This phenomenon was further magnified after the passage of Obamacare. People in the private sector saw their medical coverage decimated, and their costs triple or more, while those who have a lip-lock on the public tit suffer no consequences.
Teachers, city clerks, government deadheads of all description still have gold-plated health care paid for by folks who work for a living.
Working people don’t like it.
Summary: the lower class Trump voters are more complex than the Libs think, and often resist voting Dem.
Doesn’t matter. Thick-skulled Dems will continue to think that if you oppose socialism, which is supposedly for your own good, you’re a deplorable racist hayseed.
So they’ll keep focusing on anti-Trump-tweets suburbanite women.
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.
The reason rural voters are particularly wary of free stuff may be that they are closer to nature and work with animals or have to deal with them much more than urban liberals, and as anyone who interacts with animals knows, offering food, water, shelter and gently treating them from a young age changes their behavior, and thus gives you power which you can use not just in a somewhat harmless way to tame them for companionship but also can be used in a controlling way to tame them in order to exploit them for work, milk, meat, or eggs, or even to entrap and kill wild ones, when they are annoying pests or when you want to use their fur or meat.
Providing free stuff always involves taking away some or all of a wild animal's liberty by creating anything from minor dependence as in the case of a bird feeder or water source, or major dependence, as in the domestication of animals to make them easier to handle, causing them to lose more and more of their survival skills and instincts while they unwittingly pick up habits and traits that are desired by humans the longer they are bred in captivity- until like bulldogs or sheep, the animal is fully domesticated and so deformed or genetically altered they actually need management to survive.
He makes some good points about the economic diversity among Republican voters but he’s guilty of the same behavior he’s criticizing in liberal journalists - that is, a simplistic generalization of others’ behavior.
She’s remarkably blunt about the political upshot, making explicit what most of the genre leaves subtextual: “Economic appeals are not going to sway any Trump voters, who view anyone who is trying to increase government spending, especially to help other people, with disdain.”
This line of argument is widely embraced across the liberal commentariat: Trump voters are an impenetrable bloc, an irredeemable monolith motivated by racism and resentment.
That’s just a misrepresentation of Monica Potts’ argument. Her piece is actually pretty nuanced and doesn’t blame things on racism and resentment.
Attributing views to the “liberal commentariat” that they don’t all hold is intellectually lazy and what he accuses them of doing.
Those 'truths' that the left hold self evident...that more government, for example, would make their lives better...are viewed with contempt by the right.
We truly are two nations living in one land.
The author completely ignores the concept of patriotism: that
“Make America Great Again” has a genuine, heart-felt meaning to Trump voters.
While the author drones on about class and economic condition he’s completely incapable of seeing beyond his liberal presuppositions to the core of traditional Americanism that binds Trump voters together.
Small town libraries aren’t exactly a small “investment” by those paying property taxes.
One near me probably doesn’t get 10 people a day walking through the doors
I wonder if the staff of a magazine called “Jacobin” ever has considered how the original Jacobins met their ends.
Bump
I thought it was called MAGA country?
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.
Oh how dreadful! These smelly Walmart shoppers are so stupid that they refuse to accept free stuff from our benign overlords. They must be forced to comply.
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.
“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.
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.
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.