Today's installment of our continuing series, People With Whom I Empathize But Do Not Understand, comes to us from the small town of Mexico, in Maine, courtesy of The Portland Press-Herald.

In conversations with voters here last week, most said they were willing to overlook Trump's unpolished way of speaking, his frequent caustic comments about women and minorities, and even his lack of specific ideas. They didn't care about Clinton's emails or where Trump likes to grab women. They cared about their jobs. The economy. Their safety in the world. They know Trump alone can't save the mill from closure, if that is its fate, just as it has been the fate of so many of the state's paper mills in recent years. Bucksport. Millinocket. Madison. Jay. But voters were willing to give the New York businessman a chance. So were all those other mill towns. In some ways, Trump's lack of specifics helped. Whatever he does, it's sure to be different.

Here's where I get lost. There are thousands of Americans who feel the way that these people do, but few of them are willing to sign on to a philosophy of desperation by which any change is bound to be an improvement. Many of those people are black and/or Hispanic, because they know from collective memory that change for change's sake is an uncontrollable process, or at least that it's beyond their control.

Leo Grassette gave 41 years to the Rumford mill. He's 80 now and still works part time at the Mexico Trading Post. He doesn't have a career to worry about. If the mill closes and takes with it all the jobs, it won't affect him. His pension is safe. But Grassette and his wife of 57 years have children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. In the 15 presidential elections held since he began voting, Grassette had never voted for a Republican. That changed last week. Like many, he felt Clinton was dishonest but it was more than that. She talked more about why Trump was bad than about why she was good. "Democrats used to be for the working class," Grassette said. "I don't feel that anymore."

There is one party that wants to privatize Leo's Social Security and one that does not. There is one party that wants to hand him a worthless voucher and call it Medicare and one that does not. There is one party that at least tepidly supports organized labor through which Leo got his pension, and there is one party that does not. There is one party that wants to keep Leo's pension out of the hands of hedge fund cowboys and Wall Street thieves, and one that wants to hijack Leo's pension into the casino economy.

How, I wonder, are the Democrats no longer "for the working class," and why doesn't Leo feel that anymore?

Welfare was a big source of frustration among Mexico voters, and it's a topic that Republicans have done better seizing upon. Many said the town, along with neighboring Rumford, has been too generous with benefits. For blue-collar workers, one of the hardest things to reconcile is the idea that someone may be getting something he or she didn't work for. Grassette, the longtime Democrat, said it this way: "I'm not against helping people, but you've got to help yourself."

There no longer is a federal welfare program, at least not the way there once was. There hasn't been since 1996. Ever since it persisted in electing and re-electing human bowling jacket Paul LePage as its governor, Maine has slashed its own safety net institutions. Fewer than 6,000 people now receive payments from the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. The state's food stamp program has been cut severely; 6,500 people were dropped from the program last winter. LePage refused to accept the FREE MONEY! available from the Affordable Care Act because Obama, that's why. Further, LePage spent $700,000 on a welfare-fraud force that produced a few dozen prosecutions.

The facts seem to indicate that no poor person is luxuriating on public assistance in the state of Maine. Who are these people about whom Leo is talking? My guess is that it's the people he's been told about on his favorite radio and cable television shows. Those people do not exist, but Leo feels that they do, and that's all that matters.

Here's what I think. In January of 1981, I stood on the lawn of the Capitol and I heard the newly inaugurated President Ronald Reagan tell the country that government was not a solution to the problem, that government was the problem. This basic political heresy, contrary to the first three words of the Constitution that Reagan had just sworn to preserve and protect, is the root philosophy of every bit of conservative politics that came afterwards.

The people of the country were told that "government" was something alien to them. That sold very well. It was an intellectual frame within which a political strategy of crippling "government" in order to prove that "government" could do nothing confirmed in the minds of the people at which it was directed both ends of that equation. You make "government," that alien beast, incapable of working in order to prove that it cannot work.

Sarah Rice Getty Images

What a lot of us missed, though, was that the real goal was not just to convert voters to conservative policies that were otherwise unpopular, it also was to frustrate people into apathy and non-participation. The question of why people voted against their own interests was the wrong question. The real question was why people didn't vote at all, which had been the point of this whole strategy in the first place.

What caught everyone by surprise this year was that, somehow, in the exercise of the only real political talent that he has, Donald Trump managed to weaponize the people who otherwise wouldn't vote to the point at which action swamped apathy. The establishment Republicans were as wrongfooted as anyone else; the other 16 Republican candidates, operating within the old paradigm, were comfortable with a large segment of voters not voting at all. Trump beat them at that game, too. And here we are.

The people in this story from Maine are not stupid. They know very well that there's nothing Donald Trump can do to bring back the paper industry that was their town's lifeblood. Most of them were quite clear about that in the interviews they gave to the reporters.

And more than that, they seemed to care about preserving the last remaining shards of their town, their state and their country. "I used to walk the streets and I'd know everyone," Shardlow said.

I can empathize. Truly, I can. I'll never understand how that pain brings this woman to someone like Donald Trump, who absolutely can do nothing about any of the problems that brought these people to him. He can't bring the people she knew back to the streets she still walks.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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