That is not at all what she did- unless people think that all the lower classes are- “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, or Islamaphobic” .
Correct.
Loyalties of race, nation, and ethnicity are usually stronger in the United States than loyalties of class. Moreover, most whites (because I am white, I understand the thinking of non whites less well) like and admire rich people. Many falsely imagine that hard work will make them rich before they die.
A Republican political candidate will show up at a white, blue-collar bar, buy everyone drinks, talk about the fortunes of local sports teams, and win their votes. It won’t matter if the Republican is anti Social Security, anti Medicare, anti union, and anti-minimum wage.
They will think that his Democratic rival, who is in favor of all that stuff, and who would rather watch a play by Euripides than watch a ball game is a hoity-toity elitist.
Education has been touched on in this thread but not often enough. And I can’t say enough about how religion, especially the American brand of evangelical Christianity and its various subsets, has both been used as a hammer to keep the lower classes down and the upper classes grifting.
For all these years, we (the progressive left, for lack of a better term even if it’s not wholly accurate) has been told from across the spectrum that we “have to understand and acknowledge the concerns” of the folks who choose Trump and his ilk. And if those concerns are “I’m tired of seeing inter-racial couples in all these TV commercials.” or “My kid has a teacher that I think is gay, and so I’m worried about the safety of Timmy’s behymen while he’s at school.”? We’ve been learning that there’s almost no way of changing those minds.
We’re told that the Trump voter is lashing out becuase they’ve been mocked and teased for their beliefs. One guy I used to know online has opined that they “had no choice” but to vote for Trump even though they knew he was full of shit, because they’d been pushed too far by the media narrative. So when Jordan Klepper interviews, and then puts on television, an endless stream of small-town folk saying “The Affordable Care Act saved my kid’s life, but we have to get rid of that other thing, that Obamacare, because that’s just communism!” that’s considered punching down, and somehow it’s the Daily Show’s fault that dumbass feels disrespected.
When a bunch of bible-thumping young-earther bigots take over school boards and ban any real science education from taking place, and buy biology textbooks from the Heritage Foundation that feature Adam and Eve but not Darwin, and reduce the intellectual content of their library to nothing higher than Beverly Cleary (not knocking Bev, just using her as a marker), somehow it’s the eastern elites’ fault that new industries give their town a pass for setting up research centres.
Some GOP governor gets swept into power in some state (say, Kansas), slashes corporate taxes to the bone and thus bankrupts the state, and school funding falls through the floor and emergency room closures spread across the land, and they believe it when Faux News tells them it’s some New Yorker’s fault…
We’re seeing this up here in Ontario, to a milder Canadian degree. Much of Ontario and the rest of Canada look to Toronto with everything from distain to hatred, because we’re the financial capital of the country, and because we produce much of the media here, and our biggest-city-in-the-country status makes us more multicultural and pluralistic (what, all the TV and film studios are supposed to set up shop in Nipissing or Petawawa?). And the province has the most hilariously corrupt Premier, who will probably win another majority at the next election, because he plays off that sneering in the boonies, and promises the folks at the other end of the province that he’ll even the score with those big-city snobs.
I sound like an asshole, I know. But I’m really close to running out of sympathy for these folk, no matter how badly they’ve been screwed over by both sides. My heart breaks for them, and even more for their kids, who no doubt see a much more interesting and better world elsewhere online and feel as trapped in the cycle of decay as their parents do. And having them all vote Dem wouldn’t solve all that needs to be solved. But if they keep hitting themselves in the face with a shovel, then vote for the guy who’ll give them nothing but a harder shovel, I’m punching out.
But there’s some hope. At least we hicks in Kansas elected a Democratic governor in 2018 and re-elected her in 2022, and now the state is in the black once again. Of course, we still can’t pass Medicaid expansion, which has resulted in the closing of several rural hospitals, because socialism or something.
I’m glad to hear, and it’s definitely a ray of hope. As was the result of the abortion referendum. It seems to take something really seismic to change the inertia sometimes.