Posted on 08/06/2016 3:34:10 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
Sometime during the past few years, the country started talking differently about white Americans of modest means.
Early in the Obama era, the ennobling language of campaign pundits prevailed. There was much discussion of “white working-class voters,” with whom the Democrats, and especially Barack Obama, were having such trouble connecting. Never mind that this overbroad category of Americans — the exit pollsters’ definition was anyone without a four-year college degree, or more than a third of the electorate — obliterated major differences in geography, ethnicity, and culture. The label served to conjure a vast swath of salt-of-the-earth citizens living and working in the wide-open spaces between the coasts — Sarah Palin’s “real America” — who were dubious of the effete, hifalutin types increasingly dominating the party that had once purported to represent the common man.
The “white working class” connoted virtue and integrity. A party losing touch with it was a party unmoored.
That flattering glow has faded away. Today, less privileged white Americans are considered to be in crisis, and the language of sociologists and pathologists predominates. Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010” was published in 2012, and Robert D. Putnam’s “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis” came out last year. From opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, they made the case that social breakdown among low-income whites was starting to mimic trends that had begun decades earlier among African Americans: Rates of out-of-wedlock births and male joblessness were rising sharply. Then came the stories about a surge in opiate addiction among white Americans, alongside shocking reports of rising mortality rates (including by suicide) among middle-aged whites. And then, of course, came the 2016 presidential campaign. The question was suddenly no longer why Democrats struggled to appeal to regular Americans. It was why so many regular Americans were drawn to a man like Donald Trump. Equally jarring has been the shift in tone. A barely suppressed contempt has characterized much of the commentary about white woe, on both the left and the right. Writing for National Review in March, the conservative provocateur Kevin Williamson shoveled scorn on the low-income white Republican voters who, as he saw it, were most responsible for the rise of Trump...
Huge cut. MUCH more in th article. Please read the whole thing.
“North Carolina... “the first white trash colony.””
Only so from the perspective they were not Virginia gentry.
“But White Trash in my book is just “poor dad” stuff. I have the oldest car in my area, I wear used clothes from the salvation army and I rent a house. But I also own a software company and invest feverishly. Ya look at me, and I fit the description for white trash.”
You’re crazy. Crazy like a fox!
It is what it is, sadly.
ping
The best one I gathered from the reviews was his grandmother telling him never to think of himself as a victim.
Nice work if you can get it! (The pay anyway.)
“We take care of each other. And don’t need smarmy politicians and bureaucrats interfering.”
and that’s the way it should be. good for you.
I’m glad you’re back
My parents were meth heads and were trailer trash for sure. Frankly, I am too and some of my choices in life have not been ideal and I know it.
And I’m voting for Trump because while my family caused its own problems the Democrat’s social workers, welfare programs, drug programs, and child protective services people only made our problems worse.
See, it doesn’t take a village; it takes God, a family, and a church.
Thank you, wardaddy.
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