Every American that I met during my short sojourn in the US had to answer the question of whether they voted for Trump or not, writes Tinyiko Maluleke.
Nine days after Donald Trump was elected to become the next president of the US, I attended an academic conference in San Antonio. For a whole week I was a temporary sojourner in that Texan city.
But alas, the gods did not grant me my mischievous wish to see an anti-Trump victory protest. Just one, even a very brief one, would have been enough to quench my curiosity.
However, my other, even more fervent dream of meeting and interviewing someone who actually voted for “The Donald” was almost fulfilled, but not quite.
I could swear that I was about to break down the psychological defences of the elderly cab driver who ferried me to the airport on the day of my departure.
He was on the verge of telling me that he voted for Trump and why, for sure. Already he had volunteered some juicy nuggets of information.
Hillary Clinton could not be trusted but Trump deserved a chance, he had said to me, as a matter of fact. Gleefully, my cab driver informed me that there was no doubt whatsoever in his mind, that the state of Texas played its heroic part in ensuring a Trump victory.
Then the most unlikely incident sneaked up on us. Suddenly our sleek Chevrolet Impala LT started emitting a distressing alarm sound, right in the middle of the highway. “The goddamn car is overheating”, said the cab driver a few minutes later.
We had to take the next exit. With the misty vapour that started to rise menacingly from the edges of the bonnet evaporated my last chance of meeting someone who actually voted for Trump.
I had to wave down another cab, otherwise I might have missed my flight.
You will be pleased to know though, that, true to my glorious fixation; every American I met during my short sojourn - restaurant waiters and waitresses, air hostesses, hotel receptionists, shopkeepers and fellow academics - had to answer the question of whether they voted for Trump or not.
Not that I was clueless about the possible reasons for a Trump win.
“People perceived Trump as one of us precisely because of his vulgarities and mistakes”
I have read and understood the analytical articles that try to explain how and why Trump won. I have listened carefully to several interviews of renowned Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek on Trump, including the one conducted by Russian Television on the announcement of the election results.
One Žižek observation has fascinated me: “People perceived him (Trump) as one of us pre-cisely because of his vulgarities and mistakes”. I have heard this sentiment before, right here in sunny South Africa. This is what we said when the Zunami hit us in 2007.
So many knowledgeable people, including Malema and Vavi, described Zuma as a “man of the people” precisely because his vulgarities and his frailties made him ever so human. Many surmised that in Zuma, the poor saw themselves and in them he saw himself, so that he would always do unto them as he would want done unto him.
How wrong! All those poor folk who voted for Trump for similar reasons had better take heed.
But still; me, I had a burning desire to meet a Trump voter in person.
This despite the fact that I have closely followed the arguments of one of the most incisive African American intellectuals at this time, namely, Eddie Glaude. In a recent article, he explains why he would have rather spoilt his ballot than voted for Hillary Clinton (or Trump).
“The ANC is behaving pretty much like the DA”
What particularly irks Glaude about Hillary is her political ideology.
He is also critical how the Democratic Party has, in his opinion, come to assume that the poor, the black and the vulnerable in America would, should and will always vote for them because these wretched souls have nowhere else to go.
As a result, the Democratic Party makes no effort to respond to the deep and substantive needs of the people who vote them into power.
I understand the anger of Eddie Glaude perfectly.
If only because in this country, the ANC is behaving pretty much like the Democratic Party.
They too assume that the supposed lack of political options will always drive black voters to them.
They too are beginning to take the poor for granted.
Meanwhile, both the Democratic Party in the US and the ANC persist in providing false and limited choices - Trump or Hillary, Dlamini-Zuma or Ramaphosa, Obama or McCain. As if these individuals belong to the only class out of which our leaders must come! As if these individuals, and what they stand for, constitute the sum total of our entire political options.
Their heads swollen with power, sometimes the leaders of self-assured political parties like the ANC themselves go so far as to taunt, insult and deride the people who vote them into power. Mhayebaboo! Thixo wa se George Goch!
And yet for some reason, I still believed that voting for Trump would require a special kind of person - a person into whose mind I wanted to briefly enter. Which is why I persisted in my dogged search for the exemplary Trump voter, in the streets, in conference halls, in hotel lobbies, in the restaurants that lined the banks of the river San Antonio.
I wanted to look the Trump voter in the eye; I wished to hear it from the horse’s mouth.
“Trump won because he reignited the myth of white supremacy all the way back from the days of slavery”
All this, in spite of my knowledge of the devastating arguments presented by Nobel Prize laureate for literature, Toni Morrison, in a recent article.
She argues that Trump won because he reignited the myth of white supremacy all the way back from the days of slavery, a myth coded into the campaign slogan, “Make America great again”.
Morrison sees Trumpism as a desperate last-ditch effort to “restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity”.
It is an angry piece Morrison has penned. She charges that in this great expedition to recover historic white privilege, her white compatriots have shamelessly abandoned their humanity. She accuses them of being “willing to kill small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who invite a white boy to pray” just so America can be white again.
One morning early I was jolted out of my hotel bed by images of white nationalist leader Richard Spencer addressing a crowd in Washington DC.
He was shouting in a manner reminiscent of Nazi sloganeering, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” I saw some members of his audience respond with the reprehensible Hitler salute. That sent a chill down my spine.
There and then, I was cured of my need for meeting a Trump voter. The real highlight of my stay in San Antonio came when I sat listening to a speakers in a conference plenary session that was chaired by philosopher Cornel West - one of the most erudite social scientists in the world today.
On the “menu” of that session were the likes of Eddie Glaude, already introduced above, plus two other renowned scholars.
The discussion was supposed to be about the “hatreds of our day” focusing on the growing xenophobia directed at Latinos, African-Americans and Muslims.
With Cornel West at his most provocative self, darting in and out of the discussions with Muhammad Ali-like rope-a-dope skills, the 2016 election of Trump and the future of leftist politics in the world were thrown into the sizzling pot of discussions.
It was an electrifying session.
The Cornel West panel made up for all my wasteful and fruitless expenditure of sweat, breath and time in search of the elusive Trump voter.
In hindsight, perhaps my desire to observe and hopefully engage a human specimen of the kind who would vote for Donald Trump was misplaced in San Antonio.
Haven’t we had in Jacob Zuma our own Donald Trump in advance? I think Jacob Zuma could teach Donald Trump a thing or two. And if I were Trump, I would seek to learn as much as possible from the rise and especially the imminent fall of Zuma.
* Maluleke is a professor at the University of Pretoria and an extraordinary professor at Unisa. He writes in his personal capacity. You can follow him on Twitter: @ProfTinyiko
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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