The People are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore

    I see a recurring theme here when I read the chapter titled Canary in the Coal Mine, just like the book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, with a chapter titled Canary in the Auto Plant. In both books, you see how the liberals became disillusioned with Obama and the Democrats, while the working-class Whites were fed up with everything. In Iowa, which Obama won in 2008, you now saw “Hillary’s Bitch” bumper stickers. It was the state that Hillary lost twice, first in ’08 and again in ’16; she came off as cold, power-hungry, too close to Wall Street, and out of touch with the invisible Americans who don’t wear suits. Then again, was there any way she could’ve saved the Democrat Party? Could Bernie Sanders have done a better job?

    Sexton mixes the journalist’s objectivity with his own surprise at the change in American attitudes towards liberalism. However, he doesn’t lose his impartiality; he has great respect for the working-class barflies, the cracker-barrel philosophers, the less ambitious people in small towns. However, he doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for cranky baby-boomers who bitch in the bar. It seems to him, during his beer-fueled writing binges, that the 2016 campaign was a beer hall rally. First came the angry white men, then the Archie Bunker and Fred Flintstone types, raising their tallboys and drinking to the health of a macho-patriot. With the election of a great American loudmouth, we’ve degenerated into open racism and it gets worse.

    Sexton admits that he did a lot of the research in bars. He went in there to see and explore the world of the beer-loving unemployed conservative, then uses it as a vantage point. While Shattered explored how Hillary Clinton lost, this book ponders how Trump won. There’s an undercurrent of delusion among Trump’s supporters, clearly seen in any small town that went downhill during the Obama years; why do they believe that the president can somehow reopen a shuttered factory, when it can’t compete with foreign labor? There is also a difference in the attitude towards the President’s responsibility when you look at the two camps. On one side, too many liberals are asking for money while on the other side, the conservative voters just want their jobs back.

Maybe it’s like the Bob Dylan song, Only a Pawn in The Game?