Posted on 08/02/2016 12:38:44 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Niall Ferguson says the Republican presidential nominee has emerged as a champion of the disgruntled lower classes, who – though poorer and less educated than the nation’s elite – are legion
In his brilliant and prophetic 2011 book, Coming Apart, my friend Charles Murray identified the stark social division that is defining this year’s US presidential election. Murray’s book was unabashedly about “the state of white America”. The white population of the US, he argued, is more polarised than at any time in the past half century. On the one hand, there is a “cognitive elite”, who are educated at universities like Harvard and Yale, marry each other, work together and live in the same exclusive neighbourhoods. These people are politically more liberal than the national average, as well as much richer.
On the other side of this social chasm is a new lower class: white Americans with nothing more than a high school diploma, if that. In a masterstroke of exposition, Murray vividly localised his argument by imagining two emblematic communities: Belmont, where everyone has at least one university degree, and Fishtown, where no one has any....
(Excerpt) Read more at scmp.com ...
You go, girl!
Yet I was born into a blue collar family. My dad a jack of all trades - coal miner, sawyer, railroad worker, rancher, gas station owner, cement truck driver. My mom a secretary. I know who really builds things and keeps the country going.
Yes, my grandad was a railroad worker, cowboy, homesteader in ND and a cop. My mom’s family were farmers from southern Indiana. Salt of the earth.
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