Dispatch 5: A liberal went into Trump Country, you WON’T BELIEVE what happened next
Before I'd left Pinedale, Wyoming, an old rancher at the Corral Bar gave me a tip. You want to see one of the last real cow towns in the West? he asked, One of the originals? Head to Augusta.
Augusta, Montana, population 238, is home to the ‘Wildest One Day Show on Earth,’ an annual rodeo with a full weekend of festivities surrounding it. I drove straight there from Missoula, arriving in town alongside the procession from the annual parade – this year’s theme: Love, Freedom and Rock & Roll. I parked by a dusty motel and hurried out to join the crowd.
A rollback truck hauling a pickup with a cage full of angry turkeys drew huge applause. Butch Gillespie, an aging cowboy running for state senate, threw hard candy at children from the bed of a pickup; he frowned and tossed me a grape Jolly Rancher when I held out my hands. A chubby man in an American flag onesie sprayed the crowd with a super soaker from the back seat of an old convertible. The rodeo queen stood on top of a small float and waved to her adoring fans, as did the armored sheriff deputies who rode by on horses, ATVs and motorcycles. A merch table spanning a whole block sold Trump ‘24 banners next to Confederate Flags. The lady in charge called out, Here comes a hound dog! then winked at me and said, I ain’t talkin’ bout the pooch.
I pitched my tent in a grass lot by a large RV with Montana plates. Two fifty-something couples sat outside on lawn chairs drinking beer with three dogs laying at their feet. A stocky man in full cowboy attire was playing the guitar and singing The Sound of Silence:
And in the naked light, I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
Dorothy ran over to say hello, so I followed. The guitar player asked where I was from. New York, I said. He looked surprised. It’s just you? he said. Me and Dorothy here. We’ve been on the road for nearly two months. He looked at his friends. Well, I guess that’s the best kind of New Yorker. They all laughed.
The woman next to him chimed in. I’m sure you think we’re crazy, she said, crazy and angry. Dorothy was helping herself to water from a bowl sitting by the guitar player’s feet – the other dogs eyed her suspiciously. I shrugged. And I wonder what you think of me, I said. The man put down his guitar and went into the RV. I noticed a sign above the door: Welcome to Camp Quitcherbitchin, A Certified Happy Camper Area.
He returned with a beer and another lawn chair. I’m Eric, he said, and reached out to shake my hand. This is my wife Amanda, and our friends, Bud and Bianca.
I introduced myself. He pointed at Dorothy, who was now laying in the shade of the RV with the other dogs. Your dog’s already figured it out, he said, but you’re welcome here with us. He set the chair down at my feet and handed me a cold Busch Light.
Before I tell the story of my time in Augusta, a few disclosures and caveats. First, I want to emphasize that this was entirely spontaneous. Sure, I was eager to meet all types of people during my travels, but I did not expect nor actively attempt to have this type of immersive experience with people from ‘the other side.’ I didn’t plan on writing anything like this – figured I’d stick to grizzly encounters and gator farms – and I’m under no illusion that this piece is the first of its kind. Hopefully the title demonstrated my familiarity with this tired genre. I don’t think I’ve unearthed any hidden truths, solved any mysteries, or even necessarily covered any new ground. As I hope you all know by now, I am not a professional reporter – just a guy on a road trip with his dog.
But I did have a fascinating, eye-opening experience with a group of people from a different cultural universe, so I’m simply going to recount it here with minimal editorialization (until the very end) so that others can share in it and draw their own conclusions. I’m also not going to speculate on how I’d have been treated differently if I wasn’t a straight, white, cis male – again, the reader can extrapolate whatever they’d like – but the central role that my identity played during this weekend, and throughout my whole trip, for that matter, is not lost on me.
Despite our diametrically opposed worldviews, these people were very, very good to me. They fed me home cooked meals, kept a cold beer in my hand at all times, helped out with Dorothy, taught me the history of the rodeo, introduced me around town as one of them, and, most notably, engaged in good faith political debates with me for three straight days. In short, they let me crash their weekend getaway, and showed me nothing but kindness, patience, tolerance and generosity. It is incredibly difficult for me to reconcile all of this with some of the things they said, as well as their support – in some cases, fanatical support – for what I believe to be downright hateful policies, and a hateful, corrupt man.
