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What Liberals Miss About Trump Country
Jacobin Magazine ^ | October 15, 2019 | Paul Heideman

Posted on 10/16/2019 1:39:32 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet

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To: JJ_Folderol

Exactly. Like all leftists he can’t admit that decent people can have decent reasons for opposing socialism and the welfare state. He also can’t admit that decent people can have critical attitudes towards certain aspects of the culture without being racist. Unfortunately these massive fallacies are fundamental to modern leftist thinking.


21 posted on 10/16/2019 5:55:19 AM PDT by Yardstick
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To: piasa
"It never occurs to liberals, who, often lacking a sense honor or integrity and respecting only themselves, that getting free stuff is not a 'benefit' but may in fact be detrimental in many ways, one of which is human dignity, and another is individual liberty. "

Yes!

Sometimes it can be as simple as not trusting the government and not wanting it to grow any more.

I've been playing with a theory that rural, and even suburban people rely more on their neighbors than they do "the system." Urban people rely on the system and may not have even met their neighbors.

When you depend on your neighbors, you must be responsible for your actions because the relationship could mean your survival. Not so much in the city.

22 posted on 10/16/2019 5:55:43 AM PDT by MV=PY (The Magic Question: Who's paying for it?)
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To: TexasM1A

I would like one of these folks just once to show me an area of the country, where the majority of the inhabitants subsist/survive because of the governments largess, live good lives.
Just one is all I want to see.

Urban Virginia and Washington DC, Baltimore?


23 posted on 10/16/2019 5:56:10 AM PDT by yetidog
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

My wife and I have discussed this a lot. In 2016 I told her the election was going to be a populist election between leave me alone populism and nanny state populism. If the DNC hadn’t screwed Bernie over I would have been right. I still think that is what drives Trump voters, but not in the way liberal think.

What I saw happening in the country was a growth of a large, unwielding, unresponsive bureaucracy. But it wasn’t just in government it was in everything, and it’s purpose was to distance institutions from the people who used them. Whether it was your local township office or Comcast there was always layer after layer of people you had to deal with to get things done. And often even after dealing with the layers nothing got done. You called about a problem with your cable bill and you got “Maria” in Mumbai who you couldn’t understand and couldn’t help you. Need to talk to someone at the power company, good luck. Again you’d get someone who was good at feeling your pain, but not good at dealing with your problem. We had become a country of feigned empathy, but practical incompetence.

Add to that the attitude of our betters. From Hillary and her party, to petty bureaucrats, to ‘educators’ and the media, everyone knew what was good for us. To them we all were ‘Shanika’ my name for any unwed, uneducated mother firmly attached to the government tit and happy about it. We all needed to be taken care and when we said ‘no not really’ we were branded deplorables and unredeemable by the same people who told us how much they cared for us. What they didn’t understand was that we didn’t want to be taken care of, we wanted to be left alone to live our lives while having real access to the help we needed it. We didn’t want to have to listen to ‘the menu that has been changed’ only at the end to again talk to ‘Maria’ who had no authority to take care of our problem.

And lastly I believe the icing on the cake was the whole transgender thing. We had been brow beaten into accepting the homosexual life style, then the courts over turned all the laws on same sex marriage after we had spoken our minds on that issue. Then after getting the right to marry they demanded you participate, and finally it was oh yeah we also want grown men to be allowed to pee with you ten year old daughters and granddaughters. We had found out that it’s never enough. There was no end to the demands of the perverse. Regardless of what we gave them there was always one more thing.

So after years of being ignored, patronized, pushed and lied to we said enough. Mr. Trump went around the country and listened to regular people, talked their language, addressed their concerns in the same ways and tones you’d hear in small town bar in a Saturday night and promised in his acceptance speech that ‘I’ll listen to you, I’ll be your voice in Washington’ and people said what do we have to lose.

