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Sympathizing: Must Loving Fishtown Equal Hating Belmont?
We have plenty of folks on Ricochet who inhabit Belmont, more or less, but identify with Fishtown. It seems the easiest way to signal this sympathy is to be a self-hating Belmontonian. But what if you don’t hate everything about Belmont? Is it possible to sympathize with Fishtown even then? I would say yes. Though I would not, at this point, expect to be believed.
I recently reviewed Dreamland, a reporter’s magnum opus on the opiate addiction epidemic. My interest in its devastation isn’t academic. After all, I, too, have known chronic pain, death-wish despair, and repeated exposure to opioids through injury and surgery. Nor am I the only one in my family to have had these problems. Yet we’ve been spared from narcotics addiction, and the buffer of Belmont customs is at least partly to thank for this. Growing up, I hadn’t thought of myself as “Belmont.” My parents’ one sacrifice to dwarf all others was buying us a precarious perch in a Belmont neighborhood so we could attend its famed Belmont schools. It meant money was always tight. We dressed in the kind of secondhand clothes that made other kids point and laugh. In Belmont, we were at the bottom of the food chain, and that, plus my family’s right-leaning distaste for Belmont smugness, left us thinking of ourselves as outsiders, crypto-Fishtowners. It took leaving Belmont to find out how Belmont we’d become.
Being Belmont isn’t such a bad thing. There’s much more to Belmont than smugly looking down on the rubes. We rely on Belmont to support much of the finest flower of Western civilization – the arts, the sciences. As Charles Murray noted, Belmont neglects to preach the morals it still practices, while Fishtown struggles to practice what it preaches. But practice is not nothing, especially for youngsters who get to grow up surrounded by the practice. In my teens, I began attending about the Belmontiest church you could imagine – folks way richer than us, socialites on the “in” when I was “out,” with everybody reluctant to preach what they practiced. But among the things they practiced was traditional worship music (it’s why I went) and, as Lutherans like to say, music is its own sermon. You can get a pretty good Christian formation in one of those churches by ignoring what’s spoken and taking to heart what’s sung. And oh, the music!
Whenever I’m around other classical-music lovers, I can pretty much guarantee that I’ll be in the political minority. Loving classical music seems very Belmont, and my family never did adopt Belmont’s progressive politics. It can grate to hear other musicians and music-lovers toss off progressive opinions like they’re sure everyone agrees. It can grate that the arts aren’t “owned” by the faction whose stated political project, after all, is preserving the best of Western tradition from whatever threatens it. It can grate, but what does not grate is listening to and making music – participating in the perpetuation of that tradition – with these progressives. We decry progressive attacks on aesthetics when Belmontonians support modern works that don’t deserve to be included among works of historic greatness – but that only happens because works of historic greatness are still being performed, largely thanks to Belmont’s support. Music, at least, is something traditional conservatives do with Belmont. Not without it.
From music, and the tacit-but-powerful pressure to stay on the straight and narrow, to all the other social resources and little customs which can fortify a family in the face of pain and despair, my family owes Belmont too much gratitude to really hate it. If proof of loving Fishtown is denouncing Belmont, I’m in trouble. Should it be?
According to some, perhaps:
If the poor have vicious habits, whose fault is it — theirs or the people who made fortunes encouraging and refining these habits with the help of international consulting firms?
Supposing the indictment against international consulting firms were true, not every Belmontonian makes money with the direct help of such a firm. But just being part of the Belmont class – or even getting along ok with the Belmont class – might seem like tacit approval of those who do. As @jon just observed,
Elitism is Belmont hating Fishtown. Populism is Fishtown hating Belmont. Either is just Americans wanting to hurt their fellow Americans, which is where our politics has been for at least a decade.
Is it still possible to be neither an elitist nor a populist? To have sympathy for those who are hurting without hating the better-off?
Published in Culture
I’m just curious, what’s your plan for fighting the SJWs?
Or because it’s very easy to treat the outgroup with contempt. The narcissism of small differences. None of which makes it right. Or makes the mistreatment born of contempt equivalent on both sides. I agree with you it isn’t.
Disturbing? Yes.
Alarming? Because I see the alarm overblown, I perceive the alarm as less. Perhaps it’s just my contrarian nature?
