It was over in the Trump thread.
Here's the full article.Quote:
For months, the only thing that’s surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it is the class culture gap.
One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.
Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “ can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.
Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.
Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. “Directness is a working-class norm,” notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp,” an electronics technician told Lamont. Of course Trump appeals. Clinton’s clunky admission that she talks one way in public and another in private? Further proof she’s a two-faced phony.
Manly dignity is a big deal for working-class men, and they’re not feeling that they have it. Trump promises a world free of political correctness and a return to an earlier era, when men were men and women knew their place. It’s comfort food for high-school-educated guys who could have been my father-in-law if they’d been born 30 years earlier. Today they feel like losers — or did until they met Trump.
Obligatory disclaimer: we all know full well that Trump is full of shit and that analyzing why Clinton lost is not an endorsement of his wrongness.
It's not just a question of culture--it's also a matter of raw political, occupational and economic power.
The Democrats have largely been the party of the professional-managerial class, not the working class, since the late 1970s/early 1980s, the point at which the rapidly expanding PMC became roughly 1/3 of the electorate. "New Democrats" like Clinton thought they were safe in championing a PMC agenda (neoliberal economics, marginalization of urban issues in favor of suburbia, political correctness, etc) because the working class "had nowhere else to go," providing the party with a multi-class coalition that would be difficult to overcome at the national level. But the Democrats' increasingly conservative economic policies eventually forced many working class voters to elect Republicans on the basis of social issues. Now Trump's right-wing economic populism may have finally exploded our frayed political paradigms, definitively providing white working class voters with a new and seemingly permanent ideological home. It's no coincidence that Clinton won only the counties/states considered to be epicenters for the PMC. And it's certainly no coincidence that Trump won almost exclusively in areas where the population is definitively non-PMC.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
) in my interactions with the rural people I talk to, grew up around, and call family. And most of them live in areas that underperformed for HRC. This is, of course, just anecdotal observation, but I think many urban dwellers don't truly understand the vitriolic hatred for Clinton in rural areas. Whether everything they believe is justified or not, they absolutely despise her and often state they wish she was dead.
