Guest post: If you want evidence of the contempt of Conservative punditry
Guest post by Lady Mondegreen.
If you want evidence of the contempt of Conservative punditry for the working-class whites who vote for them, look no further than the National Review:
Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America…
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.”
The Right needs little excuse to lecture poor people on how it’s all their own fault, but I’m pretty sure that David French and Kevin Williamson are going on about “Personal responsibility” here in order to disavow any personal moral responsibility on the part of movement Conservatism for the rise of Citizen Trump.
Where I apparently agree with Kevin Williamson (the original piece is behind a paywall, so I’m going by this “defense,”) is, we both think Trump’s supporters have a sense of aggrieved entitlement.
We disagree about the nature and causes of that imagined entitlement. Williamson seems to think the poor whites attracted to Trump are morally dysfunctional (and uppity re their betters at National Review) because that damned Welfare State has conditioned them to expect that the government won’t let them and their children starve. I think that they’re morally culpable for buying into the racism and xenophobia that the Right has been exploiting for decades, that lets them blame their economic problems on black and brown people, and foreigners.
But those economic problems are real. They cannot be handwaved aside with that handy conservative mantra “Personal Responsibility.”
Furthermore, they are *anti* government spending, apparently believing that if the government stops regulating and taxing businesses, the businesses will hire them at fair wages (and those lazy people who are using the social safety net for bad reasons, somehow, while mine are good reason will have to get off their butts and go to work). They use programs and hate the programs.
It’s easy to blame the underclass for the rise of Trump, but the evidence shows that Trump has significant support among elite college graduates and self-described political moderates. There is discontent across the board.
One thing that has been exposed by the Democratic contest is the contempt that middle-class Democrats have for for working class supporters of that party. Bernie has given some hope for the future, but the Establishment won’t give an inch, it will have to be torn from their hands.
The National Review just wants to ignore the serious lack of wage growth. There are fewer unskilled jobs around but people have not been given an education to help them to be more skilled
That’s possible, but a more parsimonious explanation is simply
For the last 50 years, the Republican/Conservative establishment has been running a massive bait-and-switch on their own base. In What’s The Matter With Kansas?, Thomas Frank offers this catalog
This kind of thing drives liberals right up the wall: how can these people be so stupid? How can they not see? How can they keep voting Republican year after year, generation after generation?
My sense of it isn’t that they didn’t see, but that they didn’t care. Their lives were OK; the Republicans gave lip-service to their hot-button issues, and that was good enough.
What’s changed isn’t that they’ve suddenly wised up, but that their lives are no longer OK. The long, slow decline of the middle and working classes–accelerating after the 2008 financial crisis and continuing through the Great Recession–has finally crossed a threshold where things are not OK. (see: Return of the Undeserving Poor: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/15/return-of-the-undeserving-poor)
So the deal’s off, the bait-and-switch won’t work any more, and what we’re left with is raw tribalism. Trump isn’t so much running for president as he is angling to be tribal chief.
Krugman writes about the same National Review article: Republican Elite’s Reign of Disdain http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/opinion/republican-elites-reign-of-disdain.html
Who Turned My Blue State Red? http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/opinion/sunday/who-turned-my-blue-state-red.html argues that the entitlement issue is actually a divide-and-conquer strategy, with the fault line running between the first quintile, who receive benefits but don’t vote (are profoundly politically disengaged) and the second quintile, who administer benefits (think: police, nurses, social workers, teachers), and do vote, and resent the sense of entitlement that they perceive among the recipients in the bottom quintile.
It’s easy to blame the underclass for the rise of Trump, but the evidence shows that Trump has significant support among elite college graduates and self-described political moderates. There is discontent across the board.
I think that elite college graduates have some support for Trump because they realize that even their white collar jobs, in IT for example, are jeopardized by immigration. The fact that Disney Corp. imported foreign IT experts who were then trained by the Disney corp. workers they were to replace ( under penalty of no severance package) really drove that home. Those imported workers were only paid 60% of the salary earned by the Disney employees they replaced
And yet the cost of a set of mouse ears is still rising.
That major *all American* multinationals can now avail themselves of numerous visa programs to import white collar workers en masse from places like India has been a wake up call.
When that Trans-Pacific Trade agreement kicks in, an agreement that throws open the borders, America will be flooded with cheap labor engineers and IT experts and other white collar personnel from China. Wage structures are set to really head south.
John, how? China is not a party to the TPPA.