Really? How would you know? So everyone in the rust belt who feels abandoned by the Democratic Party is a racist?
I have heard countless people use the term, and why I point out that unless they are buying locally or eating the avacado-and-olive diet, much of their food comes from there, the response is invariably “I get my food from the grocery store,” generally with a sense of irony, but occasionally with the apparently sincere belief that they actually don’t need anything from the Midwest.
I general disabuse people of their romantic notions of “agrarian fantasy” by relating the less disgusting anecdotes of my summers spent working on Iowa farms, and occasionally regaling them with the true nature of “vegetable” oil. Having spent the child, adolescent, and early adulthood portions of my life in the Midwest, I have no desire to return nor any particular sympathy with the general ‘moral’ and political climate of the region, but it is a mistake to think—as Hillary Clinton apparently did in 2016–that the people there and what they think don’t matter.
Stranger
Yes, that’s what I keep hearing. But I don’t see how that translates to Donald Trump. He share’s middle class American values of being a billionaire?
“Racism” is too easy an explanation. Plenty of old white guys ran in 2016.
I will say this – I live in brownstone Brooklyn, possibly the most liberal place in the United States outside of Berkely, California. Or maybe Burlington, Vermont.
I can’t speak for Berkeley, or Burlington, but in liberal Brooklyn, the contempt for the white working class is astonishing.
Yes. Only a racist in the rust belt would think that the republican party represents his interests better than the Democrats.
Some relevant links:
55 percent of white Americans say discrimination exists against white people in the USA.
CNN guests use fake hillbilly Southern accents for mockery, Don Lemon laughs
Both of these took place after Trump was elected, yes, but they are illustrative of the sort of things that propelled people to vote for Trump in the first place.
That kind of arrogance directed at working-class people is exactly why they vote for Donald Trump. You’re a solid Trump ally.
Are you saying you disagree with me?
If idiots want to vote against the only people who are actually trying to help them, because they are also trying to help people who aren’t white, then to hell with them. They deserve everything they get.
You have been living in a bubble too long - and it’s a bubble even within NYC. Don’t feel to bad- most people do. But I’m going to guess you don’t spend a lot of time talking to 50-70 year old white guys who didn’t go to college. From here on, I’m speaking about the ones I know, who may not be a representative sample. They’re Archie Bunker transported to 2020 , although they’ve learned not to say (or sometimes even think) the most offensive things Archie said. But what “MAGA” means to them is bringing back a world where a loading dock foreman can own a single-family house * and support a wife who doesn’t work outside the home and a daughter and later an unemployed son-in-law. They aren’t exactly racist - they wouldn’t have a problem if a black foreman could do the same but at the same time they aren’t exactly not racist because every time a black guy gets the foreman position they will blame it on affirmative action. They feel like Trump is one of them, because for all his money, he still has lower-middle class tastes in a lot of ways. And for some reason that’s not clear to me, they seem to think they are going to become very rich one day - I’ve had a couple go on to me about the “death tax”, and when I asked if they expected to leave a multi-million dollar estate, their reply was essentially “It could happen”. They’re very authoritarian when they agree with the authority but dismiss authorities with whom they disagree . This is how you get people who said " Not my president" about Obama but believe that everyone in the US should respect Trump personally simply because he is the president. I even know a number of allegedly devout Catholics who basically said the Pope needed to stay in his lane when he criticized the wall and had the deer in the headlights look when I asked " Isn’t everything in the Pope’s lane?"
A lot of it can be described as a desire for their children to have what they had when they were younger - but they don’t realize that if they want their children who work in the service economy to live as well as a factory worker in the 50s, Trump is absolutely not the person who is going to do that.
- Yes, there are single-family houses in NYC. Whole neighborhoods full of them in fact - something that surprises a lot of people.
If it’s true that the Democratic party has become a party that doesn’t understand nor care about the concerns of rural and working-class whites, then the fault of that is those rural and working-class whites.
In 1964, rural and working-class whites were largely Democratic. The rural and working-class whites spent the next few decades deciding to leave the party because they cared about being pro-segregation more than they cared about a party that would address their actual concerns.
They decided that issues that were none of their business—people’s sex lives and reproductive choices and entertainment choices—were more important than their economic well being.
They decided that imposing their religion on everyone else through prayer in schools was more important than their economic well being.
They decided that they liked being told “We’re No. 1” and “kicking ass” were more important than crafting a rational foreign policy.
They decided that they loved hating minorities more than staying in the party and participating in setting up systems that would benefit everyone, including themselves—clean environments, rational energy policies, equal educational opportunities, fair housing, fair employment policies, fair wages and benefits, reasonable social safety nets, health care, child care, etc.
They could have remained a major segment of the Democratic party and then it wouldn’t have mattered how many idiotic city people didn’t respect them, because they would be working with everyone to make things better.
But they made dedication to being sexist, racist assholes their priority. That’s why they voted for Nixon, that’s why they voted for Reagan, that’s why they voted for George W. Bush, that’s why they voted for Trump.
So don’t ask me to empathize with them.
