The angry Americans of 2016

The 2016 election has ripped the scab off many wounds we thought were well on their way to healing. Now we fear that underneath the scab a dangerous cancer had been growing.

It seems that the intellectual class and the mainstream news media never bothered to cover the huge number of Americans who were left behind and felt 'discarded.”

It's been years since then-candidate Barack Obama mentioned the many Americans 'clinging to their guns and bibles.” The Guardian reported it this way in its April 14, 2008 edition:

'Barack Obama was forced onto the defensive at the weekend over unguarded comments he made about small-town voters across the Midwest. Obama was caught in an uncharacteristic moment of loose language. Referring to working-class voters in old industrial towns decimated by job losses, the presidential hopeful said: 'They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Back then, Hillary Clinton responded by saying she was 'taken aback by the demeaning remarks,” calling them elitist and out of touch. Clinton campaigners in North Carolina handed out stickers saying: 'I'm not bitter.”

In the end Clinton succumbed to Obama and lost her party's nomination. If someone on her 2016 campaign team had paid more attention and asked themselves how large a block these 'bitter” folks were and when they might wake up and roar, the 2016 campaign could have been cognizant of this neglected group of Americans. Instead Hillary Clinton showed how much contempt she herself has for this 'silent majority” when she called them a 'Basket of Deplorables” who were supporting Donald Trump.

As if to validate this theme the New York Times recently ran a fascinating review of the book Achieving Our Country, by Professor Richard Rorty, (Harvard University Press, 1998.) titled 'Richard Rorty's 1998 Book Suggested Election 2016 Was Coming.” An excerpt of the book has been retweeted so often the book is sold out. The analysis of Prof. Rorty seems eerily predictive of 2016. It reads, '[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers - themselves desperately afraid of being downsized - are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for - someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.”

He continues: 'One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment, which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates, will find an outlet.”

We can continue down this path and pit the white, small town, working class, lower middle class and rural voters against the city, educated, and minority voters. I fear what will happen if we do that.

I've discussed these unfolding developments with some of my contacts with whom I discuss politics and history. I call them my 'focus group” which may sound too formal to some of my critics. I have reached the conclusion that because of all these tensions there may be civil disobedience at the very least. At it's worst it could be a brutal internecine war between the conflicting groups in this country who have lined up on opposite sides of most issues. Such a state of unrest may not spare any part of our wonderful country.

I may be too dramatic, but I was born and grew up in Colombia, a country wracked with internal violence for much of my childhood. Members of the Liberal party and Conservative Party massacred each other over their respective ideologies. Villagers massacred their minority party neighbors or drove them out to other villages where these people would be the majority.

In Conservative villages, even gasoline cans were repainted from red to blue - the color associated with that party. The Liberal Party used red as their color. In these hyperpartisan villages political leaders ordered the patron saints of their 'enemy” villages to be 'strangled” with ribbons of their party. So for example liberals would get a statue of the patron saint of the conservative village and tie a red (their color) ribbon or rope tightly around the neck of the saint to punish their enemies. Conservatives did the same to their enemies with blue ribbons. The war lasted for decades and was called 'La Violencia” - simply, 'The Violence.”

Those who think we in the United States are immune to disruption, chaos, and mayhem are ignoring the history of most countries and societies. We are not an exceptional nation in that sense. Actually, we are a very young nation that has been very fortunate only to have one cataclysmic internal Civil War that pitted us against each other. However, we have descended into great tension and disruption in other periods notably the Anti Vietnam War and Black Power period of the late 1960s, which I felt firsthand as a graduate student at Columbia University, in New York.

I can still smell the tear gas and feel it burning my eyes as it wafted through the open windows during my three hour Ph.D. oral exam.

' Steffen Schmidt is a professor of political science at Iowa State University. Comments: steffenschmidt2005@gmail.com