After three weeks of struggling to write about this experience, I still don’t feel confident that I’ve accurately captured its essence. If I was reading this piece as written by someone else, I'm fairly certain there'd be times when I'd think, That is a completely irredeemable thing to say, how the fuck did he stick around after that? To that criticism, all I can say is this: I get it, man. I’ve been there. But spending an extended amount of time with someone face-to-face and witnessing their entire three-dimensional humanity is a fundamentally different experience than reading about it in an article, or worse, hearing just a soundbite. This doesn't excuse anything that was said, but hopefully the reader keeps this in mind as they read the piece and inevitably cast judgments.
Lastly, I should just clarify, the entire weekend was not spent debating – there was also dancing, sing-a-longs, toasts, roasts, stories, and all of the other things you’d expect at a 3-day long party in rural Montana.
Eric had served in the Air Force for twenty years and now worked as a civil engineer, a supervisory diesel mechanic at a military base in Montana. His wife, Amanda, was the office manager of a local auto dealership – she was British born, the two had met as teenagers while Eric was stationed in England and she worked in the kitchen at a bar he frequented. Go make me some mushrooms, were the first words he’d said to her. They’d been married for 36 years and had two kids, including a son in the Marines.
Next was Bud, a union electrical lineman and former bull rider who, in my mind, I can no longer distinguish from Bruce Willis circa the late Die Hard reboots. Bud was quiet, unless he was explaining to me the ins and outs of bull riding – showing me the ropes, literally – in which case his eyes lit up and he became animated, or when he spoke of the crime spikes in major Democrat-run cities, the lack of work ethic in the younger generation, or the general decaying of moral society (in fairness to Bud, he was typically goaded into these flare ups). Bud’s wife Bianca, an addiction counselor, dog groomer, jewelry maker, and general renaissance type, was far more vocal than her husband. Bianca, born and raised in Germany, reiterated over and over how lucky she was to live in the greatest state in the greatest country in the world. We are in God’s country, she’d say, gesturing out towards the open plains. This is heaven to me.
Beyond the core four, there were other recurring characters including Doug, a large goateed man who could have clean-and-jerked my compact SUV had he felt like it, Debbie, a cowgirl and great grandmother who drove a custom-built truck and owned a construction company, and Randy, a lumberer who nearly choked me when I bought him a drink and said Consider it a handout. (Eric, laughing, put his hand between us and said, He’s with us).
For the life of me, I cannot remember how we managed to launch straight into it, but we did, starting with COVID. These folks were virulently anti-mask and anti-vaccine mandate. The virus existed, yes, and it could be deadly, but so could the flu – and like with the flu, the vast majority of the population was not at serious risk. To them, the issue of mandates was one of freedom more than one of public health (though their emphasis on freedom was at odds with their scoffing at people who continued to wear masks). They laughed about times they’d been followed around stores by employees pleading with them to wear a mask, and they suggested that those at serious risk could wear an N95 or simply stay at home. On the enormous death toll, Eric first called the number into question – People can die in hospitals from anything these days and they’ll call it COVID – and then gave me the harsh reality, as he sees it: Unfortunately, the virus did what viruses are meant to do – culled the herd. There was also just a different set of facts between us. Cloth masks had been proven ineffective in stopping the spread, they claimed. They all knew people who’d suffered serious side effects from the vaccine (hair loss, inability to walk straight, complete loss of energy, etc.), and Eric walked me through the reading he’d done that demonstrated the vaccine was not an effective one (though he wasn’t against all vaccines, he noted). I told them that my brother, an ER doctor, hadn’t lost a single vaccinated patient to COVID, while the unvaccinated ones continued to have dramatically worse outcomes. The only response, from Eric, was, Tell your brother that he’s a hero. I asked if they knew anyone who’d died of COVID, and of course, like all of us, they did. Two friends of theirs, twin brothers, wound up in adjacent beds in the ICU, both comatose and intubated. One of them woke up and saw that his brother was gone, and was told that he’d died right next to him.