Yes. We must cast the less educated, the less well-informed, out of the Party. And we righteous few will bask in our superiority and our purity.
Yeah, that’ll work.
In addition, one huge contributor to Trump’s vote was/is that many conservatives are convinced that they, not liberals, are the ones who have been “taking the high road” for the longest time, and that it is time for them to ***stop ***taking the high road.
Readthis Town Hall post(it’s full of invective, and the writing can be quite inane or juvenile, but it gives a sense of the mindset of people who feel this way.)
We righteous few have actually been the majority in the last 2 national elections.
So what? That’s not how presidential elections work. It doesn’t matter.
We righteous few *lost *the last election to those on whom you look down. Obviously, we’re not doing it right.
You’re right about there being 16 other old white guys running in 2016 GOP. Some of them quite wealthy or backed by wealthy influential conservative PACs. So what differentiated Trump? If memory serves he introduced himself as the most bigoted, most loudmouthed, most anti-intellectual, candidate. Everybody, including the GOP said he wasn’t a serious candidate, too divisive, too inexperienced, couldn’t possibly win. The rest is history.
He captured the hearts and minds of right wing voters by appealing to their most base instincts of fear, bias nativity, greed and insecurity. “Racism” may sound like too easy of an explanation, but the right answer is not always complicated. Especially when you look at history and recall how most authoritarians gain and maintain power.
What does “doing it right” look like?
Because most progressives/liberals/moderate democrats don’t advocate for the denial of human rights to republicans/right-wing/conservatives. We don’t say they can’t prey how they want, vote, love who they want, be denied social & health benefits. Many of us call them ignorant or stupid for wanting to deny that to others and themselves, but we don’t say they are not entitled to the same rights we seek for all.
People hold onto political power by any means necessary. Thats why we have dictatorships, because the people in charge of the dictatorship enjoy the status, privilege and wealth that comes from it. And people will do a lot of cruel, inhumane things to protect status and privilege.
On a much more subtle level, thats what being part of an in-group is all about. As the in-group, you are considered the default. Thats why for the longest time we defaulted to using ‘he’ as a generic gender pronoun, and why crayons used to call peach colored crayons ‘flesh colored’. Or for the longest time in teh US if you said you were religious people just assumed you were christian.There is a psychological benefit of being the in-group, as well as various material benefits (better jobs, politicians care about your problems more, more wealth, cops are more respectful, etc). People desperately want to hold onto those benefits.
The idea that a white man can commit a mass atrocity and its just written off as a mental health issue while everytime a black person, muslim or illegal immigrant does it is used to paint everyone with that attribute in a bad light is part of the whole thing.
Point being, there are certain privileges to being the in-group (white, male, christian, native born) and the people who enjoy and identify with those benefits are not giving those up to have to live in a multicultural society where they lose that status.
I think its entirely possible for the left to understand the right, its just that we aren’t going to like what we find. There is no Bernie Sanders esqe economic argument we can make to Trumps base that will appeal to them despite what some on the left want to believe. We can’t promise these people better jobs, better benefits and better wages since they are motivated by maintaining the status and power of their in-groups, not by economics. They want to live in a society where cops, business owners, the media and politicians treat white people and christians better than black people and muslims. No economic argument can change that.
Then on top of that, a lot of people on the right are ashamed of their own beliefs and engage in double think, so if you ask them directly they won’t give you a direct answer. These same people who think Trump is the most honest politician around or who believe ABC is biased but fox news is unbiased aren’t going to say defending in-group status is what motivates their support for him. They’ll find some more socially acceptable answer, and most don’t have the insight into sociology to even understand their own motivations anyway.
That’s what he would like to believe, but of course it’s a total bullshit act. He’s a total fraud and a fake. A bullshit reality TV show. But he knows how to pull one over on dupes who watch too much reality TV.
No – it’s a waste of empathy. LET ME REPEAT: it’s a total bullshit act. He’s a total fraud and a fake. A bullshit reality TV show. But he knows how to pull one over on dupes who watch too much reality TV.
Do I have to say it again??? OK–LET ME REPEAT: He’s a total bullshit act. He’s a total fraud and a fake. A bullshit reality TV show. But he knows how to pull one over on dupes who watch too much reality TV.
That’s all there is to it.
This is absolutely my experience as well. The number of times I’ve heard anyone refer to flyover country non-ironically is either zero or very close to it. It’s basically a hoax, a joke, a straw man at this point. "Hey, look at dem coastal people, they think they’re better than you, they refer to your state as ‘flyover country’ ". I mean, we don’t, but of course they don’t believe us…
(Of course the situation is more complicated now, because I do, in fact, feel contempt for Trump voters. But not all rural people in the middle of the country voted for Trump.)
Of course. All this nonsense about the urban/rural divide, or the forgotten white working class, is just the bullshit narrative that the Republican Party has been spinning to survive, and which has set the stage for Trump.
It’s not that complicated, folks. We are a nation that is nearly half made up of mentally lazy, gullible dupes, who got that way by sitting on their ass watching too much bullshit TV.
Trump doesn’t know much, but he knows that there is a sucker born every minute.