Guest post: He articulates their misplaced rage
Originally a comment by Claire on Marcus Aurelius he isn’t.
I grew up amongst these people too, albeit in the UK not the US. But the working class man who toils down the pit or on the docks or the steelworks etc, tough, salt of the earth types who don’t tolerate anything they regard as weakness (with a special focus on “womanly” behaviors) are the same there too.
I’m from the northeast of England, where once there were jobs aplenty in those industrialized industries. The men whose fathers and grandfathers and so on worked down the pit, they work down the pit and they expect their sons to do so as well. Except they didn’t because the collieries, the shipyards, the mills all closed down and suddenly there were no jobs anymore. They weren’t helped or supported by the Government (who was doing the closing) and whole villages died or were reduced to a rump population. Communities destroyed and scattered to the four winds.
Those people were the solid base of the Labour party, and most would have died rather than vote Tory. Anyone who did was outcast as class traitors (this was not the case in other places where working class Tories were a thing). They were socialists and proud of it, the word doesn’t carry the negative connotations it does in the US.
These were the people that voted for Brexit.
I was horrified. Couldn’t they see that it would hurt them not help them? That a post-Brexit Britain would be no more interested in anything beyond London and the Home Counties than before? Some of them even voted Tory, a fact so astonishing I could barely believe it was true.
They’ll keep believing, even when the inevitable economic and logistic havoc is rained down upon them. They’ll blame Europe for any messes and now they have COVID19 as another excuse for why Brexit isn’t the Utopia they were promised.
They are the British equivalent of Trump voters – angry white working class people who are blaming many past injuries on immigrants and globalism going back decades. They’re given an icon – he doesn’t follow any of their rules on masculine behaviors but he articulates their misplaced rage. They’ll follow him over the cliff, telling themselves their beloved leader knows what he is doing.
Being a somewhat angry working class person myself, I don’t understand how this silver spoon ignoramus represents anything I believe in. He only inspires righteous indignation in me. I know much about the immigrant population, and I know the enormous value they have in feeding the world. I don’t see him as an effective leader or a respectable role model, I see him as a xenophobic separatist flag waver without a cause. Most of the hillbillies and rednecks who support him are rebellious against an imagined enemy, a poltergeist, a phantasm. The thing they are raged about and opposed to doesn’t really exist. He is a corpulent, ignorant, media clown who lives in la la land, he cannot relate to his voter base on any level. It is a prime example of a cult of personality, and left unchecked will (and has for the most part) developed into a out of control fascist propaganda state. Trump is not to be believed, not only the deliberate disinformation and the condescention he has for all of us, but the sheer stupidity of his knee jerk capricious statements, attitudes, and policy manuvering that further his dystopian agenda. There is no mystery to this man, he is exactly as he seems, an immature rage tweeter who never developed into a mature human being. He is not fit to lead anyone, he hasn’t the character and never will have. Maybe people feel powerless and view it as some kind of team sport that they have to be fans of, one side or the other, and so they align themselves with the current champion (illegitimate as he is), so they don’t have to do any advanced thinking on the subject.
Gawd, I wish I could find one Trumpie who could honestly tell me, in detail, why they think he is a good man and why. I really don’t think that is possible, yet here he is in office. The contrast between Obama and him is staggering, and he has the insane gall to criticize his predecessor. Truly beyond the pale.
But unfortunately, the coal deposits (which they did not own anyway) had a finite time before they were exhausted. But worse from their point of view, that coal they mined fed into an international division of labour, which worked at achieving a post-coal, post-fossil-carbon economic reality, so every coal train they helped load contributed to the destruction of their lifestyle; which they had persuaded themselves could go on forever. On this point, Karl Marx was quite right.
That their counterparts in the US finished up supporting a political fraud like Captain Bonespurs (aka Trump) illustrates well the confusion of the times we live in.
The working class does of course have plenty of things to be legitimately angry about. Voting for Trump amounts to saying out loud – louder,in fact, than it’s possible to ever say anything with words – that Your only problem with any of those things is that they don’t go far enough.
Trump was elected by his base to break things. He is breaking things, and they are happy. They haven’t realized yet that a lot of the things he is breaking make up the very system they depend on; they only know that it makes liberals unhappy, because liberals don’t like broken things messing up their nice Utopia. (Like this was a liberal Utopia before Trump broke it – but they perceived it that way, because blacks, gays, and women run everything…in their view.)
That’s one problem I had with Bernie. It seemed like a lot of his voters also just wanted to break things. Just breaking things is no solution…you need to be able to repair things, too.
I think that explains the strangeness of Bernie voters who decided to vote for Trump – break things. Oh, and yes, hatred of Hillary and a desire to punish her. Too bad they had to punish the rest of the world with her. Couldn’t they just have sent her a mean email, complete with unhappy emojis?
Twiliter #2
It is often not so much that they like/admire Trump as it is that they LOATHE the world they think the “left” is going to force on them. Look at the trans cult issues — Obama did an end run around the rights of real women and reality by Executive Order and pushed trans cult into the lives of many people who do not want to live their lives by the edicts and whims of men in womanface.