As we sat around the RV and talked, a large SUV slowly backed up in our direction. I didn’t think much of it until Eric leapt out of his seat and made a dash for the driver’s-side door. There was nobody in the car. Eric made it in just in time to hit the brakes and stop the car from running right through us, though not before it loudly scraped against the side of his pickup and left a deep gash. An elderly lady had inadvertently stepped out of the car while it was still in reverse. When she heard the commotion and realized what she’d done, she was distraught. She put her head in her hands and said, I shouldn’t be allowed to drive anymore. I watched from a distance as Eric and Amanda talked to her. They exchanged insurance information, but the conversation went on for some time after that. Eric’s hand was on her back. They were comforting her.
They rejoined the group. I can fix the car, Eric said, I just wish she wasn’t so dang upset about it.
We picked up and walked over to Western Bar on Main Street. Eric bought a round of drinks and we gathered around a high top on the patio. He asked me who my favorite politician was. I hesitated. There’s nothing you could say right now or at any point that would make me get up and leave, he said. I served so that you could have any damn opinion you want. And besides, we’d all be better off if we were having these conversations.
Bernie, I said, and he cringed. Bud called out from across the table, He ain’t bringin’ socialism here. The funny thing is, Eric said, we probably agree on what most of the problems are, noting the nation’s wealth disparity and money in politics, but we have entirely different solutions. The answer can’t be handouts. People need to earn it, or they’ll never have a reason to work. A red-faced man had appeared at the end of the table, Randy. I get up every day and I try to keep my damn business afloat, he said. Giant corporations are tearing through the forests, leaving them in ruins, and there's no lumber left for me. And guess what? You don't hear me complaining about it! I told him that I thought he had every right to complain, and that maybe somebody should stop those corporations from destroying forests and hoarding lumber. Well, he said, nobody is, and that’s just the way it goes. I suggested to Eric that some people might need our help because the deck is stacked against them and the opportunities to ‘earn it’ just aren’t there. He didn’t get any help growing up, though – his family didn’t have much money, he told me, and he worked hard his whole life to get where he is today. I told him I was sure this was true, but still, some people might not be able to do what he did, like refugees, or those born into extreme poverty. He did acknowledge the reality of inequality of opportunity, but he firmly believed that everybody in this country has a shot, and didn’t think much of the idea of white privilege. He was generally opposed to the social safety net, though we did find some common ground on the need for early childhood investment. Even if we posit that anybody can work hard and succeed, I said, speaking in his terms, can you blame the child for their parents’ ‘laziness?’ No, Eric said. I’m with you on that one.
On race – they were as open-minded as anyone, they claimed. Eric told me about a black airman that he'd become close with in the military -- We had to beat the hoodrat out of him, he said, and then he was my brother like everyone else I served with1. They did have black friends, Bianca noted, emphasizing how open they were in discussions of race – one biracial friend, she told me, said things like, Half of me wants to steal that TV, the other half wants to return it! She spoke with pride about a young Native American boy who she’d worked with through years of substance abuse recovery, seeing him through to sober adulthood – I called him Mowgli, she told me. Eric bemoaned that he’d been accused of racism for having a ‘Jocko’ style lawn jockey in front of his house. He showed me a picture of a statue of a black boy with caricaturesque features (large lips, flat nose, etc.) holding up a lantern. He admitted that at one time this figure was called a lawn n****r (bleeping my own), but even so, the ignorance of the racism accusation infuriated him. The statue was used to guide escaping slaves to their freedom in the Underground Railroad, he told me. That’s what that little statue means to me, he said, nearly getting choked up. I pointed out that the imagery itself had long been considered anti-black, but in his eyes, this was secondary to the anti-racist meaning behind it. The word ‘woke’ was thrown around quite a bit.
In terms of Trump’s alleged racism, Eric had never seen any evidence of it. I asked about the famous golden escalator speech. The fact is, Eric told me, many of the people crossing the border are drug dealers and rapists. Don’t you think it was a bit of a generalization? I asked. He sighed, and said, I probably would have phrased it differently.
The sun had started to go down. We picked up dinner from a Chinese food truck and moved into the street where there was a party going on. Apparently the music had changed over the years, though, and it just wasn’t the same. This ain’t country, Doug said, this is trailer park trap.
