{"id":5516,"date":"2017-07-15T11:37:19","date_gmt":"2017-07-15T18:37:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=5516"},"modified":"2017-07-15T11:43:02","modified_gmt":"2017-07-15T18:43:02","slug":"trump-bet-americans-like-un-presidential-antics-may-right-neal-gabler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2017\/07\/15\/trump-bet-americans-like-un-presidential-antics-may-right-neal-gabler\/","title":{"rendered":"“Trump Bet Americans Would Like His Un-Presidential Antics. He May Be Right.” by Neal Gabler"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>President Donald Trump waves as he walks to Marine One while departing from the White House on July 12, 2017. President Trump is traveling to France, where he will meet with the president and will attend Bastille Day events on Friday. (Photo by Mark Wilson\/Getty Images)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

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Is America one big con game?<\/h3>\n

July 13, 2017 (billmoyers.com)<\/p>\n

Political pundits have been intoxicated lately by explanations as to why Democrats always seem to be behind the eight ball \u2014 never mind that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote; that liberal positions on issues like\u00a0health care<\/a>,\u00a0climate change<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0income inequality<\/a>\u00a0are held by a majority of Americans; or that\u00a0Republicans are more unpopular<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The idea, promoted in\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0with three different op-eds in the past month alone, is that Democrats don\u2019t plug into traditional American values the way Republicans do, and it\u2019s those values that swayed the last presidential election, especially in the Rust Belt, and in the recent special congressional elections, Trump\u2019s general unpopularity notwithstanding.<\/p>\n

Daniel K. Williams<\/a>, a religious historian, attributed the Democrats\u2019 recent loss in Georgia\u2019s 6th<\/sup>\u00a0Congressional District to the fact that the party had become too secular to appeal to religious minorities and baby boomers, too removed from America\u2019s religious traditions.<\/p>\n

There has never been a president whose values are so antithetical to traditional American ones \u2014 never one less self-reliant, loyal, tough, disciplined, religious or virtuous.<\/div>\n

Democratic pollster Mark Penn and former Manhattan borough president Andrew Stein\u00a0penned an op-ed<\/a>\u00a0in which they called for the Democrats to reject the \u201csiren calls of the left\u201d and move to the center to attract working-class voters \u201cwho feel abandoned by the party\u2019s shift away from moderate positions on trade and immigration, from backing police and tough anti-crime measures, from trying to restore manufacturing jobs.\u201d In short, Republicanism lite.<\/p>\n

And then there is the analysis of\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0columnist David Brooks, inaptly titled \u201cWhat\u2019s the Matter With Republicans?<\/a>\u201d because it really was aimed at what\u2019s wrong with Democrats, since in his view nothing really seems to be wrong with the GOP. Republicans subscribe to traditional American values forged on the frontier, things like self-reliance and self-sufficiency, independence, loyalty, toughness and virtue; Democrats seemingly do not.<\/p>\n

None of these criticisms is new. In fact, they are pretty hoary. But they actually seem a lot less persuasive now that Donald Trump is in the White House. There has never been a president whose values are so antithetical to traditional American ones \u2014 never one less self-reliant, loyal, tough, disciplined, religious or virtuous \u2014 so the argument doesn\u2019t hold much water to me.<\/p>\n

I want to suggest something else entirely that helps explain the love for Republicans and Trump in the supposedly old-fashioned precincts of the South, Midwest and West. I want to suggest that beneath or beside these so-called \u201ctraditional\u201d frontier values \u2014 which we ourselves promote so self-aggrandizingly \u2014 there\u2019s another set of values, no less American, and probably much more so. According to some historians, they, too, were forged on the frontier as a form of survival.<\/p>\n