The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(11-26-2019, 01:03 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/tru...jc_7q-xX0Q

I grew up in rural, small-town America — and I can tell you the real reason why people love Donald Trump
When I tried to debunk one old friend's conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton recently, he replied, 'You've forgotten where you came from'

Larry Womack, California
1 day ago

I grew up in a small town in California, with a population of just over 2,000. When I was in the third grade, my classroom had exactly one black student. It was an election year: George H W Bush versus Michael Dukakis. When the traditional student poll was held, she was the only student who said she preferred Dukakis. Other students pressured her until she changed her vote to Bush.

It’s hard to overstate the small-town social pressure to conform. When a childhood friend posted a hoax story about Hillary Clinton on Facebook recently, I directed him (without comment) to a Snopes piece debunking it. His response was, “You’ve forgotten where you came from.” Then he unfriended me. For many in rural America, it’s downright logical to deny objective reality on any particular issue. Supporting a Democrat might mean a better standard of living in some ways. But, it will also come at a personal cost.

People especially value the opinions of those who model success in their daily lives. Donald Trump spent years playing a successful businessman in a game show that many of these people watched regularly. To them, he’s practically a hometown success story. Of these, there are too few. Between 2008 and 2017, 99 per cent of America’s job and population growth was in metropolitan areas. Rural Americans are being left behind.

Probably because the manufacturing jobs that allowed one to live reasonably well in rural America have largely disappeared. There might be one big industrial employer that youth seek and get after marking time as workers in stores, restaurants, or nursing homes... and after getting a job with that industrial employer they see themselves set for life. The cost of living is low, and 'family life' is more satisfying than urban indulgences including intellectual life. Adults who grew up as kids in that small town still have attachments to their old high school, where they expect their sons or daughters to undergo the civic rituals of high-school athletics before themselves marking time in a restaurant or store until a job appears in the town's big employer. Tradition is comforting even if it has little formality behind it. 

Then some bean-counters far away decide that the company would be more profitable as an importer than as a manufacturer. The bug employer shuts down its operation in town, and the well-paying jobs disappear.   

The problem with Trump's appeal is that his success does not mean that he is creating jobs. Apartment complexes have lots of work available when being built, of course -- but they are hardly large-scale employers. 

Quote:So, when those rural Americans not coming up with ways to make their own problems worse, they’re looking for out-groups to blame. Like the minorities who live in those thriving urban centers, and have an increasingly equitable share of power in Washington, DC. Rural voters are far more likely to believe that black and Latino people are abusing government assistance programs, for example. The racist resentment is vast, and a growing body of research has found that support for Trump is fueled almost entirely by hatred of out-groups: In 2016, the strongest predictors of Trump support were bigotry and lack of education.

So it isn't economic distress? Trump did advocate tariffs that would supposedly make a reversion of big corporations from being importers to being manufacturers. Tariffs are a raw deal, dirty taxes that raise the cost of living and the cost of doing business.     

Quote:All of this is coded in political language, of course — which is why simply being female, or a person of color, is enough for voters to view a candidate as more left-of-center than their actual policy positions. To far too many, the word “liberal” has become a slur for anyone who doesn’t look like them.

As the late Lee Atwater said, you might not get away with using a certain word that rhymes with "trigger", but you can talk about other things allegedly specific to white people as virtues and to non-whites as alleged vices. If it is welfare, then white people generally do not admit to it. I have calmly used a SNAP card as if I would have used an "American Impress" Card. 

Here's the dirty little secret. Middle-class blacks care about poor blacks, on the whole; middle-class Hispanics care about poor Hispanics on the whole. Well-off white people do not care about poor white people. Often the cause is distance, in that white people in  Greater Indianapolis don't spend much time in rural Kentucky. 

Quote:If you asked rural Americans how they felt about people of any particular minority group, most would pride themselves on having an unassuming, open-minded acceptance. And, for the most part, that is true on a personal level. But, to them, racism is a Klansman in a movie. It isn’t a contemporary power structure, or an implicit bias that gets black teenagers killed. They don’t see that. They can, on the other hand, see themselves struggling. They just very earnestly do not get it. The minorities they do know are — like that little girl in my third grade class — pressured to fit in, to stay quiet. They’re not talking much about racism.

All of this is exacerbated by the fact that rural teens are stubbornly less likely to pursue higher education than their urban counterparts, even as the low- and middle-skill jobs in their areas disappear.