I find it very alarming :) Why do you think the alarm is overblown? Many people on Ivy League campuses really, seriously do not believe in free speech. These people are or at least were supposed to be our future leaders; I don’t want them anywhere near power, and the fact that they are already very near to power scares me out of my mind. They are the people who made Trump possible, and their behavior is making the idea of a meritocracy very difficult. As a general rule, I have no problem with the idea that the smartest and most hard working people should generally run things, but what do you do when many or most of the smartest, most hard working people have completely lost their minds? I guess you vote for Trump, to begin with :) I don’t know if the human race has faced anything like this before. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
You would have to show me where anyone on the Right from Belmont–anyone at all–has looked the other way when it comes to riots and violence.
There is not a single podcaster that I know of on Ricochet, not a major journalist in any major conservative publication, that has tolerated or justified riots and violence unless… of course… you’re talking about when that Congressman broke that journalist’s glasses. (There was lots of rationalizing of that.)
Maybe I’m just not aware but it seems to me that groups like Antifa have been universally condemned in Belmont.
That is absolutely true, and I completely agree with you when you say this helped cause the Trump backlash.
Of course it has. The contexts are always unique, but it’s easy to find “elites” in US history who have overplayed their hands and then faced a backlash from “regular” people.
A good example of this would be the Wilson years, which led to a giant rebuke of his party in Congress as well as a new president who was seen by some as pretty “Fishtowney” before he died unexpectedly in office.
Yes. It will be. Some good will come out of it along with some bad. As always, I hope the first outweighs the second. In the case of Harding, I think it did.
I teach critical thinking to as many students as I can, as the only part of the world I truly control is my classroom.
I remind myself that the Catholic church essentially pushed the phrase “social justice” into the world, so I try to see what makes individuals embrace certain aspects of SJ movements that can then be rationally discussed, even as I try to show how some movements are more about power than social justice.
I openly condemn fascist groups like Antifa in conversations with others and show how they are fascist groups and why their emergence should make us want to think deeper about lessons from the past. (A lot of people have a very hard time describing what a fascist even is.)
I have open and civil dialogues with people I know who don’t agree with me on politics when such dialogues are possible and not obnoxious, and I often find lots of folks on the Left who are as disturbed by mob movements as much as I am.
I vote in local elections and explain why “Resistance” marches are offensive after a free and fair election when my friends participate in such.
I try my darndest to “evangelize” conservatism in effective ways by being as intellectually consistent as possible. I don’t like “virtue signaling” anymore than anyone else, but young adults do, actually, notice when you’re hypocritical. (Of course, I fail on these fronts at time, just as I also fail to always be a good Christian.)
When called a “racist” for loving the United States–as I have been, sadly–I don’t get mad but ask, “How so?” I like to make SJWs argue with themselves because that’s much, much, much more effective than ME arguing with them, and if they are not too far gone, they can start to see why some of their own positions have not been very well thought out. This takes a lot of discipline, btw. I often feel a flash of anger with which I must wrestle… (If I lose control of ME, I have lost. The goal is to let the other person convince himself rather than give him the out of calling me “unreasonable.”)
I support intellectual diversity whenever I can. Loudly.
What’s your plan, @damocles?
You had said earlier,
Of course it is disturbing when there’s more than the occasional kook in polite society who has no problem with these threats against political opponents. Still, I’ve watched people predict that this or that antifa protest will end with rivers of blood in the streets when it not only didn’t, but was, from a less overheated perspective, quite unlikely to do so in the first place.
Maybe I’m a strange person in that overheated rhetoric tends to sway me in the opposite direction?
Now, I see our failed public schools as a much bigger threat to ideas of meritocratic, opportunity society. Belmont public schools remain good (well, relatively good), but outside of Belmont?… Murray posits that America’s coming apart is turning Belmont into a sort of hereditary aristocracy based on IQ, a “meritocracy” of sorts, but where is the merit in children who find their aspirations thwarted by a system that often doesn’t appear to give a crap about children outside of Belmont?
I say this as someone who knows quite well there are Belmontonians who do give a crap about opportunities for kids outside of Belmont, and who may themselves find their Belmont-fu is not enough to get what should be simple, minor changes made before their give-a-damn gets busted.
None of that is to say campus hostility to free speech is unproblematic. But it seems to me the derangement on campus isn’t as pervasive as people’s lust for the sensational makes it out to be. It’s become fashionable for those on the right to mock idealistic young conservative politicians with Ivy-League degrees – to mock those whose existence is evidence that the Ivy League doesn’t turn all its students into antifa zombies bent on becoming Democrat politicians and donors. I see a desire to paint this problem as even worse than it is, and that makes me cynical.