The Left will never understand this because they don’t live in the real world. They live in a world devoid of intellectual curiosity. They live in a world where there are 57 genders and counting, they live in a world where a warming earth causes extreme cold and heavy snow. But most of all they wish to live in a world of experts, academics, think tanks and words. A world where everything can be explained and managed by a government funded study created by people who live in ivory towers, no life experience necessary. They will never understand real people and how real people live and the problems real people deal with. You listen to the democrat candidates and that’s what you hear. So by extension they will never understand why people like and support the president. Because he is a man who speaks to the concern of those real people, speaks to them in their language and offers real world solutions to everyday problems. They can’t fathom anyone actually doing that and without the help of high paid experts no less.


24 posted on 10/16/2019 5:57:02 AM PDT by redangus
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

“Comments?”

Well, coming from a writer who does pieces for a magazine called “Jacobin,” it’s not surprising that the conclusions drawn are somewhat off the mark as well as solipsistic. It seems to me the writer already had a conclusion in mind and went out to find evidence that supported said conclusion.

What was telling — and which the author was just itching to point out — was the bit about supposedly “huge” numbers of white people being racist. Good lord. Are there racists in America? Yes, and there always have been and always will be. But is America a racist country? Absolutely not.

I’m old enough to remember real racism (and in a large Midwestern city, Detroit, which runs counter to the so-called “prevailing wisdom,” if you think about it) growing up in the 1960s and part of the 1970s. I’m retired military and it’s to the U.S. military’s credit that I never saw any appreciable amount of it (and I’m a brown-skinned American of partial Hispanic heritage) during the two-plus decades I served, stationed in many parts of the country and deployed all over the world. Actually, I saw more racism in certain parts of Africa (and I don’t mean South Africa) and in the Middle East than I’ve seen in the U.S.

Here’s the bottom line: America is LIGHT YEARS removed from those days, and only the most ideologically hidebound leftists are refusing to accept this fact.


25 posted on 10/16/2019 5:58:05 AM PDT by BigKahuna
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To: yetidog

I guess, but supposedly those folks have jobs.


26 posted on 10/16/2019 5:58:48 AM PDT by TexasM1A
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To: abb

I think it is...

Small Govt vs. Big Govt

Legal vs illegal immigration

Illegal immigration is the issue that galvanizes the majority of voters regardless of ethic component. I found this out big time ringing door bells for campaigns over the years


27 posted on 10/16/2019 6:29:33 AM PDT by Jimmy The Snake
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

This is clearly a Leftist source.

But the author is at least not blinkered enough to try to paint everybody who voted for Trump as being motivated by racism/hate which is the usual, lazy, and above all False Leftist narrative.


28 posted on 10/16/2019 7:18:27 AM PDT by FLT-bird
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To: Yardstick

Exactly. To Leftists any opposition to socialism must be motivated by racism. It never dawns on them that their proposed government benefits may not be used/wanted/beneficial to many people - but the cost of paying for them will most definitely be felt by everybody who works for a living.

Similarly if you value your country and want to limit immigration and H1b and other work visas, you must be motivated by racism. It never seems to dawn on them that cheap labor has harmed both blue and white collar Americans and that it is natural for people to value their own culture. That doesn’t necessarily mean they hate all others, only that they value their own and don’t want to see it swamped, wiped out or radically transformed by a tidal wave of foreigners they never asked to come here.


29 posted on 10/16/2019 7:27:36 AM PDT by FLT-bird
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To: piasa

Those who bait deer or have seen neighbors do it are less likely to fall for “free stuff” when socialists try the same trick with them.


30 posted on 10/16/2019 8:30:15 AM PDT by Pollster1 ("Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed")
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
Brilliant send-up of the media's narrative fantasies:
There’s more than a whiff of the familiar “culture of poverty” narrative, usually applied to black Americans, to this picture. In both cases, observers point to the culture and values of a group as responsible for its condition. In the culture of poverty story, black Americans lack the morals and mores that would allow them to succeed in the labor market. In the Trump voters story, the normative deficiencies of poor whites lead them to oppose investment in public goods (infrastructure, social welfare programs, libraries) that would actually improve their lives. In both cases, the social structures that shape people’s lives fade from view, replaced by nebulous constellations of values that determine people’s fates like astrological signs.

31 posted on 10/16/2019 10:25:46 AM PDT by Albion Wilde (It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it. --Douglas MacArthur)
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