Stephanie McCrummen of the Washington Post reported from northwest Georgia a few days ago under the headline, "In rural Georgia, an unlikely rebel against Trumpism." The focus of her story is Cody Johnson, and the dateline is Beulah, Georgia, an unincorporated community in the northwest part of the state. Johnson voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Raphael Warnock twice this fall. McCrummen provides a great deal of background on Johnson, going back to his early childhood, to explain his recent political decisions:
How Johnson became an unlikely part of an emerging voter revolt against Trumpism is not so much the story of some political strategy, or even the policies of the national Democratic Party, which has long been accused of ignoring places such as northwest Georgia.
Rather, it is the story of a thousand life experiences that add up to a certain kind of American character, one that can arise from the very landscape where the Trump movement took root.
For Johnson, the process was one of slow accumulation, and to explain this, he took a drive one day, tracing a childhood across the 14th District, an area that stretches from the Appalachian foothills to the outermost edges of Atlanta’s sprawl, encompassing farms and factories and one small town after another including the one where Johnson’s first memories were formed.
He drove past the prim shops of downtown Jasper, past the gas station where his mother had worked, and the marble quarry where his father had worked for 20 years. He stopped in front of a weedy lot where his house used to be. He remembered two things.
One was his parents’ fighting, which left him with an urge for escape. The other had to do with his father, who, Johnson remembered, had him carry heavy marble blocks from one corner of the yard to another, back and forth for hours.
“I was always in trouble,” Johnson said, explaining that this was such a constant state of being that it became the bedrock of an identity. “I was the troublemaker. I guess I just always remember kind of not going with the group, no matter what.”
He continued driving down a narrow, pine-shaded road until he stopped at a cluster of low brick buildings that was a housing project where he lived after his parents divorced, and where his neighbors were White and Black and poor. He remembered two more things.
The first was the image of his mother putting away groceries in the kitchen as he tried out a racial slur he’d picked up on the playground. He remembered the box of macaroni and cheese she had in her hand at that moment, and the feeling of the box slapping his face, and the sound of her yelling, “You’re not better than anybody,” and the shame he felt as he cleaned the noodles off the floor, thinking of his best friend, who was Black, and his friend’s father, who was always helping his mother out.
I love how this defies the Southern stereotype of the racist parent and shows us the Southern parent who did not tolerate racism in her children, who taught them not to be racist.
Johnson got motivated to vote after Trump was elected in 2016, followed by Marjorie Taylor Greene as congressperson from his district:
“You couldn’t turn around without seeing some sticker, some post promoting violence and hate,” he said. It was the red hats, the flags, the conspiracy theories, the bullying, the racism. It was the sheer totality of how the Trump movement seemed to overtake people’s minds, he said.
“To me, anything that starts to dominate everything about you — when you can only interact with an ideal instead of have a conversation — I’m skeptical.”
But what was most insulting to him of all was the assumption that he would go along with all of it because of how he looked and where he lived. He started to feel like a spy. He had neighbors who made him aware of a bar near his house that was supposedly a gathering place for people in the white nationalist movement. He got a Facebook invitation to join some militia group, which he blocked. He had White co-workers who flagrantly used the n-word and made racist comments to him, and he came to enjoy their shock when he told them to cut it out.
Here's a long quote from Johnson:
It was disgusting that people might think I was okay with that. I decided I wasn’t going to just let it slide. Because if you let it slide, you become complicit, and complicity turns into guilt, and guilt turns into shame, and shame turns into fear, and I don’t want to live in fear.
And this bit refers to the recent Dec. 6 run-off election for the U.S. Senate seat from Georgia.
And then a 33-year-old White man from northwest Georgia voted for the third time in his life.
He voted against the Trump-backed candidate, and as he saw it, he voted against all the politics of Trumpism that had been expected to work on somebody like him — white nationalism, grievance, bitterness, bullying and, perhaps most of all, fear of a changing world.
“I have relatives who retreated rather than adapted,” he said, thinking of the life he left behind. “I think of it as, I left the mountain to come into the world, to go out into the world. It’s something I’m kind of proud of.”
This highly textured story is so worth a read in its entirety.
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