Lois Lane (View Comment):
I read your account and think you’re doing a fine job upholding Western civilization. But are these admirable pursuits really what anti-SJWs mean by “fighting the SJWs”?
I mean, you’re not Twitter-trolling people, or manufacturing and spreading “edgy” memes. So where’s the “fight”?
I concur. Only by ticking off leftists and not advocating conservatism through the culture can conservatives win. It is the only way to truly “fight”.
I don’t always pay attention to what is going on; could you give some examples of conservatives mocking any and all politicians with Ivy League degrees? Doesn’t Donald Trump have an Ivy League degree? ( honest question, I don’t know, but Wharton sounds pretty close to the Ivy Leagues to me, did he go to Wharton? I can’t remember.)
Well, I spend a fair amount of time on Ricochet, and those who on the right who oppose Trump spend a great deal of time wringing their hands and criticizing him at every turn, but seem to just shrug when it comes to riots and violence. They seem to think that Trump is more of a danger, and to be fair, he is the President, and the rioters aren’t. But I don’t see a lot of concern about the riots from anyone other than Trump supporters. I think a lot of people are blinded by their hatred of Trump.
The ones who are most vocally obnoxious in their criticism of Trump are the ones you notice. If someone weren’t that enthusiastic about Trump, but just didn’t say much about it, how would you notice?
It’s also possible to just shrug about most sensationalized stories (including sensationalized criticism of Trump).
Another possibility: if you’re less convinced by sensational stories of America’s imminent destruction, you’re less likely to look to a single politician as the last-chance champion who needs to be enthusiastically defended no matter what.
People who think there’s a lot wrong with America, but that America took a lonnnng time to get this way, will take a correspondingly long time to fix, and who think that, despite what’s wrong, there’s still stuff that’s right with America, are less likely to sensationalize the news of the moment, and less likely to rally to a champion. Among these, some just won’t say much in the Trump wars, and these you don’t notice. Others get drawn in for some reason – perhaps to play “loyal opposition” or devil’s advocate – and it’s not surprising when those playing the contrarian are, well, contrary.
The OP links to what seems a fairly standard example of this budding genre, against Sasse this time. It’s not “any and all”; however, having an Ivy-League diploma could be used as a populist cudgel against you at any time.
He does. However, Trump is an honorary non-Ivy-Leaguer. I don’t make these rules. I just observe them.
That is totally, totally true. But I do think that people should pay attention to what is happening in higher education as well because universities are important cogs in the social machine, and the elite doorways are narrow. It matters when they are closed to kids from Fishtown. It matters when they are closed to new ideas.
And yeah. I guess I’m not much of a knife “fighter.”
I recognize that sometimes it is better to let other people commit hara-kari whilst avoiding getting cut. ;)
Fair enough, but it’s one thing to play devil’s advocate, another thing to look the other way when some of the most privileged and well educated people in the country are burning things down. With masks on their faces, so no one will know who they are, and politicians and college administrators are letting it happen.
I don’t understand why you don’t find this alarming. Maybe it’s because I am older than you are, and I remember when poor people who believed that they had nothing to lose were the only ones who rioted. Now, highly educated people who have a great deal to lose are rioting, but they probably won’t lose anything, because they aren’t being held accountable.
For those of us who aren’t politicians and college administrators, what constitutes looking the other way?
For alumnae of a college where rioting occurs, withholding donations and explaining why is one form of refusing to look the other way: one that already happens, not surprisingly (“We’re the alumnae, we write out the checks. / We abhor campus violence, pot smoking, and sex.”)
But if we’re not politicians, college administrators or faculty, if we’re not alumnae giving indiscriminately to our alma mater no matter what our alma mater does, what constitutes proof of not looking the other way, proof of innocence? (There is a guilty-until-proven-innocent vibe to all this.) Rooting for Trump? Would we really want to say, you hafta root for Trump the way we do, or else you’re looking the other way?
If you’re older than me, how could you possibly remember that? Privileged students have been participating in “revolutionary” rioting since at least the French Revolution(s), haven’t they?
