Part 1:  Community disintegration and voter fragmentation
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By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

You may be familiar with the parable of the blind people describing the elephant. One asserts that an elephant is like a wall. Another, that it’s like a tree trunk. A third counters that it’s like a snake. “Not a snake, but a stake,” insists the fourth. The fifth can’t imagine why the others don’t know that an elephant is like a warm flapping blanket. And so on. Each is certain because, for a moment at least, each directly experienced the elephant.

As I listen to commentators assess the reasons for Donald Trump’s election and why they did not anticipate it, I feel like I’m hearing a similar conversation.

Another sight-related allegory is that in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. When I have tried to understand past historical moments that I was living in, I’ve often felt as if I were looking with only one eye, if that. But I’m old, I’ve lived through many such moments, and I’ve continually paid attention, as flawed as that attention may be.

So I may have been the only person in Sally O’Brien’s on election night who was not surprised by Donald Trump’s victory. For months, friends and acquaintances were uninterested in considering why I thought that Donald Trump had at least an even chance of prevailing. Now I’ll tell you why I think it went the way that it did.

It’s a long story with more interacting parts than those of the proverbial elephant. It begins in the mid-1960s when industrial centers and many rural areas were solidly Democratic, and the Democrats were the working people’s party.

The policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, combined with America’s having the only intact industrial base following World War II, had brought economic security to much of the working class. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was extending it to the poor and to racial minorities.

Places like Somerville were rich in the two things that connect us to the broader world—community and work. Across communities, people got their national news from relatively few sources which, though they took for granted status quo values and assumptions, were committed to being evidence-based and self-correcting.

But economic forces, technological change, and bipartisan fiscal and trade policies would, over the next five decades, erode community and living-wage employment. And communications technology, appropriated by political and business opportunists, would proliferate “news” sources while disconnecting them from journalistic standards of fact-based reporting and verifiability.

In community we are seen for who we are rather than the roles that we play. We develop empathy for others who may be different from us in significant ways, but whom we know. Communities have the strength and flexibility to accept people who may have odd ideas or behaviors because communities know them as whole people and make use of what they have to contribute rather than focusing on what makes them different.

If you’ve never lived within community, you may not understand—or believe—what I’m describing. But I will ask for your indulgence with what may seem like a pointless digression because I think that it’s essential to understanding the moment that we are in. And it rarely figures in political commentary.

I can tell you that in community, we get listened to, and we listen to ourselves, enabling us to hold on to the reality of our own experience. And in or out of community, our own experience is all we have to build a self, form an identity, and evaluate reality.

Throughout our lives we are often told that what we experience is not real or not nice. Holding on to those experiences can cost us personal acceptance, affection, employment, and advancement. So to a greater or lesser extent, we “repress” some portion of our experience, which is a fancy way of saying that we habitually direct our attention away from it.

But the more of our own experience we lose, the more of our selves we lose, and the more we must look beyond ourselves to define reality and choose direction. And the more vulnerable we become to political, commercial, and personal manipulation.

Community helps protect us from that. But converging economic and social forces gradually disintegrated all the associations that wove the fabric of community, such as extended families, neighborhoods, churches, unions, veterans’ posts, ethnic associations, fraternal orders, sports leagues, benevolent associations, local political organizations, civic groups, and so on.

Flight from the cities began unwinding the fabric of urban neighborhoods without creating community in suburbia. Well-paying jobs for high school graduates gradually disappeared, while corporate owners appropriated an ever-larger share of productivity gains. To make ends meet, women increasingly entered the workforce, whether they wanted to or not. Commute times lengthened and adults used their scant spare time to soothe increased stress with television’s balm rather than to sustain associational life.

Without the mutual care and spontaneous problem solving provided by community, the need and cost of government services increased. Schools took on greater responsibility for raising the young, and the police, for providing security and maintaining order. Physical and mental maladies proliferated, along with “programs” to treat them.

Without ward-level activists, political parties replaced retail organizing with wholesale advertising, which cost much more, while making the parties more beholden to large donors with their own agendas.

Without community’s capacity to preserve the integrity of personal experience, individuals became more vulnerable to manipulation. From partisan ads, political opportunists, and media demagogues these individuals were told whom to blame for their suffering. They were fed explanations that either abstracted a misleading fact from the larger truth—as in the parable of the elephant—or were without any basis in fact.

The human need to belong to something greater than oneself remained. So illusory “communities” emerged. Rather than being based on knowing each other as whole people, they were based on perceptions of shared grievance and whom to blame and hate. And shared “identities” crystallized around these perceptions.

The Democratic Party has gotten the most attention for relying on identity politics. But it was the Trump campaign that successfully exploited identity while revealing that the motive force in the Republican Part for fifty years has been identity, rather than ideology. That is the subject of the next column in this series.