I asked Eric if he felt any compassion for families from violent areas of Central America who cross the border out of desperation. Of course, he said, don’t confuse my respect for the rule of law with a lack of compassion. You have to understand, without laws, we don’t have a country2. He reminded me that his wife had immigrated the legal way, and that in this day and age, it might have taken years because of all the people cutting the line. I asked if he would cross the border illegally if it was the only way to get his child out of a violent, dangerous environment. He paused, and then said, Probably, but once I was over, I’d do everything in my power to gain citizenship the legal way. I noted that this would still be breaking the law.
On the big names in politics – the Clintons, they believed, are the most corrupt family on earth (I understand the sentiment, I said, but that seems a bit hyperbolic), though the Bidens are giving them a run for their money (You’ll rarely catch me defending Biden, I said, but that’s just not true), and they’d seen no evidence of corruption in the Trump family (I had no response, simply lost consciousness).
The whole crew supported Trump, some more vocally than others. Eric claimed that he liked the guy, but didn’t worship him – next to every other lying politician on both sides of the aisle, he was the best option. Eric took Trump at his word that he went to Washington to drain the swamp, but conceded that he’d been overwhelmed when he took office and hired some bad people. When it comes down to it, I just think we were a lot better off with Trump than we are with Biden. I asked for examples. Gas prices, he said. And Russia’s aggression. I pointed out that these were both global issues that the president had limited control over, and also that the latter played a role in the former. He countered that Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine with Trump in office. Biden is weak, he said. Plus, he killed the Keystone Pipeline the day he took office, which, beyond jacking up gas prices, also cut about 10,000 jobs. Jobs, and outsourcing came up. Trump fought to keep jobs from going overseas, he said. What about the free market? I asked. Capitalism, and all that? He pondered it. There’s a lot we could have done to prepare for globalization, he said, Trump was just trying to make up for failures of past presidents.
We spent a long night drinking whiskey at Buckhorn Bar. A couple of adolescent cowboys brawled – over a woman, I gathered – and Eric broke off our talk to counsel two young Marines. We called it a night at close to one a.m.
The next morning Bianca heated up breakfast burritos and Amanda brewed a pot of coffee. I lingered by my tent until I was invited back over. It was rodeo day, but we had hours to burn, so we picked up right where we’d left off.
The schools had been corrupted by Democrat-controlled education institutions, they believed. Instead of addition and subtraction, one of them said, they’re teaching Jimmy how he can turn into Jenny. I told them that I was quite certain they still taught arithmetic in schools, and that there was a difference between teaching tolerance for gender fluidity and instructing children on how to change genders. Gender fluidity? one of them said, I’ll show you some gender fluid—he looked down at his crotch and burst into laughter (…paging Dr. Freud). More, from Eric –White kids are being taught in schools that they’re to blame for everything wrong in this country. Again, I said I was sure this wasn’t true, but I asked him if he thought our history of chattel slavery should be taught in schools at all. Yes, he said, slavery was a reprehensible part of our history, but it wasn’t the central part. I told him I disagreed, but I asked if he thought there might be lasting repercussions that were important for children to understand. Bianca interrupted. It’s in the past! she said. I’m not worried about what happened yesterday, I’m worried about today. Who cares about yesterday? I asked her about the Holocaust. Terrible, she said, but in the past.
We walked into town and picked up a few cases of beer. Throngs of rodeo fans young and old gathered on the lawn outside of the arena. The tailgating began.
A culture of handouts and unaccountability had caused a generational decline in work ethic, they believed. We’ve got new linemen coming in who refuse to pick up a shovel, Bud said. ‘That’s not part of my job,’ they’ll say. And THAT’S what’s wrong with this country. Nobody wants to just do the damn job. Debbie lamented that she couldn’t find anybody to work construction since the government had started providing better unemployment benefits. And this was right in line with the nation’s crime spike, which they believed was the result of woke, soft-on-crime Democrat politicians and DAs refusing to hold people accountable3. I suggested that the crime spike might have to do with the increasing desperation that people are living in due to COVID and the economic decline. No, the country had lost its moral compass, they believed, and we were all suffering for it. Have you seen the video games kids are playing these days? Bud said. Where do you think the gun violence is coming from?