I went to a college that had some very real, very atrociously-handled campus violence in the 70s, and nothing near as bad since. Campus misrule is a problem – and it’s atrocious when campus administration is unwilling to play the adult but instead gives in to spoiled children throwing tantrums that appall many students on campus, too, students who are there to learn and have better things to do with their time. This is a problem. It’s not an unprecedented problem, though.
They should be held accountable. One of the worst things my own college did was not hold those chuckleheads in the 70s accountable. But willingness to vent about it on the internet in sensationalist terms is only a loose proxy for willingness to support real accountability.
I agree. I suspect it’s tempting for those on the right (on any side, really – it’s a human problem) to use disagreement over what the solution is as a proxy for disagreeing that there is a problem. The old, “If you really cared, you’d do it my way,” argument – an argument that’s understandably difficult to avoid using.
No, I think it is totally possible to recognize that Trump is the democratically elected President without rooting for him. Alan Dershowitz does this: he is quite clear that he did not and does not support Trump, and would have preferred Hillary, but he dismisses most if not all of the investigations against Trump as utter nonsense. Why can’t never Trumpers do the same thing, especially when it comes to rioting?
I agree that sounding off on the Internet is not enough, but it’s something. The silence from many in Belmont on the issue of riots is deafening, especially considering how loud they are about issues they really care about.
Both Belmont and Fishtown have their fair share of dysfunction. We should all be concerned about people in Fishtown who are in danger of falling through the cracks; we should be more concerned about the people of Belmont who have the power and means to impose their dysfunction on the rest of us.
So, are you saying that “recognizing that Trump is the democratically elected President” and “dismiss[ing] most if not all of the investigations against Trump as utter nonsense” is equivalent to not looking the other way about rioting?
Issue such as?…
I have not found the silence from Belmontonians deafening. I do think, however, that division of labor makes as much sense in politics as it does anywhere else.
To use myself as an example, there’s little point in me writing red-meat OPs noisily condemning antifas, because Ricochet already publishes plenty of those OPs. So, when I write, I write about other things, things where I’m less likely to duplicate others’ efforts and more likely to stumble on something insightful. Hence, OPs on music, the arts, and similar cultural topics, on Christian faith, math, suffering, human perception (especially from an informal Bayesian perspective), economics, what the Institute for Justice is doing… Or, I write for comic relief, especially since topics everyone feels more-or-less equally comfortable laughing about serve as a safety valve for escalating tensions on the site.
If everyone gets involved in attacking cultural bads rather than transmitting cultural goods, the cultural goods won’t survive. Treating cultural survival as a purely combative effort fails: it’s a cooperative effort. Even if, like in my local classical music scene, that means willingness to cooperate non-politically with political opponents.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with caring about the former more than the latter, especially considering how many (like you) already care about the latter more than the former. Again, division of labor.
Precious aspects of our culture will go unpreserved if we all feel obligated to abandon them for the sake of alarmism. We recognize this when it’s the left raising the alarms.
I find it interesting that several individuals have claimed that trump speaks and acts like a person from Fishtown. That trump is not an elite so to speak, he is not smug like some leftist in Berkeley. But there is plenty of evidence that trump is smug. The number of times he has spoken of women is evidence of such. Whether grabbing them by their genitals or saying they were his Vietnam, that is quite smug.
trump is also from a family which is Belmont. trump did not attend public education. His father was of the occupations which Murray describes as Belmont. He attended Wharton at Pennsylvania University for his college education. In addition to this trump does not send his children to public schools either. Currently his son Barron will be attending a private Episcopalian school in Maryland (and he is moving from Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in New York).
I could go on further about countless other smug statements (like “I alone can fix” or “I can shoot someone on 5th avenue and my supporters will not care”) but the argument that trump represents Fishtown somehow is unfounded. Far more evidence points to him being Belmontonian.
As to the point of this article though. From what I read on Murray’s summary of his book (as I do not own the book) on the AEI website I think he makes one major flaw in his analysis (as in the summary he does not give a solution to the issue) and that is that is the generalizations which occur in regards to Belmont vs Fishtown and how it relates to both living according to the founding virtues.
As pointed out by Murray the vast majority of people in Belmont are following the prescription for a successful society (discounting their political views, which are not unified to say the least). It is a large chunk of people in Fishtown that are failing to live by those civic virtues. Why is that? Is it their own choices? Is it state intervention? It is not for the people of Belmont to change. After all as Murray points out they tend to do more charitable work and the like. They are already helping people.
