Re: Campaign 2016 Part XXIV: Both candidates are the same, but here's why yours is aw
I understand just fine. There are three main reasons people are voting for the Butternut Turd:
1. They hate Hillary & Obama (these are your garden variety rednecks / sexists / racists)
2. They think educated people, especially Washington pols, aren't listening to them (this is the average voter - and they're correct)
3. They're out of work or marginally employed, and screwed because they don't have the education and skills to be relevant to the modern service economy (these people I do genuinely feel bad for, and I think our trade agreements have likely contributed to giving them a raw deal)
I read a piece this past week that talked about how in the first half of the last century successful, educated people in this country used to use words like the N-word and coon, along with unflattering caricatures to marginalize or express contempt for a sector of the American public the speakers felt were beneath them, or deserving of their contempt. Today those same people have substituted an entirely different section of the American public as the target of our scorn, but use the same tactics.
Sure, there are racists and fascists to whom Trumps message is music to their ears. But if you think that 43% of the American electorate supports him because they fall within that category, you simply fail to understand.
The best description I've heard for it is it pertains to your place in line. Think of your position as a place in a long line, heading up over a hill. Over the crest is the American dream.
The line is long, and you are a long way from the crest. But you are proud of where you are at, and what got you there. You may not have an Ivy league education. But you get up in the morning and you go to work. You go to church and try to live your life in a way that has been taught to you as being morally upright. You help friends, neighbors and family members who are in need.
But you don't seem to be moving in that line. You are a patient man. Sometimes it feels like you advance. But most days you feel like you are in the same place you were in yesterday, or maybe even further behind.
But they wait, because that's what they've been taught to do.
Then they see that other people are being moved ahead of them in the line. The other people may be minorities. They are told that these people deserve to go ahead of you in line for that job, or for that spot in college your kid wanted. You see Michelle Obama and you ask, how could she afford to go to Columbia and Harvard. My daddy worked as a municipal worker too, and he couldn't have afforded that. She must have been given help that you weren't given.
They see the woman they went to high school with but who now works for the County. You got better grades than she did. You work longer hours and at a job that is substantially more difficult. Yet she has a public pension waiting for her when she retires and gets four weeks of paid vacation. Why does she now move ahead of you in line?
And the people who are telling them they must yield their place in line are people who refer to them as racist, as a hillbilly, as an uneducated redneck.
When they hear Donald Trump speak, they hear someone say that their place in line will be protected. It's all nonsense of course, but that is what they hear.
But please, just keep reducing it to the "they're just a bunch of racist old rednecks who will soon be dead" argument.
