02-17-2017, 02:55 PM
(02-17-2017, 11:07 AM)SomeGuy Wrote: Speaking of ignorant, resentful people...
I am speaking of ignorant and resentful people. I know of people who believe in what Donald Trump offered in 2016. They are proud to be white even if they have little else in which to be proud. Many are scared that their precious daughter might marry and have children by some black man, and have no idea that their daughter could instead end up unmarriageable (if not dead) with a drug habit and STDs because she sleeps around even if only with white johns. Ignorant, resentful people do not make good lives for themselves, and do not prepare their children well for a changing world.
Yes. I hate the direction that America is taking under Donald Trump. I expect very bad things to happen in economics and foreign policy.
Donald Trump is the last sort of person I would want during a potentially-dangerous situation involving military activity. I doubt that I would have so many problems with "President Mitt Romney", who condemned the misogyny, vulgarity, and capriciousness of Donald Trump. I thought that Romney was too narcissistic and was too connected to economic elites for my taste... But political swings from liberal to conservative are the norm in American political life. Swings from sane to insane are abnormal.
I dislike the chaotic, dictatorial, pay-for-play style of governing that I associate with President Trump. I would dislike this in a President who ran and won with promises of a liberal agenda.
I do not resent the honest successes of middle-class blacks, Asians, and Hispanics. I feel that I have far more in common with them in values than I do with the white people in distress shown in the original post. I have severe doubt that President Trump can solve the problems of such people. But note well that Democrats are not reaching them well, either.
...I am reminded of a study that I saw of differential death rates among poor ethnic groups in Chicago and Philadelphia heat waves. poor whites and blacks had huge increases in death rates during the heat waves. poor Hispanics did not receive such an increase in death rates. I am guessing that Hispanics just as poor and with even less time in which to establish social networks as poor whites or blacks had some sort of community response that ensured that people who showed signs of having trouble got help. They got box fans from people who cared about them. They did not keep their windows closed out of fear of crime. They did not have the atomization that other poor people endure in America. "Every man for himself" works well enough for economic elites. It works badly for poor people.
Should Democrats get the ability to address the concerns of poor white people, then they can get a New Deal coalition forming around them.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.