As to public policy (which Murray hints at in his summation) that is more a reflection of the individuals in fishtown. They after all are the ones which constitute the majority of the electorate. They voted for representatives and senators which would pass Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Minimum Wage, Obamacare, and the like. And mind you that they did this is in vast majorities when they supported Democrats. The people of Fishtown (assuming we want to use broad generalizations) voted for more state and they got more state. And the stronger the state the weaker the individual (and thus the collective of individuals). They got what they wanted, good and hard. That isn’t Belmont’s fault.
Wow, really? Ok, liberals in Belmont are very loud about global warming, among many other things. Conservatives in Belmont are very loud about their concern for the people in Fishtown, though it doesn’t always come across as concern :)
I did not read this particular book by Charles Murray, but I have read some of his other writings. I get the impression that he thinks everything in Belmont is hunky dory, and Fishtown is the source of all of America’s problems. I get the impression that even many conservatives in Belmont feel this way. There seems to be a general feeling that as long as everybody works hard, everything will be fine. That isn’t the case. If they don’t believe in the basic concepts of freedom, hard working people are infinitely more dangerous than lazy people, and well educated people are infinitely more dangerous than uneducated people.
I suspect that most people in Fishtown recognize the problems of Fishtown. They don’t know how to solve these problems, but the problems are recognized, and they are recognized as dire. I don’t get the impression that people in Belmont understand how dire their own problems are.
I was nodding along to this passage up to the point, “It is not for the people of Belmont to change.” People in Belmont already help people, true, but the immiseration in Fishtown is too great for philanthropic Belmontonians to suppose there’s nothing about how they’ve tried to help so far that needs reassessment. Also, I think this is the kind of phrase that Fishtown advocates object to as smug, and honestly, I sympathize with the Fishtown advocates here. Fishtowners in humiliating distress are already primed to believe Belmontonians just want to humiliate them further, and even truisms about it being impossible to help without the helpee’s cooperation can come across as attemts to humiliate rather than help.
(And on a side note, putting my Mod hat on, could you please knock off with the eccentric de-capitalization? It annoys a great many fellow Ricochetians, even those otherwise on your side, and it’s an extremely efficient way to give others permission to ignore the thoughtful things you say, which I’m pretty sure is not what you want. OK, Mod hat off.)
Thanks for the answer, despite the impertinence of the question. I was wondering whether you’d name news-cycle sensationalism. You didn’t. Which is, I think, reassuring :-)
And I’ll cop to have been thinking only of right-leaning Belmontonians and not Belmontonians as a whole when I wrote my response. Sorry about that!
@couldbeanyone: I don’t think anybody needs to be told that Trump is from Belmont. :) And it is clear to anyone who has seen footage of him from his younger days that his current persona is a schtick. In his younger days, Trump was actually rather soft spoken and generally calmer than he is now. It is possible, though, that the soft spoken, calm persona was the schtick, and what we are seeing now is more real: there is no way to know, and I don’t think anybody cares. The political class of the left offers Fishtown nothing, and many on the right offer nothing other than criticism: nobody cares where anybody comes from. Trump succeeded not because he duped people into thinking he was from Fishtown-he didn’t-but because he addressed the concerns of Fishtown at a time when most in the political class were writing Fishtown off as irrelevant.
If advocates and the people of fishtown are concerned with humiliation and apply it to themselves as if they were a collective and likewise with Belmont then Marx was right (how they hell do they know that Belmontonians want to humiliate them anyways?). What you describes fits the definition of class consciousness. And the class consciousness of the “working” class will compel them to eventually “break” their “chains”. The people of Fishtown have then given up on the notion of an individual, virtue, and vice. They believe in fate and that the world is somehow slated against them. A convenient line of thought to explain away their countless failures. The first step in rectifying bad behavior is acknowledging it exists (you can’t fight an enemy you do not perceive).
It would appear given your testimony that the people of Fishtown have not realized their mistakes. If they view criticism which explicitly points to improvement to them then they are too entitled and smug in their ways. That is not my fault or any other individuals but their own. To imply otherwise is unjust and pathetic.
I don’t believe me not capitalizing trump is against the rules of the CoC. Besides I see countless other individuals slanting critics of trump on Ricochet as NeverTrump (not counting other slants used during the election cycle or right after it) or suffering from mental disorders. You don’t see me typing “I can’t take you seriously because you attacked me and not my argument”. I engage, as that is the point of Ricochet is it not? Thoughtful discussion.
