Attempts to humanize Trump supporters with sympathetic portrayals (sad story of farmer etc etc) remind me of the description of the planet Krikkit in HHGTTG. https://sites.google.com/site/h2g2theguide/Index/k/krikkit

There will be some charming, schmalzy story about a lifelong farmer in rural Nebraska and his he feels betrayed and how he felt heard by Trump etc. And in several hundred or even thousands of words there will never be an acknowledgment of the (popular) majority of the country.

This particular aggrieved minority is somehow worthy of radical humanization in American media, achieved via literal erasure of the presence of other people in this country/world in the telling of their story as some sort of national synecdoche. Hallmark channelification .

While I’m annoyed by the clumsiness of the narrative wokewashing practiced by Hollywood, with its crippling focus on representation, it does underline the dangers of telling the story of any group as though it were the only group in the country/world.

“Erasure” as meant by the woke crowd generally refers to explicit obscuring of important roles played in stories by specific people who aren’t chosen for spotlight focus. Like say the black women in Hidden Figures, but this is a slightly different beast.

This kind of hillbilly-elegy sentimentality that washes out everything that’s “not Krikkit” from a story is a different genre of bullshit. The experience of a farmer in Nebraska cannot be meaningfully interpreted if you pretend the banker or cab-driver in New York doesn’t exist

It’s fine in fiction. Friends, Seinfeld pretended New York was the whole world and the suburbs and rural America were occasionally played for laughs. There’s a whole bunch of Red America shows that return the favor (Hallmark channel is full of them, plus stuff like Hart of Dixie)

But telling nonfiction “human interest” stories this way is bad. Yes, insular people everywhere are always going to tell their stories as though they are the only stories ones (or only truly, ineffably human ones). You do not have to pander to that conceit.

I squarely blame the media for this. This isn’t even hard writing. It’s not investigative journalism. It’s barely a notch above service journalism like travel or restaurant reviews. It’s utterly lazy to default to simple human interest point-of-view-character throughline stories.

You’re not writing a sitcom or telenovela. You’re not profiling the story of a Truman show type person living in an actual simulated reality bubble. These are functional adults who are aware of the rest of the world and choose to pretend it doesn’t matter.

If Mr. Nebraska Farmer acts like Chinese people are a faceless Yellow Peril Borg, call him on it. If he acts like a California vegan hippie commune is somehow worth less than his trad Norman Rockwell painting family, challenge that.

When the prejudices go the other way — a city elite person acting contemptuous of an exurban, small town or rural type — they get called on it, shamed for it, and a parade of politicians rushes to denounce them and extoll the virtues of Real Americans™

In a way it’s a deep kind of patronization to not hold these self-proclaimed Real Americans™ equally accountable for their prejudice-soaked self-narrativizing the same way demonized urban elites are. They’re not children even if they want to be treated as such.