academic, intelligent, sophisticated Trump supporters which perceive this more as a struggle against a new so-called Far Left which needs civilizational, right-winged parties and counterparts to win this sort of ideological clash of civilizations which already existed 1968 with the former old New Left when he was a conservative student at the campus. This gives us a good portrait of the transformation of the Left and of the Right. However, it is really questionable to portray the Democrats. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as transition candidates of the Far Left which might be a supporter of the social-democrat Bernie Sanders whose leftism and communism is just to demand a social welfare state as Scandinavia.

Trump’s sexism, racism, the denial of climate change and Covid, the denial of scientific facts do not challenge this kind of economically-oriented and right-winged value-oriented Trump voters, especially since they see this as a culture war, as a clash of civilizations nationally and internationally and in the LGBTIQ -Gender-BLM-Social Democratic Identity Left the main enemy for the „American Way of Life“ and smell communism and the „Extreme Left“. A struggle that they have been waging in part since Nixon’s time and that the “silent majority” now see justice granted, just like Michael Fox in a Reagonite 1980s TV series broadcast as a neoliberal yuppie youngster declared Nixon as the greatest president in US history to the horror of his liberal 68s parents. However, this perception is not just a US phenomenon, but also in Europe, if not globally.

„This Time, the Far-Left Surge Might Succeed
(As It Is Doing In Europe)

by Daniel Pipes
Washington Times
June 14, 2020

Stteet riots, eminent liberals fired, the Democratic party veering sharply Left: these trace directly back to events of fifty years ago.

„The 1960s“ (which in fact ran from 1965 to 1975) was a decade of massive change, a rebellion against the stability, growth, and (yes) smugness of the immediate post-World War II era, 1945-65. The 60s are now remembered primarily as a time of youthful rebellion, of sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll. University hippies in Volkswagen microbuses decorated with peace signs represented the vanguard; mellow students followed. Woodstock represented the heights and Altamont Free Concert the depths. British poet Philip Larkin memorialized this spirit in a famous poem with its first line, „Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three/(which was rather late for me).“

A Volkswagen microbus decorated with peace signs.

As financial theories at the heart of Marxism-Leninism collapsed, identity politics took their place. Culture replaced economics. Marcuse and Gramsci replaced Marx and Lenin; Repressive Tolerance replaced Das Kapital. Ethnicity replaced the class structure. Transgender rights replaced workers‘ rights. White privilege replaced the bourgeoisie. Racism replaced imperialism. Palestinian victims replaced the Cuban paradise. Taking the knee replaced black power fists. Immigrants replaced the Third World. Safe spaces replaced sex. Local foods replaced drugs. Pride parades replaced rock ’n roll.

The Left then had dreams, today’s has nightmares. That one had fun, this one suffers.

But this one also has a far greater reach in „the real world.“ Democratic politicians and labor leaders resisted leftist pieties a half-century back and submit to them now. The schools, media, and arts then tolerated a range of viewpoints hardly imaginable in this era of suffocating progressivism. The church of Black Lives Matter, with its outrage at even the slightest dissent, epitomizes this „Great Awokening“ era of cancel culture and de-platforming.

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was much more dangerous than he looked.

Leftists like Matthew Yglesias use the term „Great Awokening“ in all seriousness.

For all their differences, the Left of the two eras shares a fundamental similarity in its anarchism, its arrogant innocence, and its (Saul Alinsky-style) treating opponents as enemies to be destroyed. Obsessive hatred of Nixon transferred neatly over to Trump. David Horowitz‘ observation, „Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out,“ holds true in both eras.

And the Right, as ever, fails to keep step. The kids flock to Bernie Sanders who mixes promises of free stuff with rage against the 1%. Concepts like microaggressions and intersectionality meet no conservative response. #AbolishICE inspires street demonstrations, #ProtectTheBorders barely exists. #ClimateChange swamps #SecureTheGrid. #BlackLivesMatter tromps over #StopRacialPreferences. Which has more caché, #MeToo or #AbolishTheAdministrativeState? The Left says „trust women“ when Brett Kavanaugh is accused but nimbly switches to innocent-until-proven guilty when Joe Biden is in the dock.

America’s first far-left surge prepared the way for the second. Decades of hard work by dedicated cadres has paid off.

Western civilization is in play, threatened from within. Today’s deeply grounded movement could succeed in taking over; after all, it is doing just that through most of Europe.

Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2020 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.

http://www.danielpipes.org/19557/this-time-the-far-left-surge-might-succeed