As to it giving “permission” for others to dismiss my arguments then if what you type is true then those individuals are not coming to Ricochet for thoughtful discussion. If they cannot engage in a conversation because they are triggered by one letter and thus use such as an excuse for dismissal then they are not engaging by the rules of logic (in good faith) but by their own emotional bias. That is not my loss, they can stay in their echo chamber.
@couldbeanyone: is there anything you like about Fishtown? :) You seem to find Fishtown very distasteful. Considering that, as you pointed out, most Americans are from Fishtown, I don’t understand how you expect to succeed politically, or why you bother, if you dislike most Americans as much as you seem to. What are you trying to accomplish by spewing this bile?
Some people do care Judithann. If a person states that another person is from a place because they talk and act like a person from that place then they are arguing they are the same (if it quacks, looks, and smells like a duck its a duck). For example.
How do you know the political left has not offered Fishtown nothing? The majority of people in fishtown asked for help from the political left and helped them get elected repeatedly. And the political left delivered. They delivered them Social Security, Minimum Wage, Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and college loans for their kids to go to school and the like. The political left has much to offer the people of Fishtown. We are witnessing the fruits of their labor even today.
As to the conservative advocates advocating for individual autonomy and virtue how is that demeaning to the people of Fishtown? They are arguing that if the people of Fishtown see the dignity of their humanity and the great potential of their humanity and actually work towards it then they will reap the benefits of it. The big difference is that the left wing approach is very much short term. It promises countless rewards in the short run (within a year in most cases) with said welfare while the right wing approach is long run. It promises that through hard work, honesty, and other virtues one will build a base on which they will build a stable and prosperous home for not only themselves but also their families and descendants.
As to trump and Fishtown. How has he addressed Fishtown in a way different from the political left. trump promised trade tariffs on imported goods. That was a position of the Democrat Party in the 1970s. He has promised healthcare insurance at government expense to cover everyone. How is that different than the Democrats? trump has promised state intervention to “aid” the people of Fishtown. He has not offered anything different from the Democrats.
Overall trump did not win because of some massive blue collar surge. He won by a margin of only 50,000 votes in a few states. He won because he appealed to certain fishtowns in a few states along the rust belt. But to as to evidence of “political elites and fishtown” here is an example from an alleged member of the GOPe on something that relates directly to Fishtown.
Are you attributing Trump’s victory to one statement made by @bryangstephens? :) I think Bryan is the greatest, but you are reading way too much into this statement.
It seems as though your default is to believe the worst about Trump’s supporters. For those concerned about morality, giving other people the benefit of the doubt and not assuming the worst is a big part of Judaism and Christianity. So, I ask again, what do you expect to accomplish from spewing this bile?
Um, yes he has. Democrats are offering open borders; Trump made clear that he isn’t an open borders guy. In other respects, his agenda might resemble what the democrat agenda used to be 40 years ago, but democrats have gone off the deep end. Trump found a way to capitalize on that.
You seem to very big on the importance of people in Fishtown taking responsibility for their failures. Don’t you think that republican politicians should do the same?
Did you not just state that I am attributed trump’s victory to one statement made by Stephens? That is is the perfect example of reading too much into something. As to the example that is not reading too far. Stephens states that trump walks and acts as if he is from fishtown. He is not the first person to state such on Ricochet.
I am taking Stephens at the face value of what he typed. That is good faith. As to complaining that my arguments are bile could you actually try to elaborate on how they are in fact bile. Just because you don’t like them does not make them untrue.
So borders are the only thing that trump offers different from the Democrats? The last I checked Bernie Sanders, a relatively popular Democrat, stated that open borders are a threat to American jobs. To state that all Democrats are in favor of open borders is inaccurate.
As to borders are you arguing that borders is all that matters? Do you have proof that a majority of fishtowners are against illegal immigration, legal immigration, or increased legal immigration? Do you have any polls to cite? Is borders the only thing trump has to offer fishtown? That is not much.
As to Democrats going off the deep end since the past 40 years there is nothing wrong then to you about the minimum wage, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Community Reinvestment Act of 1977? They didn’t go off the deep end when FDR got elected 4 terms in a row? You seem to have a short memory. If you are worried about immigration why are you not worried that they went off the deep end when they repealed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921 in 1965?