Posted on 04/05/2016 5:20:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
What you hear when you listen to many fervent supporters of Donald Trump is that they are victims -- victims of globalization and trade agreements that have sent their jobs to Mexico or China. Victims of competition from illegal immigrants from Mexico willing to work for starvation wages. Victims of a Republican establishment that promised to get rid of lots of things they don't like and then failed to deliver.
Their complaints, in some cases, have some validity, but not always and not a lot. Economist Gordon Hanson writes that without the ability to move lower-wage jobs to Mexico after NAFTA was ratified in 1993, "there might not be much left of Detroit at all." Which is to say, the U.S. wouldn't have the 800,000 relatively high-wage auto-sector jobs it has today.
As for the reviled Republican congressional leaders, anyone familiar with the Constitution should know that the president has the power -- and in this case the inclination -- to veto any conservative legislation Congress passes.
Demographic analysis shows that Trump is getting disproportionate support in primaries from white male non-college graduates with modest incomes -- a group that, as The New York Times' Thomas Edsall notes, has been giving Republicans large margins in general elections.
And Trump's appeal amounts for some quantum -- no one can be sure exactly how much -- of the increased Republican turnout this year. So far 21 million Americans have voted in Republican primaries and caucuses, as many as in the whole 2008 cycle and nearly 2 million more than in 2012.
But Trump supporters also seem to have something else in common, as I argued in a recent column -- a lack of social connectedness. They are less likely than average to be active in voluntary associations and in churches, in community activities and in extended families.
They seem to see Trump, a familiar figure from his reality TV show, as a single figure who can, without institutional support or coherent philosophy, right the wrongs they complain of.
When you look at a map of the counties Trump has carried in primaries, prominent among them are places with slumped industrial economies and closed factories, such as Youngstown and the Ohio counties along the Ohio River. They are places where family structures are crumbling, male life expectancy is declining, opioid addiction is common and up to one-fifth of adults receive disability insurance payments.
In writing of such places National Review's Kevin Williamson describes "the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy -- which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog."
I wouldn't be so harsh. But the fact is that Disability Insurance rolls have more than doubled in the last two decades, and about half the applicants claim ailments -- back pain, depression -- that are unverifiable.
DI recipients can live in such places on $13,000 annual benefits. But it's hard for them to gain the satisfaction that comes from earning success at work, raising your family and serving your community.
What such people need, Williamson says, is not OxyContin but U-Hauls. But mobility -- moving from one place to another -- in America has been declining for a generation. There is little out-migration from the Ohio River counties, much less than there was from Youngstown when steel factories closed 35 years ago.
Then there was moaning about the fate of people uprooted from their lifelong communities to move to fast-growing places like Texas. Moving is a pain, but it struck me that people leaving Youngstown were less painfully uprooted than their grandparents were when they moved there from rural Poland.
Earlier generations of Americans, after being moved around the country and the world in World War II, moved readily to seek better lives. Several million Midwesterners moved to California. One-third of American blacks moved from the segregated South to what seemed the promised land of the North.
Inadvertently perhaps, we have made it easier to stay put, through disability insurance, through low-priced goods at Wal-Mart and its competitors, through opioid prescriptions written by dollar-hungry doctors -- even as family and community ties grow frayed.
People in such situations evidently see themselves as victims and Donald Trump as someone who will make them winners again. Their sense of victimhood resembles that of the Emory University students who couldn't bear seeing "Trump 2016" chalked on the sidewalk.
Those victims could easily have solved their problem themselves. Maybe protesting Trump voters can, too.
Is Michael Barone really a clueless Delta Bravo ?
There is some truth to this. I have known relatives who have graduated with fairly good majors who could not find jobs locally, but would not move away from “home” and mommy and daddy to where jobs they had prepared for were in demand.
You can spot the bias of their surroundings when journalists write about college grads. What they see in their world are liberal arts majors. Engineering, management, computer science, logistics, and medical don’t get seen, so don’t get considered.
DC has always been a cesspool; now more than ever.
One other point — let Barone write a column about the combined effects of family disintegration, refusal to relocate, drug addiction, anger, and abuse of government benefits - but describing blacks - and wait for his media buddies to howl in outrage.
Essay contest :
Are Hillary and Bernie voters really victims?
Are BLM and CAIR members really victims?
Answer in 10 words or less...
From the novel David Copperfield, by Dickens. Agnes Wickfield was the beautiful and accomplished daughter of Mr. Wickfield, a lawyer. His clerk, the utterly loathesome Uriah Heep, inveigled himself into the alcoholic Mr. Wickfield's confidence and gradually gained control over him, always entertaining the thought that he would marry Agnes. Of course this was anathema to David Copperfield, who looked upon Agnes as his "dear sister," and couldn't abide the thought of the dear creature in the embrace of someone he looked upon with such disgust. Unbeknownst to David, Agnes is head-over-heels in love with him, but in the true spirit of Victorian self-abnegation, doesn't make her feelings known. Not until David has foolishly married a useless bimbo, who conveniently dies, and Uriah Heep has been consigned to prison, does David realize that he has loved her all along. In the end David and Agnes get married and have lots and lots of children, which is the Victorian way of saying that they made the two-backed beast a whole bunch of times.
So, to get to the point, "Agnes Heep," is like a sardonic "what if Uriah had prevailed?"
If you haven't read the book and this makes you want to download a copy and peruse it, so much the better! It's a fantastic novel. The part where David professes his love for Agnes will make you cry.
If they wanted that, they'd be conservatives and/or libertarians. What they truly want is government doing things for them, rather than other people whom they believe don't merit it, or warrant it. Kind of like the slogan "Better Police for a Better Police State."
Speak for yourself. I am victim of none of those.
Yeah you are. You live with their trade agreements? Immigration policy? Fiscal policy? Healthcare?
Well, maybe not if you live in Norway.
Talk about missing the forest for the trees.
Trump is the most conservative candidate... He is self funding.. and he has demonstrated he is capable of creating jobs. Trump also has the greatest respect for the Constitution... Trump does not require an exemption to hold the office of president. I could fill up page after page after page with examples of how Trump is the only conservative.. Making American Great 'AGAIN' is pure conservatism.
Calling oneself a 'conservative' does not make one conservative... Talk is cheap, actions tell the history.
Now that is a sentiment I can agree with.
Just an observation: The “victim schtick” is about enriching the leaders in the Grievance Industry - think of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Historically, Republicans have not wanted to wallow in self-pity, to seek government-approved remedies for life’s challenges, or to support those who get rich or powerful off of stirring up animus amongst the individualists that make up the USA. This election may portend a new type of voter who wants to be rescued more than he wants to be free.
Of course I live with them. I am not a victim of them. Victim mentality is a mind set, not physical chains.
Vote Trump.
Pretty pathetic reasoning from Michael Barone. Townhall is slipping into NR territory.
And then there is the fact that many of the jobs that do exist are done by legal and illegal immigrants, who get preference for welfare and affirmative action for themselves and children over the unemployed citizens whose jobs they took.
No sir, we are not abandoning our towns nor our way of life. We can rebuild right here.
However, the first task is to stop the mercenaries in dc from stealing our money and enriching their friends at our expense.
Just curious, and yes, I’ve read the Dickens classic.
My Christian surname is the same as Uriah’s (my college nickname was “Uriah”).
We are certainly victims of the GOP and their lobbyist run party who would love to throw out all our votes.
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