And so we got into guns. These folks loved their guns, and were against any form of gun control. Simply put, it is Eric’s belief that any law-abiding citizen should be able to own any weapon they’d like. Predator drones? I asked. Sure, he said. If the government can have it, we can have it. That was the whole point of the Second Amendment. I pointed out that the guns being referred to when the Second Amendment was written were shooting musket balls, but he was ready for this argument. No, he said, they were the most advanced weaponry that existed at the time. It’s all relative – the point was for citizens to be able to defend themselves against a tyrannical government.
I asked if he’d prefer to live in a world without guns. It’s not a realistic scenario, he said. Forget the government for a minute. The bad guys will always find ways to get their guns, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be outgunned by the bad guys. (He had the same answer when I asked why he needed such powerful guns.) At the center of Eric’s position on guns is the heartfelt belief that he and his family and everyone around him is safer when he’s carrying a gun. He was adamant that he’d be able to end an active shooter situation very quickly4. You’re probably right, I said, but you grew up with guns, have been shooting them your entire life, and served in the military for twenty years. The issue is that every Joe Shmo off the street could be walking around with a gun. How do you think that would go? He shook his head. For one, you wouldn’t have these crazy people going after soft targets, like schools, because there would be no soft targets. I told him I didn’t agree with that, but either way, don’t you think there’d be more shootings overall if everybody was walking around with a gun? I asked. It doesn’t matter what I think, he said. Who am I to judge how someone chooses to protect their family? Or should the government get to choose? He referenced the No-Fly Lists and their notorious anti-Arab discrimination. We’re all supposed to get equal rights in this country, he said. And civil liberties. By the way, I consider Edward Snowden to be an American hero. That’s more than most Democratic politicians can say. We agreed on those last points, but I was frustrated that he couldn’t acknowledge the nation’s gun problem. We were less than a month out from Uvalde.
Look, Eric said, I believe that everybody in this country should know how to handle a firearm. Even me? I said jokingly. Yes, he said, in fact, what are you doing on Monday?
The rodeo was Sunday afternoon. I spilled enough ink over the sport in my third dispatch so I won’t spend much time on it here, but suffice to say it had much of the same hijinks, though without any vicious maimings. It was, as advertised, quite wild.
I’ll just say this – I wish I’d taken the time to learn the history of the rodeo before writing my last post about it which, in hindsight, was quite ignorant. As I learned, the rodeo events are far from arbitrary – each one is modeled off of activities that have taken place on ranches for hundreds of years; steers were wrestled to the ground for vaccinations and branding, bulls and bucking broncos were ridden in order to “break” or tame them, small children learned to ride wild horses by starting on sheep, etc.
If anybody tired of my incessant questions throughout all ten events, they sure didn’t show it.
Sunday evening we ate Mexican again – it was taco night back at the RV – and then on Monday morning we packed up camp and left town. I followed Eric and Amanda to their home at the top of a giant desert hill about an hour outside of Augusta. Eric ran me through an exercise in moving my hands towards my eyes and then back towards him, and noted that I was right-eye dominant – he needed this information to calibrate the scopes, he told me. He packed a duffel bag full of guns and ammunition, and then led me out to pasture the pasture behind the house. Dorothy, left behind with Amanda, did not seem to like this turn of events.
Each gun worked differently, and before handing me each one, Eric spent ten to fifteen minutes walking me through its basic mechanics, loading method, aiming techniques, and most importantly, safety mechanisms. He’d then demonstrate all of this himself before handing me the unloaded gun and instructing me on everything we’d been over, only this time while I was actually doing it. After I’d loaded each gun, he’d take a step back, remind me how to disengage the safety, and then say, Gun is ready to shoot.
The first gun was a Remington Model 580 Bolt Action .22 – a rifle that held only one bullet at a time, and a ‘small’ bullet at that (.22” diameter). It was the same gun he’d used to teach his two children to shoot. He demonstrated the proper standing and squatting positions to shoot from, as well as the different options for breathing techniques (you can shoot at the top, bottom, or middle of a breath, but it’s important to choose one and stick to it – this is a crucial part of keeping a steady aim). I looked through the scope, took a breath, exhaled, and pulled the trigger. Five o’clock, Eric said. Aim up and to the left. I reloaded and took another shot. You’re jerking the trigger, he said, go lighter. I reloaded, took another, then reloaded, and took another. I hit the bullseye with my fourth shot.
