What the Democrats Refuse to Admit

Okay, It’s been almost seven months since the election that changed the United States from the world’s leader to the world’s joke. Donald (The Punch Line) Trump has reached his 100th day in office and the Democratic Party continues beating itself up about why they managed to piss away an election they couldn’t lose. And still they are clueless or maybe just too politically correct to acknowledge the real reason Trump was able to get enough votes in the Electoral College if not among the population to become our president.

“We should have nominated Bernie. Hillary wasn’t likable enough. We didn’t have a strong enough ground game. The Russians rigged the election. We didn’t listen to the people. Comey should have told us about the investigation into Trump’s people and the Russians.” Yeah, well pigs don’t fly and what are you gonna do about it?

For all the reasons Democrats have developed about why they lost the election, there is really only one, and they refuse to acknowledge it because it is too politically incorrect for many of them to accept. The problem is that Trump’s base is dumb as a post and it always has been It is why those people have continually voted against their own self interest and have filled the halls of congress with stupid, dishonest, lying trash that votes its pocket and not its constituents. It’s why they voted Trump into office and it’s why they will stick by him no matter what horrendous thing he does. These people are old fashioned, died in the wool, back country, fundamentalist dumb and there’s nothing that will change this and no way for any logical argument to get through to them.

Yes, I am a New Yorker but for most of the last thirty years, I have maintained a second home in rural Connecticut. My home was in a small former farm community that had been discovered by successful city folk as a quiet weekend escape. Although many of the natives would deny it, this influx of city folk actually saved the community, which had lost any and all means of supporting itself when the farms failed, the iron mines disappeared and the charcoal pits burned off. There is no longer any kind of manufacturing or farming available in Northwest Connecticut. It has been replaced by city folk who need stuff done. The native residents of the area have discovered that they are very good at doing that stuff, supplying those services, at very significant prices, prices that no one but these affluent weekenders can afford or would consider paying. But just because they make their living off these invaders, doesn’t mean that they think of them as anything but pond scum; albeit occasionally with very good reason.

The local New Englanders of this area, many of them going back generations, are what we love to think of as the “Salt of the earth.” They are friendly, helpful, loving and attentive… if you are one of the tribe. The local inhabitants love their town, its way of life and its fundamentalist religiosity. They are all basically some kind of Christian, the town having been formed as an offshoot of the local protestant church and the current members still holding to the faith of their fathers. It’s that faith that is both the strength and the curse of the local population because in that faith the white Christian God is king and all others are outsiders and somehow less than acceptable.

When I first moved to this little piece of rural heaven I immediately made an effort to mix with the local people, joining them for coffee in the mornings at the local general store and enrolling in groups like the Land trust. I made it a point to use only local services and to buy all my supplies from local merchants. I was instantly tolerated… but that’s about it. I quickly learned that no matter how much I sought to integrate myself and my family into the local culture, I was an outsider, a member of the NY intellectual elite and that most feared of enemies; a liberal.

Everyone was always nice and polite but on those rare occasions when politics emerged in a conversation at the local morning coffee stop, that conversation ceased as soon as I ventured an opinion. I soon learned that there was no such thing as discussion or investigation of any topic, only reiteration of the acceptance of fundamental beliefs. Socialism was wrong. It led to communism, which was our universal enemy. There could be no possible way in which any process that smelled of socialism was acceptable. Pointing out that many of the processes by which we all lived were based in democratic socialism was futile. The entire mentality of the crowd was based on a fundamentalist framework which allows for no descent, no discussion, certainly no introspection or investigation. It was quickly and universally pointed out to me that there was no way a member of the intellectual liberal elite could ever understand the moral precepts by which the local population guided its life. Pointing out that it was perhaps unfair of one of them to be making assumptions about what was needed by the black urban community since there was not a single black resident in the town and most of them had never actually met a black man or woman was dismissed as liberal prejudice.

