Trump supporters in Marin County, California are rare, but can be found at Country Clubs, in groups of mature males. Their camouflage consists of looking like regular members of the Marin habitat, excepting for their unusual political characteristic.
Note: this is written from Hong Kong and Macau, where internet access to Blogspot is intermittent because Blogspot (and Facebook and Google) are considered possibly dangerous. This post may lay out in an ugly way. If it does, I will fix it when I am back in the USA.
I reported last month about my experience at a Harvard College reunion of the class of 1971. To help readers with the math, we are all about my age, 67. We fit a narrow demographic. We were all pretty good at high school, nearly all of us have advanced degrees of one kind or another. We are professional people most of whom ended up financially comfortable. Nearly all of the class are going to vote for Hillary Clinton, except for a few former Sanders supporters who became never-Hillary.
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TV Comedy Drama mocking Marin County
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In that big liberal group there are a few prosperous male classmates who for reasons of taxes, or because they consider Trump the peace candidate, or because they are deeply habituated to voting Republican plan to vote for Trump. But it was a matter of humor when someone suggested to the assembled class that anyone planing to vote for Trump should raise a hand. Of course they would not. By the standards of our college class of 1971 only an admitted fool would admit to voting for Trump.
So I sought out Trump-supporting classmates.
Here is the report from someone who knows and shares habitat with Marin Trumpsters, who asked to remain anonymous. My informant lives in Oakland, but he golfs with Marin County Trump supporters, so considers himself well positioned to observe their folkways. The cultural meaning of Marin County is "wealthy, liberal, hip." It is the sort of place where cool hip things, especially if they are sort of expensive, get going first: eating local, eating vegan; recycling; electric cars; kale in salads; granola; soy latte's EST, Wings, and Consciousness Raising; passive solar houses; artisanal cheeses, craft beers, adopting kids from Africa; refusing to vaccinate children, eco vacations.
Lifestyle paradise in Marin is not cheap. The homes are awesomely expensive. Two million dollars gets a house that would cost $400,000 in Medford, Oregon.
It is a style and a set of political beliefs and they are easy and fun to mock because Marin locals are assumed to have disdain right back for the kinds of people who drink Budweiser beer and drive American built pickup trucks. It is not Trump country.
Some Hillary Clinton supporters consider Trump's war on "political correctness" to be a coded way to endorse racist and misogynist thinking. A person is assumed to be thinking and believing in certain stereotypes but is forced to filter and edit them in polite company. But it is bigger than that. It is a counter-revolution. It is an expression of backlash against the tide of social control and required but unfelt respect for others and it goes beyond race, religion, and ethnicity. Broad changes in social values are underway, reducing the range of socially acceptable selfishness. You cannot just toss bottles in the trash; you are supposed to recycle. You cannot just smoke a cigar or cigarette when you feel like it; no smoking zones extent to outdoor areas. You cannot just act selfishly and have it be validated by your own right of existence; you have to be wary of causing offense, of appearing disrespectful, of being inconsiderate. Whatever happened to "taking care of number one?"
America First is an expression of the right of America, too, to take care of number one at the national level, but it is also felt at the personal level. Trump's campaign is a expression freedom from social constraints. And this attitude has a gender component. Females generally take a more active role in the socialization of boys than do men, from parenting through elementary school. Women socialize and civilize boys. Trump is expressing the right of men to be men, to loosen ones collar, to take off ones Sunday clothes and be real and free. Note that the "pussy-gate" tape recording appears to have surprised people but not change Trump's support very much. It is consistent with the Trump message: boy's doing what he says was locker room talk, regrettable but no big deal, with Trump being scolded about it endlessly by women saying he had misbehaved. Same old story.
So it makes sense that in an environment that is unusually sensitive to proper environmental and personal behavior there is a backlash. Attached is a report from a person about my age who lives among these male Trump supporters:
[Name withheld--an anthropologist hiding in plain sight]
Commentary on Donald Trump supporters in the San Francisco Bay Area
11-2-16
Perhaps I should be embarrassed to say that most of my political conversations take place in the grillroom of my country club in Oakland, California. “Country club talk” is the apt cliché, most memorably attached to Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded dinner speech, in 2012, where he conflated the two different “47 percents.”
Nobody in my formerly all-male grillroom says anything good about Trump, but that does not lend a free hand to Trump-bashing. While I personally am convinced Trump is an ignorant pig and a cruel clown, when I coyly seek out like-minded fellow club members, I most often only get anti-Hillary comments back, and no confirming anti-Trump comments!
For my tribe (white male, over-60 crowd of golfing retirees), the antique but deep and abiding antipathy toward Bill Clinton is the strongest emotion, and it spills over to Bill’s wife (that’s how she’s seen). Nobody likes Hillary at all.
I do know one super-enthusiastic Trump supporter; a huge fan who was once my boss—a very successful retail entrepreneur, Ivy educated, law degree. He lives in tiny Ross, a precious jewel of a community in Marin County and an epicenter for radical left-wing, left-Coast, aging-hippie politics. Obviously, my friend feels quite alone there—perhaps especially in his own house, where his wife is a home-schooling, anti-immunization, crazy leftist, surrounded by like-minded moms who, now, refuse to even speak to my friend. He is an absolute pariah and his neighbors have no qualms about expressing their disgust with his support of Trump. He confesses to me that I am the only one he can share his feelings with (because he knew me as a Republican for many years; my sister worked in the first Reagan White House). “They hate me,” he sadly whines. “Why do they hate me?”
To help his community-standing over the past decades, my friend supported local Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein; I’ve seen the pictures! But his support, now, of Trump has nothing to do with his policies (how could they be?) but rather my friend’s pure hatred of “political correctness” in all its forms. He loves how Trump talks like a real person; the way a person would hold court in a bar. He is in awe of Trump’s masterful self-promotion and marketing instincts. Of course, I often harken to what Harry Truman remarked: “How come everyone who knows how to run the country decided to become a barber or a beautician?” But my friend is enthusiastic about Trump because he expresses the distain that he feels for all the political correctness that, where we live, is inescapable and just nuts.
I have another friend who also is a big Trump supporter, but this guy lives in Georgetown, D.C. Also Ivy educated (masters from Harvard) and also totally attached to Trump through their shared hatred of rampant political correctness. In both cases, support of Trump has nothing to do with politics. In both cases, it’s a cry against political correctness as they see it.
Now, in both communities (Georgetown and the S. F. Bay Area), my Trump-supporter friends are viewed as at least harmless; they basically have no vote, as they are drowning in a sea of Democrats.
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