We moved to a Henry Big Boy Lever Action .44 Magnum, another rifle. This one took larger bullets (.44”), and could hold more of them at once (we loaded it up with five, though I believe it held more). This rifle felt a hell of a lot more powerful – like it could put a tunnel through somebody – and could be fired at a more rapid pace since I’d only need to pull a lever to drop the next bullet into the chamber (as opposed to reloading from scratch, as with the first one).
Next was a Ruger Super BlackHawk .44 Magnum. This one – a small, light revolver with big bullets, really went boom. The cylinder turned on its own with each shot to bring a new bullet into the chamber, but the hammer had to be manually pulled back before the gun could fire again. It was accurate, and famously reliable, Eric told me. This is the gun you’d have wanted if that grizzly had charged you, he said, It’ll never let you down.
Lastly we fired a 1930 Colt Model 1911 .45 ACP – a semi-automatic pistol, meaning that with each shot, the action mechanism automatically loaded the next round into the chamber, so the trigger could be pulled repeatedly to fire additional rounds without any other steps needing to be taken (as opposed to the previous guns which required another step to load the next round into the chamber, or a fully-automatic weapon in which the trigger can simply be held down to fire repeated shots). In short, this gun fired big bullets, with great accuracy, and in rapid succession.
When we finished, there was a mutual acknowledgement that this had been a profound exercise in trust. And I should mention, he said, that I’ve shot with one other New Yorker before, referring to one of the ‘recurring characters’ who originally hailed from upstate New York, and you’re the first one to hit a bullseye.
In my third dispatch, I wrote about a conversation in which I learned quite a bit about responsible gun ownership. Now, I got to see it in action – there was absolutely nothing haphazard about the way Eric handled his firearms, and the lesson he gave me in how to safely operate them was impressively thorough. I can also appreciate Eric’s love for the craftsmanship of these complex pieces of machinery, which he sometimes builds himself, as well as for the sport of shooting (there is no denying the pride I felt when I hit my first bullseye). In Eric’s case – as a veteran and a hunter – guns have served a concrete and important purpose throughout his entire life, so I can see where his drive comes from to own a large and diverse arsenal of them.
Even without that life experience, I can understand the impulse to own a gun – after my time shooting with Eric, I felt it myself. To hold a gun is to feel exponentially more powerful in a world that seems to get bleaker and more violent every day. There have, in fact, been a few prominent voices on the left calling for us to arm ourselves. So for a moment I imagined what this would feel like, and immediately the questions started to come up — Where would I keep it? Would I keep it loaded? Who else would know about it? What would it take for me to pull it out? What would it take for me to use it?
Ultimately, my intuition led me to the same conclusion that my past research has — owning a gun would put me and my loved ones at a significantly higher risk of dying by one, a risk that far outweighs the minuscule chance that it might actually save my life. Eric might say – That’s fine, you make your choice and I’ll make mine, a choice that I’d understand given his level of expertise and experience. But I wish Eric would look at the bigger picture and accept some small sacrifices of his own personal freedoms in order to make it more difficult for the wrong people to access these deadly weapons – guns are, after all, frequently used to murder people.
Eric just doesn’t see it this way, though. Regardless of your laws, he’d remind me, you wouldn’t see any less shootings, because the bad guys will always find a way5. This judgment, to me, simply doesn’t pass the sniff test – but it hardly matters, and is largely beside the point. To Eric, freedom is sacred, and no inconvenient truth will get in the way of that.
I don’t think it’s possible to draw any sweeping conclusions about Trump supporters from my time with the Augusta crew. They’re certainly not a monolith, and even with regard to the specific folks that I met, I regret to say that I failed to build a model that perfectly explains every last word that was uttered. But I do have some closing, non-comprehensive thoughts that I’d like to share. Much of this is not new, but I tried to look through the lens of my own personal experience to expound on what’s already out there (though, another reminder, this was spontaneous, and I’m very much a dilettante in the academic field of Trumpian Sociology). I communicated as much of this as I could during my weekend in Augusta, but some of it I’m only able to articulate with the benefit of hindsight.
Eric, Amanda, Bud, Bianca, Doug, Debbie, Randy, and the rest of you – if you’re reading this, I promise, I would have said it all to your faces if I could. All except for Doug’s, at least.