They are struggling, but they are trained not to see it as a class struggle. Such, after all, is godless communism. These people think that when they get the chance that they will kiss up to the power elite of America. 

Quote:So, Trump’s attitudes really aren’t any different from the actual feelings of many rural Americans. How can they condemn him for it? Even if they don’t agree, they can identify him with people they love, in spite of those attitudes. He is their father, their uncle, their boss — and his re-election slogan may just as well be, “I don’t see what’s so racist about that.”

It isn’t just Trump’s ignorance that should bother people, of course. It’s also the allegations of corruption against him. It is telling that, in one recent survey, the people least convinced by Trump’s anti-corruption rhetoric seemed to be Romney-Clinton voters. But they tend to live in the suburbs. Rural folk wisdom dictates that all politicians are corrupt to the core, and that anyone who believes otherwise is disgustingly naïve. Once, when my mother expressed contempt for Trump’s corruption, my father groaned back, “They all do it.” My father is a Democrat, but I’m afraid to ask outright whom he voted for. I’m not sure I could look at him the same way.

The politicians of course are from elsewhere -- like New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, or Boston. Bill Clinton may have been born and raised in Arkansas, but he became a city-slicker while in college. Rural America is becoming less relevant as a source of nationwide politicians. It's the same within states, too. The greater the difference that people are by culture from the politicians, the more likely they are to project their dark dreams upon them. Such applies as much to bankers and creative people as to politicians.

Quote:It will surprise no one who has lived in rural America, or pays attention to Trump’s tweets, that Trump voters are more likely to believe conspiracy theories. Institutions like science, education and government are run, after all, by liberals. Many Americans will see a story in the newspaper as less trustworthy than the meme or obvious hoax site shared by someone they know.

The kinship bond is stronger than logic and objective reality. The narrow community is more reliable than the bigger one. This said, the small-town newspapers increasingly avoid national news because it simply wastes space that can be applied to the nearby bust of a meth lab or a local sex offender. As one newscaster once put it, "If it bleeds it leads". Word-of-mouth from people that one knows and trusts means more to some people than does something emanating from a giant city.   

Quote:Add to the equation a steady diet of fringe media with no accountability itself and you have a rural population that largely believes Trump is no more guilty of corruption than the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bushes, or anyone else. The perception is that he is just being given a hard time because he happens to be one of them.

Like other confidence men, Donald Trump has found the trick of making people who seem neglected feel important, making people who get no respect for their wisdom seem astute, making lonely people feel that they have a friend, and making people who seem ordinary feel special. Instead of fleecing people for their life savings to invest in a pill that can make gasoline out of water, Donald Trump has fleeced them with an economic ideology that will hurt the salt-of-the-earth types even more, and with a foreign policy likely to result in a war that turns their kids into cannon fodder. 

Trump is not one of them except for in no way being an intellectual. This man is probably less learned than our last President who did not have a college education; Truman was an avid reader, and he learned what he had to know at the time throughout his political career. His behavior is inconsistent with someone who takes the moral teachings of Jesus seriously. He seems to cadge together the ethics of Aleister Crowley and the ideology of Ayn Rand, both of whom were as obnoxious, elitist, wicked city-slickers as people can be. Trump is the sort of person who forgets that beef and milk come from cows. He is not the sort that I would expect to attend regular church services unless a camera is rolling.  

Quote:Because, you know who looks nothing like Trump — or rural America? Every politician and media figure who criticizes, fact-checks, or objectively speaks about Trump. Those people look like the smart aleck who grew up and left town, or like the woman from corporate who laid that poor racist uncle off. They think they’re better than them. Those people, to rural America, are Liberals, with a capital L. In this very piece I insulted them. Why should they trust me?

Rural America supports Trump because they believe that urban elites hate him — and they believe that urban elites hate them, too. And I don’t think they’ll turn on him in significant numbers until they stop seeing him as one of their own.

To which I would say -- objective truth may be inconvenient to learn and accept, but that is all that we have. That smart-aleck who went to college and became a marine biologist who could never get a job that he would like in his old home town did what is natural for smart people. The "woman from Corporate" who laid off your uncle is almost certainly no liberal, as liberals rarely get ahead in Corporate America (whose political ideology is usually mirror-image Marxism that endorses exactly what the Marxists excoriates). 

Trump is a nasty plutocrat, but he has played the contempt of working-class America for the educated middle class -- the sorts of people who think that country music is an oxymoron, who cringe when they hear bad grammar or pseudo-science, and who would rather visit Lisbon than Las Vegas.