It's a non-urban, blue-collar and now apparently quite angry population. They're not people who have moved around a lot and things have been changing away from them, but they live in areas that feel stagnant in a lot of ways.
That's a quote from a Washington, D.C.-based demographer, speaking to the New York Times about Donald Trump supporters. This "expert" sounds like one of those early anthropologists describing his visit to a pre-industrial tribe in New Guinea, a man outside of his comfort zone trying to make sense of people he's never met nor understands (non-urban, blue collar) to other people (New York Times reporters and readers) who also have never met or understand people like that.
Resentment between urban and rural concerns has been running through the United States since its earliest days. The American Civil War was fought between the urban and industrial North and the rural and agricultural South. Slavery was the lightning rod but it wasn't the only issue that divided the country. The common thread, however, between North and South, urban and rural, liberal and conservative, that connects all Americans, then and now, is standing up for their beliefs, with force if necessary.
UNBC political science profession and Citizen columnist Tracy Summerville often uses scenes from the West Wing to help illustrate her discussions of American politics. One of the characters in the TV show has the Navy Jack flag hanging on the wall in his office. It is a combination of the familiar Stars and Stripes with the less well-known but historically significant Gadsden flag, which depicts a rattlesnake and the phrase Don't Tread On Me.
The problem with the Don't Tread On Me stance is that when everyone adopts it, there is little room for negotiation and any kind of concession is seen as weakness.
The American news media, from the Times on down, is portraying Trump supporters as something new in national politics when in fact they are simply a force that went quiet when Archie Bunker and All In The Family went off the air but never went away. In his essay in the January/February edition of The Atlantic magazine, David Frum, a Canadian and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, rightly identified this group. They are what used to be called Middle Americans and they used to be middle in every way -- geographically, politically and economically. Now, the middle class has shrunk dramatically in the last 30 years and those keystone high-paying, low-skill jobs are almost all gone, today done by robots in modern factories or shipped overseas. As Middle Americans fell further and further behind the rest of the country, they volunteered to go to Afghanistan and Iraq, came home wearing the shame of Abu Ghraib, then their tax dollars were used to bail out millionaire bankers on Wall Street.
And folks in New York and Washington have the audacity to wonder why these people are mad as hell. They have been tread upon.
"Donald Trump has created a toxic environment," Gov. John Kasich of Ohio said on the weekend in response to the growing amount of violence at Trump rallies.
That's as ridiculous as saying Trump invented money.
Trump didn't manufacture the rage of Middle America, nor is he the first to exploit it.
The Republican Party has been encouraging it actively for the past eight years. They couldn't believe an experienced senator and war hero in John McCain could lose a general election to a black punk from Chicago young enough to be his son with a foreign-sounding name. They couldn't believe it four years later when Barack Obama was re-elected.
The Republican establishment in Washington fought Obama with malice at every turn. Meanwhile, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh took to the airwaves, spewing nonsense and hate about Obama, the Clintons and anything or anyone affiliated with the Democrats. The Republican Party establishment encouraged the vile rhetoric as a way to keep their base mobilized and engaged. The rise of the Tea Party made the power brokers uneasy and now Trump has them terrified. Forces that can no longer be controlled have been unleashed.
If Trump does not win both Ohio and Florida in tonight's primaries, neither he nor any of the other Republican candidates will have enough delegates to win the nomination before the party convention in July in Cleveland. The last time a national political party and America itself was so divided was over Vietnam. The 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago turned into a war zone, both on the convention floor and outside on the streets.
By its very nature, Don't Tread On Me is a violent threat. That's what Trump is saying with a weekend tweet that reads: "Bernie Sanders is lying when he says his disruptors aren't told to go to my events. Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours!"
That's where Coulter is going when she tweets: "Fox News (and Ted) Cruz are American traitors, in league with the liberal establishment. Silent majority must face fire from a unified oligarchy."
Both Coulter and Trump insist they don't condone violence but their language says otherwise. Coulter is accusing a national news media outlet and a potential candidate for president of treason. In most countries, including America, the legal punishment for giving aid and comfort to the enemy is death.
In a country born of violence, that has embraced violence from its revolutionary days until modern times as a defining characteristic, Trump is simply the latest to wave the Don't Tread On Me flag.
With that violent tradition and growing anger on all sides of the political spectrum spreading across a land awash with handguns, it's a small miracle no one has been killed at a political rally yet this year. Based on the way things are going in this election cycle, it seems only a matter of time before the shooting starts.