There are in fact, certain established fundamental positions that were carved in the granite of those hills, stances that could not be argued because they were in fact obvious when viewed through the religious, fundamentalist lens of the community. Whites were more intelligent than minorities and had a better moral structure because they always had. The bible had the answers. Intellectual stimulation was unnecessary because; the weekender inspired revival of the community now provided all the necessities of life. I know that a lot of people will not accept this but the reality is that these people had already established their truth and nothing will ever be able to supplant it. No reasoning, no evidence, no new concepts are ever allowed to seep into the closed vacuum of insularity in which these people exist. They are at war with everyone who isn’t them. Minorities, women, foreigners, intellectuals, in fact anyone who isn’t them is a threat. I actually had discussions in which members of the local community swore to me that Barak Obama was a Muslim born in Kenya and a secret member of the Muslim brotherhood. How did they come to that conclusion? “It was common knowledge.” But that “common knowledge” and hundreds of other lies like it had come from the despicable lips of Rush Limbaugh, Huge Hewitt, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, talk radio scum that were the current echo of fundamentalist preachers of a prior day.

These are terrified people; terrified of all the natural threats we face on this planet but even more terrified of“The other,” of people who aren’t them. That’s why they need their guns. That’s why they cower in their rural hamlets refusing to even listen to any idea that isn’t based on a 2,700 year old book written by totally uneducated men, translated innumerable times by, who knows who, chosen by a Roman Emperor as the basis for a religion he didn’t even believe in, yet accepted by them as the basis for their life. It’s a position that is so ludicrous, so illogical that it is beyond attack by any reasonable man but that is what they base their lives on and that is what they have made into the rock of their beliefs. No amount of credible investigation, logic or reevaluation can make a dent in it.

Rural Christian white Americans are secure in their fundamentalist belief system mainly because it is easier to believe than to question. What happens if some basic belief is shown to be false? That kind of crack in the bubble could be catastrophic to the whole safety net on which their actions depend. They don’t understand that, that safety net has crippled them, made them susceptible to all the lies that a man like Donald Trump is eager to feed them. The Trump belief system is turning America into a fascist nation led by lies that are morally corrupt.

“Immigrants are stealing American jobs. Liberals are coming for their guns. The government only helps those that are too lazy to work for a living. Gays will make American men stray from marriage. Costal liberals are destroying the country. Climate change is a myth propagated by the liberal press. Government does nothing to help them, but supports huge, lazy minority populations.” These are only a few of the false notions that feed rural white Christian American thought.

Yes, these are all false beliefs, all detrimental to the general health of the nation but arguing them with the white Christian fundamentalist population that exists throughout America is an exercise in wasted time because these people are not just vehemently opposed to logical thought, they are completely closed to any idea that has not already existed in their common cannon. They cannot, will not, listen to reason because to do so will violate their bubble, expose them to the plague of reason and leave them naked against their enemy, logical thought.

So what we are dealing with is a group of people who are so culpably ignorant as to be unapproachable, so steeped in false legend as to be dangerous, so insulated against reason that they have created their own truth and in so doing have exposed themselves to the likes of Donald Trump and the many congressmen who lie to them on a minute by minute basis and who they believe, only because they have been conditioned by their background to do so. It isn’t just that they can’t believe a new idea. It’s that they won’t. They refuse to allow anything that they don’t already accept to creep into their belief system.

These are people who elected a man without couth or manners to become the president of the United States. They elected a common thief, a con man and a misogynist to the highest office in the land. They voted for a man who told them he was going to get them jobs when he has a proven history of screwing his workers. This is a liar who stands in front of unemployed miners in West Virginia and tells them that he is going to regenerate the coal industry and get them jobs when anyone with even minimal intelligence knows that the coal industry is dead, has been for years and will soon go the way of the dirigible Why do they believe him? Because they want to, because they are too afraid of what else there is out there not to. They can’t face a world where they are not led, where they have to make decisions for themselves. They are the classic religionists, those who believe in God because they need someone to blame it all on. They are truly people who are too stupid to be allowed to make their own decisions and for the Democratic party not to see this and find a way to exploit it as the GOP has done, is the one great failure of that party and the reason why the Republicans have both houses of congress, the Presidency, the Supreme Court and thousands of local offices across the country. Until the Democrats recognize that stupidity and learn to exploit it, they will fail in any attempt to do all the supposed good that they exalt. Rural America is as dumb as the day is long and until the Democrats learn to exploit that weakness, as Trump has done, they will never run this country.