Trump. Trump-Pence. Make America Great Again. One sign after another.
We were driving southwest on state Route 45 over the weekend, bikes on the back of the car, heading to the Lower Trail for an afternoon ride. I remembered making the same trip eight years ago and seeing nothing but McCain-Palin signs.
It felt, back then, like we had flown off our tiny university island and landed in the vast American heartland, which was overwhelmingly conservative. Obama didn’t stand a chance.
Except the communities we passed through were also tiny. Lovely Spruce Creek has fewer than 250 residents. Alexandria, at one end of the Lower Trail, has about 350. The borough of Williamsburg, where we stopped on Sunday for “small” soft-serve cones that were almost – almost – too gigantic to finish, has a population of 1,200.
Meanwhile, there in the east loomed Philadelphia, population 1.5 million. That’s a lot of Spruce Creeks, Alexandrias and Williamsburgs.
In 2008, McCain won more than 60 percent of the vote in both Huntingdon County, where Spruce Creek and Alexandria are, and in Blair County, where Williamsburg is. Obama, meanwhile, won 83 percent of the vote in Philadelphia. In terms of actual vote totals, that was 45,000 for McCain in the two rural counties, almost 600,000 for Obama in Philly.
Statewide, Obama beat McCain in only 18 of 67 counties. But he won the state by 10 percentage points.
All of which underscores the vast split between city folk and country folk and the greater electoral clout of urban areas. A commonly held view of Trump supporters is that they’re poor, rural whites who feel abandoned and scorned by the “elites” of Wall Street, Capitol Hill, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and yes, universities like Penn State. But that was not the impression I had driving on Route 45.
The farmhouses behind those Trump-Pence signs were quite handsome. Those who dwell within do not appear to be desperately poor, so if they’re angry it’s not immediately clear what they have to be angry about.
My kneejerk response to the Trump yard signs was: I know we should respectfully disagree with those whose politics do not accord with our own, but how can I respect anyone who supports a clown like Donald Trump?
Then I thought of Bub. Bub Dambacher’s great grandfather came to California from Germany during the Gold Rush. Bub was born in 1921. His education stopped at high school, he mostly made his living operating heavy equipment and he spent his whole life in rural California, except for a tour of duty in Europe during World War II and an 11-year prison term in San Quentin (he said he killed the guy in self-defense).
How did I, a New York Jewish liberal, become friends with this Reaganite rural Californian? I was doing my dissertation research about Gold Country. Bub, I was told, had forgotten more about the area than most people ever know. The only inaccurate part of that recommendation was that he hadn’t forgotten all that much.
During the dozens of hours I spent in Bub’s mobile home recording his conversations with his friends, I heard one disparaging comment after another, some said in jest and some in earnest, about environmentalists, feminists, gun control advocates, gays – and whoever else ran afoul of Rush Limbaugh, to whom Bub and friends devoutly listened.
I bit my tongue at first, then began challenging them, teasingly, as they accepted my strange presence among them. They thought I was a hippie. I thought they were a bunch of rednecks.
But my dismay at what I saw as their ignorance of the wider world was matched by my admiration for their local knowledge, and for the way they took care of each other.
I gave my dissertation a one-word title, followed by a long subtitle: “Bub’s: Exchange and Talk of Change Among Old-Timers in California’s Mother Lode Region.”
Bub died in 1995 but I know exactly what he would say about Trump if he were still alive: “That SOB tells it like it is.”
And I’d say, “What do you mean? He lies about everything!”
But I would know what he meant: In an age of scripted, packaged, inoffensive politicians, Donald Trump dares to defy the norms of appropriate speech. White guys like Bub, who grew up in an age when they gained a sense of belonging among their peers by showing an ability to tease, be teased and heap insults on outsiders, find this refreshing, even liberating.
My friendship with Bub taught me that there are many kinds of learning and many kinds of knowledge. Rather than say I have no respect for Trump supporters, I prefer to say I have a hard time respecting their views on the 2016 election, but it is likely, or at least possible, that I could respect them in all sorts of other ways if I got to know them.
