As someone who grew up in the freewheeling 70s, my language has always been laced with profanity and I’ve never been much on the rules of “polite society.” But there is little doubt that something has changed in our society and it isn’t just the common use of bad language (which doesn’t offend me.) It’s the cruelty, the simple meanness, of the discourse that feels new. People are just acting like assholes all the time and it’s mostly coming from the nasty politics being practiced these days by the Republican party led by Donald Trump.
In the pandemic’s darkest days, a man living across the street from a Methodist church in this small town raised a flag in front of his house emblazoned with the words “Fuck Biden.”
Neighborswere so repulsed they brought it up with church leadership. A resident complained about the profanity to the zoning commission but never heard back. It wasn’t just that the slur offended their sense of propriety. Some here felt a sense of betrayal, too. The flag’s owner lived in a home that once belonged to pillars of the church community. They were the man’s late grandparents. And when they had gotten sick, neighbors recalled delivering them home-cooked meals. One church member urged the man to remove the flag.
For months, the man refused, and his brusque demeanor frightened some people off. He eventually decided to take the flag down, only to replace it with another one, which still hangs outside the house. It reads: “Joe and the Ho got to Go.”
“We’ve never seen this before,” says Joanne Fitzpatrick, a Democrat from DuBois, running through a tally in her head of anti-Biden signs that still cover her town and surrounding communities. “I’m not a prude by any stretch, but it’s offensive. We’ve just never seen this level of vulgarity after an election — and so long after the election at that.”
“In a civilized society,” she added, “we just don’t do that.”
Barrels of ink have been spilled over the past seven years examining Donald Trump’s appeal in rural places like Clearfield County, an old timber and coal regionsituated along Interstate 80 on the western edge of central Pennsylvania. Blue-collar “diner stories” about disaffected Democrats and independents who crossed over to support Republicans are so common they’ve become their own media subgenre. And the reasons for that massive defection have become familiar from repetition—the erosion of manufacturing and energy jobs, the withdrawal of private-sector labor unions, an explosion of technology and expanding cultural divisions.
What those tales often leave out is the other side of the same coin. In these towns and counties, there remain thousands of Democrats like Fitzpatrick who are faithful to their party—and feel that they are paying an increasingly steep price for that loyalty. Nearly 30,000 people in Clearfield County voted for Trump in 2020, roughly three-quarters of the ballots cast. But the other 25 percent who voted for Joe Biden—9,673 people—find themselves in an unusual position: They supported the ultimate winner and yet a relentless and toxic campaign to delegitimize his victory and overturn the election makes them feel somehow as if they’re under siege.
They are people like Kathy and Frank Foulkrod. Both are 73-year-old retired schoolteachers whose families have lived in the region for generations. They’re also Democrats, members of a minority group in a place that’s suddenly unfamiliar to them. On a tour of the town and nearby communities, they told me theyhave never felt so detached from their neighbors. “Life here has never been as coarse as it is now,” Frank says.
Daily rituals are a series of passive insults. Our drive reveals multiple signs as profane as the one across from the church, another sign calling Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris “Baby Killers,” not to mention the “Don’t Tread on Trump” placard in the window of The Cheapo Depo 2. It wasn’t far from where a handmade sign once stood with the ominous warning: “We shoot looters.” It goes beyond threats. Once-benign personal encounters between acquaintancesin bookstores and barber shops have turned into bitter, ridicule-infused standoffs over abiding by Covid-19 protocols. On a community website Frank gets on from time to time, where people once reacted to ordinary news about store openings and closings, anonymous commenters now unleash anti-government diatribes and allegations of corruption against Biden’s son, Hunter. “They’re adding timber to the fire,” Frank says.
Let’s not blame Trump entirely for this. Incivility that had been growing in the GOP coalition for some time. (Recall the grotesque behavior around the health care debates in 2009 and 2010.) But there’s little doubt that he completely unleashed the beast. And it’s gone way beyond politics. It’s now permeated our culture with everyone taking sides in a tribal battle for cultural supremacy.
It’s awful.