So it may be worth asking why the agenda of the new left is so repellent to so many people —- so repellent that many of them will hold their noses and vote for a guy like Trump. There is a pic of Biden chatting with the odious Charles Clymer —> two men with lots of issues about their behavior and attitudes towards real women just having a great old time together. The sight of that made me feel sick to my stomach and fearful about what Biden is promising to the trans cult so…………..
I come from the same part of the country as Claire and I see much the same thing. I grew up as all industry in the North East was being deliberately and systematically dismantled with no investment or will from government to replace those industries or to repair the damage. Communities were torn apart, families were destroyed, opportunities were hoisted out of reach and the people were abandoned by a Tory government for which many now have inexplicable warm, sentimental feelings of nostalgia.
I live in the former Labour stronghold that was Tony Blair’s constituency, which now has a conservative MP. On one side are the former pit villages Claire describes. On another is the former home of the ship building industry on the Tees and Tyne, now gone. Nearby are the sites of the former bulwarks of the UK chemical and steel industries, also all but defunct. Throughout all this area are the farms which have been gradually starved. The route of the world’s first public steam railway runs past my front door and while it’s now pleasingly a nature reserve, it is seen as symbolic of the industrial and economic collapse of the North East over the last 50 years or so; a failure of promise, potential and optimism.
The people living here feel justifiably disenfranchised. The region, its communities and its people were treated shamefully and subsequent governments have done nothing to compensate or repair. At the heart of the fury in the 80s and 90s was Thatcher’s Tory government which did exactly what everyone expected by putting profit above people, laying waste to the region. The people were overwhelmingly working class Labour voters to begin with and by long tradition who found their worst fears coming true under Thatcher.
And yet now, as Claire says, the region is overwhelmingly conservative and has the strongest support for Brexit in the country. Cameron’s and now Johnson’s governments have openly sought to recapture the ‘good old days’ of Thatcherism, the very thing that destroyed the North East and seemed to work hard to prevent its recovery. Yet many of the people who lived through those times are now staunch supporters of a government with the exact same disregard for the North and its people. Racism and other kinds of cruelty seem to have reached an all-time high. Attitudes toward the homeless, the jobless, the mentally and physically infirm would shame Scrooge. Cruelty to animals is rife and rapidly increasing. Disregard for the beautiful countryside is common.
It looks a lot like a classic backlash; change for its own sake and breaking things for the joy of it. Now, I’m a big fan of breaking things, I’ve based two careers on it (so far). But as iknklast says, the desire to break things should be motivated by a passion to build something better and I’m not seeing that.
If this is a backlash, it couldn’t have come at a worse time and I think it’s hurting us more as a region and a people than even Thatcher’s government ever did.
One of the biggest issues in trying to break the hold of Trump and his overseas imitators over their base constituency is that it’s almost impossible to convince someone that they’ve been suckered.
It’s one thing to try to persuade someone that they are merely wrong–there’s even a certain pride that can come from saying, “I was wrong about X in the past, but I’ve learned better.” But as any law enforcement type who deals with fraud and con men will tell you, the victims are astoundingly reluctant to believe they are, in fact, victims.
So when talking to Trumpians, you find yourself encountering this whole rationalization process that justifies their actions up to date, because to acknowledge that Great Leader has feet of clay is to admit that they can be conned, fooled, suckered. (Note the lack of empathy in the terms we assign to victims of con-men, who are actually far less often simply called victims.)
Of course, once you’re inside the con–once you’ve bought into the idea that the Great Orange One is here to save you from the destruction of Main Street–then you have to accept all those other lies, as well–that the problem is foreigners, and immigrants, and lazy blacks, and the queers and atheists destroying religious beliefs. And maybe those impulses were already there, but now you have to cling to them, without question, because to question those means questioning the original premise, which could lead to realizing you’re a dupe.
This ties into a lot of conservative movement issues, too. I’m also thinking of the way ‘Confederate Culture’ defends their statues and icons as ‘history’. The fact is, yes, most Confederate soldiers did not own slaves. They were dupes of the wealthy plantation owners who wanted to go to war to defend slavery. But admitting your great-grandpappy was a chump is hard, in no small part because a group of very dedicated racists have spent several generations pushing the idea of ‘legacy’ in the Deep South.
‘t’s almost impossible to convince someone that they’ve been suckered.’ I’ve heard people say, and have just read an article to this effect, that this is exactly why the Cummings scandal feels like a step change–people feel like they’ve been played for fools–and stupid soppy bleeding-heart fools at that.
freemage @#8:
Many if not most victims of cons are innocent-to-gullible victims of their own greed, by which I mean the seeking of a large return for comparatively small to zero outlay. Hence the old warning: ‘if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.’
Most advertising plays either to the victim’s greed, or to the victim’s ego. Trump’s offer to “make America great again” was an invitation he extended all the way to Turdsville, Arkansas for all comers to share in the ‘greatness’; which a lot of Turdsvillians found too hard to resist.
