Donald Trump supporters are not the bigots the left likes to demonise
From the Guardian:
Though calling him a fascist surely demeans the victims of the real thing, Trump has some extremely grim views, and the idea of him in the White House has an obviously terrifying quality. But for those who loathe him, a problem comes when the nastier elements of his rhetoric are conflated with the supposed instincts of millions of his supporters, and familiar stereotypes come into play. “Not all Donald Trump supporters are racists, but most racists are Donald Trump supporters,” says the liberal online outlet Salon. “The unusual geographic pattern of Trumpism … corresponds to the geography of white racial resentment in the United States,” offers a contributor to the political website Vox. “They vote for him because he is a racist bigot,” reckoned one eloquent tweeter I briefly corresponded with.
Caricatures of rednecks and white trash are obviously in the foreground here. Worse still, such judgments are often arrived at through polling data, guesswork, and a large measure of metropolitan prejudice: in keeping with one of the most baffling failings of political journalism across the globe, too few people think of speaking to the voters themselves.
So to Indiana, where, with my Guardian colleague John Domokos, I spent the best part of five days following the Trump campaign. No one mentioned his assuredly unpleasant ideas about excluding Muslims from the US, nor his absurd proposal to build a wall between America and Mexico, at the latter country’s expense. Indeed, when I saw Trump speak at a rally in the Indiana town of Evansville, he made no reference to what he has said about Muslims, and dealt with the fabled wall in a matter of seconds.
Instead, he talked at length about two of his pet themes. First, he banged on about the free trade deals that he says have blitzed US industry as companies have moved abroad, luxuriated in newly low labour costs, and imported their wares back into the country. Second, he fed that specific story into a general sense of national decline.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/13/donald-trump-supporters-bigots-left-demonise
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