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(CNN)Since the presidential election, pundits have struggled to explain Donald Trump’s upset win. Liberal columnists are united in shock that so many people voted for a man who inflamed racial, ethnic and religious tensions, insulted and mistreated women, and was deemed temperamentally unfit to be president, even by many of his supporters.
Clinton was clearly the more competent candidate, but when her campaign ridiculed Trump, it merely proved to many Americans who also felt disrespected by the establishment that he was an outsider who understood their feelings of exclusion.
She was simply unable to present herself as a forceful defender of everyone who has been left behind by the march of globalization, professionalization and the emergence of a new just-in-time, winner-take-all economy.
For the past seven months, I have been commuting back and forth to New Orleans for family reasons, and Wednesday morning as I walked into the hotel lobby I wondered if I would be greeted by boisterous celebrations of Trump’s victory. Instead, the first words I heard were from a white waitress, who later confirmed that she had never gone to college, with whom I had idly chatted over the past few days.
“Bernie would have beaten Trump in all those swing states, just like he beat Hillary in many of them,” she announced. Later, a desk clerk mentioned that her uncle had voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries but for Trump in the final election.
Perhaps Sanders would have driven more middle-class voters into Trump’s arms than any working-class ones he pulled away from Trump. But as these comments suggest, Democratic legislators need to devise ways to address the legitimate grievances of white working-class Americans without abandoning their defense of the minorities, women, and gay and lesbian Americans who are likely to face intensified discrimination under this administration.
As for Republican legislators, it is time for any of them sane enough to believe the scientific evidence of climate change to become brave enough to help protect their working-class constituencies from its effects.
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