Such lines as ‘Hurry! This offer must end in … (insert minimal number of hours here)….’ are there to encourage the mug buyers to stampede, and to suspend use of whatever critical faculties they have. Hence that likewise time-honoured saying: ‘a fool and his money are soon parted.’
Trump owes his present position to the vagaries of the American collegiate system, and he rode to office on a minority of the popular vote. American history swarms with con-men, and I dare say a majority of Americans can spot a con a mile off. The story of Trump actually proves it.
My rule of thumb, which I learned from someone else, is ‘if you need a yes or no answer right now, the answer is no.’
@Ophelia Awesome photo – it takes me back. Thank you for including it.
@latsot What you said.
@Omar Of course the mining and shipbuilding and so on were coming to an end. I think it was hard for people who literally had generations living and working in the same way, to accept that change was coming. But these were nationalized industries and the British Government made thousands of people out of work without a single thought to what they would be able to do afterwards. It was callous and unnecessary. But we didn’t matter.
So are the people of my cultural home angry? You’re damn right they are. My great-grandfather was on the Jarrow March (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarrow_March). More than eighty years later, the situation has not changed nearly as much as it should have. Because we still don’t matter.
How that translates into a complete 180 on decades of politics, I don’t know. Why they focus on all the squirrels the Tories point at rather than seeing what they’re actually doing makes no sense to me.
They call me a class traitor (I have 2 degrees and a decidedly not working class job). I say they are the ones who are the traitors. All I did was clamber out of the poverty trap. They’ve dug the hole deeper and called it victory.
My pleasure, Claire. Thank you for the post.
Omar:
Way off topic but if that were ever true (I have my doubts) then it is manifestly not true now. Most scams are based on fear and confusion rather than greed. I could write chapters on this (come to think of it, I have written several chapters on this) but I’ll spare you all. I’ll just say that people (even experts) are routinely overwhelmed by the systems we’re all embedded in and which we’re never taught how to use. If con artists are appealing to greed to work a scam, then they’re doing it the hard way.
latsot:
Discussion of fraud and scammers can never be off topic when the name of Donald Trump is involved in it.
A few details would help your case @ #14. But a quick google search confirms that an ecological niche does not stay vacant for long before some creature arises, or arrives from elsewhere, to fill it. It is the oldest story in all creation: maximum return per unit of biomass or energy invested. Such is commonly what is offered by the scammer to the erstwhile victim, and at the same time sought for him or her self. The Nigerian variant was/ is a prize example, though it appears to have been closed down now: it is a long time since one of their fabulous offers appeared in my email inbox.
As you are probably aware, optimal foraging is the reason why tigers normally do not chase things like mice. (OK a bored one in a zoo enclosure might.) Cats and other predators come in a huge range of shapes and sizes, each optimised for hunting within a particular range of prey, with minimal energy expenditure per unit of quarry. So the ponies quartered down at the local riding club are in no danger from the local puss cats out for a night on the prowl, nor are small mammals out roaming the bushveldt in danger of being chased down by lions. Except for a bit of fun on an otherwise slow day, of course.
Trump appeals IMHO to those who don’t mind getting a whole lot more than they pay for, and who like having their ego stroked in the process. As do those in the sights of the hordes of scammers out there in the everyday economic jungle.
Omar,
I’m not making a case so much as stating a fact, this is an area I have some expertise in. Greed is exploitable but so are fear and confusion. In today’s environment, the latter are far easier and cheaper to exploit with a much faster turnaround rate. The reason you don’t see many 419 scams any more isn’t that they don’t work, it’s that there are much cheaper and more effective ways to con people.
Most scams around today involve some variation of convincing someone to hand over bank details (usually posing as a bank employee claiming fraudulent activity on the victim’s account), man-in-the-middle attacks or ransomware. In none of these cases can the victims be accused of greed. It isn’t even really fair to accuse them of ignorance since I know more than a few security experts who have fallen for scams of this sort or otherwise left themselves unprotected.
It just isn’t the case any more that you can’t con an honest person and I don’t think it ever really was.
As for Trump, it seems to me that fear is at the heart of much of his con game. Perhaps the presto-changeo politics of the former Labour supporters in the North East of England has a lot to do with fear, too: the idea that a community has systematically had almost everything taken from it including worldly goods, tradition and opportunity… and now foreigners want to take what’s left. I can roll my eyes at people who fall for such an obvious scam, aimed as it is at where they’re most vulnerable, but I can’t blame it on greed.
And also concern for others. I remember nearly falling for a scam a while back that purported to be from someone I knew, saying she was in trouble and needed to have some money sent to her. I realised that a) she certainly had friends and family closer than me, and it was unlikely she’d have tried getting in touch with me first and b) if she were that desperate she would have rung me, or someone else, instead of emailing–but it was really really difficult not to ‘help’ this person. The most recent scam I’ve received was supposed to be from a lottery winner disbursing his money, who wanted to give it to random people on the condition that they used some percentage to help others.