I teach Political Parties and World History Survey in an urban high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. My students are primarily from ethnocultural minority backgrounds. Here are the most recent demographics:
Student Information
Total Students as of Oct.1, 2015: 1039
American Indian 5.87%
Asian 1.44%
African American 36.48%
Hispanic 22.91%
Caucasian 23.77%
Pacific Islander 0.38%
Multi 9.14%
Females 45.43%
Males 54.57%
IEP (Special Education) 23.48%
Gifted and Talented 22.23%
English Language Learners 6.83%
Free/reduced lunch 61.11%
Graduation Rate (2014-15) 60.32%
Attendance Rate (2014-15) 89.90%
In our Political Parties class we watched and discussed all three presidential debates in their entirety, as well as focusing upon several other past critical presidential campaigns.
Yet overall my students’ misconceptions concerning the presidential election were (to be stated in the most charitable manner) void of factual content, willfully ignorant and emotionally driven. They were almost universally for Hillary Clinton and against Donald Trump, whom they considered a vicious racist and mean-spirited warmonger.
I point this out because Oklahoma is considered “the Reddest of the Red States,” with all 77 counties voting for Trump. Ironically, it was once “Red” in a very different ideological context, as the nation’s hotbed of agrarian socialism.
It comes as something of a surprise that the strongest state expression of socialism in the United States occurred, not in the urban citadels of the American working class, but in the remote towns and hamlets of rural Oklahoma. There, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, a remarkable movement emerged that successfully elected its candidates to a myriad of state and local offices. In many areas of the state, socialists surpassed Republicans as the Democratic Party’s most potent challengers for political office, and between 1914 and 1917 the Socialist Party of Oklahoma was without question a major political force in the Sooner State.
On the days following the election we discussed the electoral results. I prepared this brief one-page summary for them in the most objective and least connotative language I could muster:
Why Donald Trump Won and Hillary Clinton Lost
While tens of millions of persons cast their votes for Trump, each with their own reason for doing so, there are several common themes why they voted for him. Trump’s major campaign theme was Make America Great Again.
This implies that America was once great but something happened to not make it great now. For generations most Americans have been very patriotic and have thought their country the greatest and freest on Earth.
They believed that if you work hard and stay out of trouble with the law, you would be able to provide for your family and enjoy a good life, and that life would be better in the future for your kids.
Most people no longer believe that. They see their standards of living go down, jobs disappear overseas, unemployment rise, factories shut down, violence and crime widespread, stagnant wages and increasing cost of goods, the quality of their kids’ education decline.
Trump promised change. He said he would fix these serious problems. He promised a positive vision of change for the future.
Most Trump voters did not trust Clinton and believe she represented these failed policies of the past. She had been involved in numerous corruption and scandals of the past.
The elite forces behind her, the Wall Street big banks, the crony corporations who benefited from government privileges, the mainstream news media who were solidly against Trump, were also much distrusted.
These voters put aside the negative image of Trump put forth by Clinton, her supporters, and the news media and decided to put their trust in him as their president.
12:15 pm on November 12, 2016