I believe that the members of the Augusta crew are good people at heart, and that the traditional way in which they’ve lived their lives -- with its premium on family, community, and country -- is admirable in many ways. They’ve lived in communities where they knew their neighbors, and had constant interactions with them over years and even generations. They saw firsthand how individual outcomes were affected by hard work and morality. I believe that they do genuinely care about the world around them, something they’ve proven over a lifetime of actions, but the fact is, they've spent much of their lives around a very narrow slice of it6 – rural areas tend to be older, whiter, more conservative, and slower growing than their urban and suburban counterparts (as of the last census, Montana is the 9th oldest, 8th whitest, and 2nd least urbanized state in the union). They’re generally more stubborn to change, but some changes are just beyond their control. Globalization has completely transformed the labor economy, and the internet (and now, COVID) has redefined what it means to be engaged in a ‘community,’ just to name a few.
I believe that their political belief system, which is chiefly about upholding this traditional way of life, is short on compassion for marginalized people because they largely don’t know or understand them, and are fed nonstop lies about them by cynical politicians and commentators who need an ‘other’ to blame for their changing way of life. It's a lot easier to point to immigrants as a threat to their livelihood than it is to face the reality of a changing economy that's inevitable in the system of capitalism that they happily subscribe to.
I believe that being in the dominant position of broader society while spending much of their lives in relatively homogenous communities has given them a distorted sense of the concept of freedom, as well as a marked blind spot around systemic oppression. Said another way, they’ve been part of the systematic oppression machine (also known as the U.S. of A.), without engaging in active oppression within their own communities – in their worlds, it’s seemed, everybody’s been free all along. There’s an inability to see how ‘freedom’ has been selectively used to maintain a status quo that’s never really been about freedom for all, and a false understanding of what it actually means to be oppressed – any new limitations to their own freedom is the real oppression! Because of this, they refuse to take their entitlement to unlimited personal freedom off of its sacred pedestal to measure it against other priorities, like the quality of life – and often, the life itself – of the less fortunate (or, dare I say, the freedom of others). I don’t think they enjoy seeing suffering any more than I do, but perhaps their ability to see their own complicity in it has been obscured by this insufficient interpretation of ‘freedom.’
I think that their positions might change, though, if they had the opportunity to spend more time with people from these groups (Central American immigrants, trans people, etc.). In doing this, they'd realize that these people really want the same thing as them -- a good life, free from oppression. Any threat that they feel from the empowerment of these 'others' – which, sometimes, does in fact chip away at their own long-held social advantages– might be mediated by the empathy that would develop from human interaction.
In my own experience in Augusta, any threat that was felt on either side quickly gave way to an active search for common ground and kinship -- this, regardless of material disagreement on virtually every issue. If there's one thing we all agreed on, it's that the dominance of our perversely-incentivized media and tech institutions over civic ones has driven a polarization that far outpaces our actual differences as people. There was also a profound shared frustration that the world today seems designed to diminish the kind of authentic everyday social interactions that allow people to foster and express a sense of purpose and cohesion (hence the eagerness on both sides to engage in this weekend experiment)7.
As I said in the beginning, I won’t speculate on how somebody of a different identity — an even ‘otherer other’ to my own mild otherness — would have been treated differently in Augusta, but given the huge amount of empathy and kindness that they showed towards me, I have little doubt that this crew would at least be willing to hear out just about anybody that stumbled into their rodeo kumbaya.
That's unlikely to happen, though, because a trans person or a Central American immigrant or any other person from a marginalized group would hardly feel inclined to show up in Augusta for lack of feeling safe. It's a terrible catch-22, and in the meantime, the politics of fear continues to thrive, and its policies -- which are, in a word, cruel -- continue to cause a huge amount of unnecessary suffering. It's a tragedy in every sense of the word, not the least of which the Shakespearean one in that I didn't find a single one of these people who have signed up for an inherently cruel political project to be inherently cruel themselves8.
If my weekend in Augusta – and my whole trip, really – has taught me anything, it’s that I believe it’s critical for us to rethink the way we organize our lives, communities, and politics in order to facilitate regular, extended, meaningful exposure to the ‘other.’ I’m not going to say Our very democracy depends on it, because after the past 6+ years, saying such things has become trite – but now that I’m home from my travels and bored and missing my daily adventures on the road, I think it’s fair to say that my own sanity does.
