Nah, I really wouldn't - I'm a lily-white grad student in a college town, totally unfit physically for anything like that. If that happened, I hope I would try to help as many people as possible, but I might just end up cowering in my apartment. I have no idea how I'd respond, really, and I won't know unless that happens. I'll say some stuff about myself though.
I did grow up in a small town in SE Indiana and have some idea of what it's like to live in rural America. It's a pretty depressing place, and it keeps getting worse every time I visit it. I was just there a few months ago, and it's pretty bad. For instance, there's a town about 20 miles away from it where a news-making HIV epidemic broke out because of IV opioid abuse and needle-sharing. At least 190 people out of a population of 4000 were infected. The county where that town is located used to vote disproportionately Democrat; Obama lost it by only 2 percentage points (and won the state) in 2008. Needless to say, Trump won by more than a 2-1 margin. The rates of suicide and drug overdose for non-college-educated white people nationwide have increased rapidly from the late 1990s on, and I know exactly who Trump was speaking to when he kept claiming that the country is in decline.
And yet, I was an upper middle class kid in my hometown; there's a tiny liberal arts college there that my father was a professor at, and the classism among the college professors and their families was the worst I have ever seen in my life. We would constantly mock the people around us in terms that would be clearly recognized as bigotry if they had a different skin color, barely even keeping our voices down in public. I was actually treated fairly well by my peers; although we were pretty bad with the classism, we weren't quite as bad as most other faculty families. The resentment between working-class white people and the educated elite is deep, and it's just a straightforward case of class warfare. When the educated class all backed one candidate who wasn't even good at sounding sincere when she really was, and the other guy is running on a campaign of sticking it to the educated insiders along with Muslims and illegal immigrants, the choice that people in that area were going to make was clear.
As for what I said up there, I always just try to be brutally honest with myself, and then share what I find with other people without holding back the dark side of it. Overall, I think we're going to need to deal more with how actual people work than with some ideal of the way society should be. We should definitely have those ideals, but everything needs to be grounded in tactics that move real people in the direction we would like them to go. To give one example, working-class white people really get angry when someone clearly more privileged than them talks to them about white privilege. That doesn't mean that white privilege isn't real, but a party that is associated with people who are often lecturing about it may well lose more working-class white voters than they would gain in increased turnout. So it could be a tactical mistake, no matter how valid the actual message is. Making enough tactical mistakes can lead to outcomes like President Trump.
@Lexicus - of course you're right that it's because I won't be on the wrong side of the barbed wire. That's why I said that it was a matter of white privilege that I would vote that way. But the flip side of this is voting for some sort of Randroid or extremist neoliberal or something, who will also hurt people (as you say, the results of that would be functionally racist even if they don't say anything racist on its face). It's a moral tradeoff.
