I’d like to correct what I see as a misconception. Trump supporters are not necessarily conservative (certainly not in the traditional sense).
Many are conservative by the definition I learned in high school: A conservative is someone who wishes to either maintain the status quo or return to a period of time in the past.
Alternatively a conservative is someone who wishes to keep what is good and works and change what is not good and/or not working.
That is a description of rational behavior not political ideology.
Not to mention that it is not how conservatism actually works on practice. "What is good" has always been very contextual, and what is good for one person may be not good and/or not working for most other people.
And for conservatives, that’s part of the problem: Things ‘worked’ well for the people who really mattered: white men without significant disability. Women were great as long as they did what they were told and other people so long as they stayed in the shadows, silent, obedient, and quiet.
I know a fair number of conservatives (90% of my high school graduating class plus 90% of the county I grew up in) and very few are openly racist. Most do not consider themselves to be racist and will happily point out their friends, coworkers and fellow church goers who are not white or who were not necessarily born in the USA. A much smaller number are tolerant of anyone who is not heteronormative, if the topic comes up, which they’d much prefer it did not.
But they are very much nostalgia driven and genuinely do not see just how racist and sexist it was in our younger days and do not notice that none of our classmates who later came out as gay never show up at reunions, nor do the very very few classmates ( none in my graduating class) who's surnames were Spanish. Indeed, a few years ago, a firmer school mate several years older than me posted in the alumni FB page contradicting the extremely sanitized version of life in our town in the 60’s and 70’s. His post was extremely thoughtful, respectful and well written—and immediately decried by other members and taken down by admin. Only happy happy happy is allowed.
I know that I tend to over generalize my lived experience but I grew up in a small town surrounded by farmland and in that corner of the county, a large percentage of folks who were related to me one way or another. Most of that is gone, replaced by lots and lots of warehouses and fulfillment centers which have brought in a great number of minorities. My classmates who decry the changes mostly focus on the ugli-fication of our very plain Jane town don’t mention the threat of all the not white people living in the neighborhood. But it’s there, unspoken.
Change is hard for most people and among the hardest changes are those that come to people who struggled hard for what they have and fur all of their family before them who struggled before and who are now secure in their lot and are genuinely threatened by the change in order, or the change in the rules of the game as you will.
I don’t think it’s much different anywhere else. People living near the edge of poverty who only have what they do because of a lot of hard work on their part do not want to upset the world order that gave them a little piece of security. They don’t actually recognize that there were others living in the shadows, working even harder with fewer chances, whose only hope for survival was working hard and keeping quiet, at least in public.
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