I was invited to hang with the crew at the rodeo again next year, and if the offer holds up after they read this piece, I just might take them up on it – I really did have one hell of a time, and I am a bit of a rodeo connoisseur, now, anyway.
And I told them that if they ever felt like making the trip, I’d love to take them around New York. I’d show them the non-touristy side of town, introduce them to my people, and attempt to give them a parallel experience to the one they gave me in Augusta – a look at the other side, if you will. I’m not holding my breath on it, though. The offer was largely ignored, though one person said, Eh, I like it right here in Montana.
The rest of the group laughed, and then there was an awkward pause – for another moment, like before, no one dared disturb the sound of silence.
[Cue the soft guitar]
Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again.
Quickly breaking my promise of withholding editorialization until the end because I found this comment to be equal parts offensive and illuminating. Sarcastic admission of racial violence notwithstanding, Eric was announcing, in effect, that someone’s race was a nonfactor for him so long as their behavior was up to par. In doing so, he also transposed a few centuries worth of systemic racism into a demeaning indictment of the victim. What to Eric was a demonstration of his non-racism was to me a blatant display of prejudice.
It was also a tacit admonition that only one of us signed up to put his life on the line for his 'brothers' from another race. The whole exchange reminded me of the railroad worker in Alabama who clumsily alluded to NIMBYism when he said, I might make the occasional slur, but I bet I’ve got more black friends than the average New Yorker. Explicit racism is always jarring, but let us not forget that we’ve got our own flavor of it up here in the north — Senator Joseph R. Biden was, in fact, the key architect of the devastatingly racist 1994 Crime Bill.
Speaking of the rule of law, I’m cursing myself for not asking for Eric’s opinion on the events of January 6th (though, in fairness, the hearings were not yet dominating the news). In fact, we barely spoke about the 2020 election, though he did note that there were lots of unanswered questions about voting irregularities. This was also before Roe v. Wade was officially overturned – we didn’t speak about abortion, either.
The crime spike in major cities also had the terrible consequence of driving Californians into Montana. Californians, I’d learn, were among their scariest boogeymen. They come here and try to bring their California ways, Debbie said. Try to change the way we live. They’re like the Mexicans that come into this country and refuse to learn the language. You can just go back to where you came from.
It’s worth noting that, as I write this, a story is developing out of Indiana in which a good guy with a gun may have finally killed a bad guy with a gun.
This debate also completely ignores suicides (which account for 54% of gun deaths in this country), and presupposes that we have the same definition of who the ‘bad guys’ are – not necessarily a given when you consider police killings, ‘Stand Your Ground’ shootings, armed militias, etc.
Admittedly, I struggled to account for Eric’s military deployments here, as well as Amanda and Bianca’s European childhoods, and surely lots of other periods in their lives. This is, of course, a generalization based on the limited personal histories that I gathered.
A 19th-century German political economist might go as far as to say that capitalism has an existential imperative to keep the public divided on culture war issues lest we come together and challenge the shared class interests of elites on both sides of the aisle. This common ground so feared by elites — a vast, rugged expanse shaped by the crushing weight of colossal greed—is, of course, what Bernie Sanders built a movement on (though he was viciously criticized for downplaying the presence of the unalloyed racism that also fueled Trump’s rise). Harrowing terrain aside, it was still the most solid common ground that Eric and I found all weekend.
On a similar note, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I believe it would behoove Democrats to closely examine the corruption, greed and racism within our own party, and ultimately, how this relates to its failure to boldly tackle the country’s most pressing issues. Perhaps I’ll infiltrate a zoning meeting on the Upper East Side and write a companion essay on this topic.
Some tactical advice for my new friends – maybe it’s unwise of me to share this, but I just can’t help myself: I believe that it’s imperative to your own political survival for you to look more closely at Donald Trump to see what the majority of the world sees as clear as day – that he’s completely full of shit, doesn’t give two fucks about you or your traditions, and would sell any one of you down the river in a heartbeat if it meant an extra scoop of ice cream on his chocolate cake.