Driving around south shore Staten Island, you can sometimes catch these small caravans or parked trailers surrounded by half a dozen or so white men, the whole setting filled with Trump 2020 memorabilia, flags sticking out of their vehicles or banners hung along chain link fence, such that they overlook the freeway sporting the reactionary slogans that define his tenure in office. One in particular that would make many groan or boil with anger is a bastardization of the LGBT acronym, the fabric instead reading that it stands for “Liberty, Guns, Beer and Trump,” just for you to get an idea of how childish and offensive the campaigners try to be with their propaganda.
My parents, fairly moderate liberals, hold a discreet disdain for these people, sometimes even going out of their way to avoid roads these men are camped out at, and at home deriding these people as man babies or mentally deficient. And I’m not going to deny their baby brain stance on politics or anything, these guys are clearly immature and insecure about the world and changing environment around them. Nor am I going to act like these people are some sort of missing working class group that must be pandered to, if you are in some mid life crisis motorcycle club or spend your weekends planted on the side of a highway, especially in Staten Island, you’re almost certainly a retired city worker with a sustainable pension, or own some sort of restaurant or rental properties, hardly an example of people on the economic fringes of our society.
Despite this, I don’t really view the caravaners with anger or disdain, rather I see it and groan, or simply pity the men running the operation. I pity them because they are so childish, as to unknowingly misplace their anxieties and alienations about the world in this vile culture war. Again, these people really aren’t oppressed in any material sense, they still embody the bourgeois backbone of America, the last remaining sects of a middle class that hasn’t been wiped out by neoliberal austerity. However, I think this current situation entirely explains their alienation and subsequent insistence to sit out in the sun for hours on end championing the current president. Simply put, I think on some deep, unconscious level, people like the Trump campaigners realize that the good times, the times of middle class American prosperity, are over, and instead of healthily coming to terms with that, they’re much more likely to respond in fear and horror, recoiling back into reactionary views on social issues, among other things. Why this is, you could list dozens of reasons. Certain media consumption, their upbringing and existence in a world that fetishizes material wealth, or simply their class positions. What I can say is that it makes sense this anxiety sprung up in a suburb like Staten Island. Despite it’s current wealth, despair and alienation bubble under the surface of it’s white fences, easily exemplified by the opioid epidemic, which quietly ravaged parts of the island, even the more wealthy and white south shore areas.
This reason exactly is why, despite my vehement disagreement and contempt for their reactionary views on modern society, I can’t help but feel bad for them. Even if Trump has a landslide victory in 2020, even if the culture swings in their favor, even if the military rounds up all registered democrats or protesters or whatever they think they want, they will never be happy. All this right wing posturing is merely a bandaid upon the fact that standards of living will continue to deteriorate around them, if not for the retired men themselves than for their children, or increasingly for their neighbors. And to be so blinded, blinded to what actually makes your life slightly more miserable as to decide to do something like spend a Saturday sporting KAG2020 merch instead of doing something politically meaningful, something that might actually better their community and by extension themselves, really just makes me depressed. Makes me sorta pity them, as much as I can before realizing they’ll never miss a rent payment or be forced off food stamps.
