Saw this at the county fair in my hometown. Evidently 2nd Amendment porn is a category
I just arrived back home in New Jersey from visiting my family in rural Nebraska, and unlike those journalists who parachute in and talk to the random cranks at the local diner, I actually know the section of "middle America" I'm writing about. Those same journalistic paratroopers also make the same mistake of seeing "between the coasts" as a giant, undifferentiated mass, as if Dallas, Chicago, rural Alabama, and the mountain west are all the same.
I can't speak for other places, I can only tell you what I saw and know from Nebraska. The main thing I noticed was that nothing has really changed from this time last year when I visited when it comes to support for Donald Trump. What I discovered then, as now, is that his support in the Cornhusker State is akin to the state's Platte River, famously described as "a mile wide and an inch deep." He has his hardcore supporters, of course, but I was surprised yet again by how little people there talk about him, when he's all people seem to talk about where I live. Trump seems to get most of his shallow yet dependable support due to the kind of identity politics that don't get discussed much in the press.
A lot of folks in what some call "the Heartland" think of themselves as Real Americans. They also think that voting Republican is a kind of membership renewal ritual for maintaining that status. In their minds liberals are bad people who come from outside and don't share their values. They would rather cut off their right arms than ever vote for a Democrat, it would be akin to them desecrating a crucifix. With that mindset in place, these same voters could find Trump personally repugnant, but at the end of the day he stands for People Like Us, aka Real Americans.
I talked to multiple people on this trip, some strangers and some not, who knowing I live in New Jersey would wrinkle their noses and say "How do you like living THERE?" Or I would get "I could NEVER live in a place like that!" The passive-aggression of those comments wore me out. They literally could not understand how I could have possibly decided to move out of Real America to the east coast. What I noticed more than anything on this trip was how embedded the politics of resentment have become in a place like rural Nebraska.
This paradigm of Real America is incredibly strong and explains a lot of behavior that outsiders don't get. For example, there all kinds of people who scratch their heads at devout Christians supporting a lying, cheating, adultering greedhead who brags about never turning the other cheek. The answer is simple: the true evil are the liberals, and anyone who stands for Real Americans can never be wrong because they are, after, the real America. The media screws this up when they keep talking about "populism" when this is really an issue of nationalism. The reporters really find it more comforting to think that these white people in the hinterlands are mad about their jobs and not animated by an exclusionary bigotry that sees those very reporters as evil people.
The biggest political attitude I seemed to get in rural Nebraska was one of avoidance. I get the feeling that I lot of people know that they signed a devil's bargain with Trump, but they could never allow themselves to question their choice. Therefore nothing seemed to register. The news of relief for farmers hurt by Trump's tariffs was out there, but no one seemed to be talking about it. The kidnapping of immigrant children and Trump publicly selling out the country to Putin might as well have never happened. The only people talking about Trump were those who despise him, who are making their voices louder against long odds.
However, they are extremely marginalized. I went to the county fair while I was back home, and in the area where civic groups have their tables I was taken aback by the lack of a Democratic Party stall. When I was a child both parties would have candidates to talk to people and plenty of swag to hand out. There were also few civic organizations that were not religious or politically religious in nature. The local Christian radio station was there, as were the Gideons and anti-abortion groups. The range of ideological diversity expressed in a public forum like that basically runs from solid conservative to Christian dominionism.
While in that section I ran into someone who was two grades behind me in school who now has seven children that she home schools. (Her new baby was really cute.) In rural Nebraska that's not looked on as being out of the ordinary (and I'm not judging btw), but moving to New Jersey is. My prediction for the political future is that rural Nebraskans will never ever abandon the Trump train, even if their support for him personally is pretty scant.
Apart from that shallow but wide river of support I have noticed an alarming rise in blatantly racist and fascist activity in my home state. I read about three of these stories in the Omaha paper on the same damn day, here's a sampler:
Fascist white supremacist posters put up in Hastings (my hometown)
20 foot swastika burned into the lawn of an Omaha park
A white bicyclist berated a black woman with a racist tirade in Omaha
Small town of Scribner considers adopting a "show your papers" law
Nazi propaganda found in "little free libraries" in Lincoln
The extreme fascist bigots are flexing their muscles. Nebraska liberals have been publicly countering this stuff, but conservatives and those in the middle really just don't seem to care. So while I have not witnessed deep enthusiasm for Trump, there is broad apathy about the worst of what he has brought.
Anyone who thinks these voters can somehow be "turned" by the right message is deluded. My great sadness is that winning is going to require getting the people who don't vote to vote, and that requires messages and imagination that are completely absent from the Democratic Party. In the meantime, the Real Americans will keep voting, and keep passively supporting this criminal administration through their apathy.
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