Arlie Russell Hochschild, in Mother Jones, surprisingly sympathetically, explains where Trump’s support is coming from.
The deep story of the right goes like this:
You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.
Read the whole thing.
Seattle Sam
Obama would argue that your grandparents put the grandparents of the line cutters at the back of the line. Therefore, you should be pushed back.
JDZ
My grandparents arrived from Lithuania to work (at the very back of the line) as coal miners in a region of America completely devoid of the line cutters’ ancestors.
Steve Gregg
I returned to my home in Peoria, IL for a visit and went to see my childhood house in a neighborhood of middle class ranch homes that looked the same as I had left it 45 years before. I got to talking to the guy who lived in my old house, who had a business which he ran out of the garage. He was working there one day when one of the neighbor kids, a black high school boy, walked in, stuck a gun in his face, and took his wallet. Another, younger, black boy, stood lookout at the end of driveway.
The cops caught them in a few minutes, took to the police station, then cut them loose a few hours later. Six months later, they returned, robbed him again, with the same results.
It was an all white neighborhood when I lived there with no crime at all. The first black family moved in right when we left. Now the neighborhood is half black and their kids are invading their neighbor’s homes to rob them with guns. There is a black judge who kicks black criminals loose because social justice.
The Caterpillar factory which propelled the town’s economy is much diminished. The result are homes, here and there, which are boarded up, even in nice middle class areas. The government gives these to black welfare cases as Section 8 housing, which is slowly turning middle class suburbs into ghettos.
A black woman moved next door to my aunt and uncle in a Section 8 house. Her man got out of jail and dealt drugs from the house. He would stand on his driveway, yelling into his cell phone, with people constantly coming and going. It took six months for the cops to finally arrest him.
The black population in this once all white neighborhood is now big enough that groups of black punks walk down the middle of the street, forcing cars to drive around the block. It’s a ghetto power trip for them.
There is an organization that rehabs old cars and gives them to black single mothers on welfare. My uncle worked for the telephone company his whole life. Nobody ever gave me a free car, he said. But if you screw up your life and go on welfare, you get a free car.
His new truck is parked out front of his immaculate home. Somebody has been vandalizing it. It’s not hard to guess who. My uncle, the good citizen, calls it in to the cops, knowing nothing will happen but thinking it’s good to let the police know about crime.
The third time it happened, the same cop came out. My uncle asked him what he could do to avoid this vandalism. Leave Peoria, the cop told him. It’s going to get worse.
My aunt and uncle can’t move because their house is worth less than they paid for it. Nobody wants to invest in a home in a neighborhood that’s going ghetto.
The government wants to build a housing project on the nearby miniature golf course. They might as well drop an atom bomb on the neighborhood. Once criminals begin ranging out from the housing project to prey on the retired folks, the white flight will begin in earnest and the value of all their homes will collapse, the homes they worked to pay off all their lives, their only personal fortune.
The welfare people are coming from the hell of the housing projects of the South Side of Chicago. At the old Cabrini-Green housing projects, the average number of children the welfare mothers had was seven, with a few having as many as twelve. That means that the South Side ghetto population overflows.
It’s a three hour drive to Peoria, which is better, relatively, than Chicago. Slowly, the town is filling up with Chicago refugees. Chicago is like a welfare Chernobyl, spewing dysfunctional black people to all the cities within driving distance where they form new ghettoes.
Des Moines is six hours from Chicago on I-80. My formerly vanilla high school is now ten percent black. There are race riots in the halls. Kids are arrested there, an absurd development to me. The local blacks complain that their kids are sent to jail while white kids are not, but the real reason is that the black parents don’t show up for the hearings where the kids would be automatically sprung, just like the white kids.
The last time I went back to Des Moines, a few years ago, a gang of black people beat a white fisherman to death downtown by the river. A few years before that, a gang of forty black kids ran riot on the midway of the Iowa State Fair, beating up white people and yelling, “IT’S BEAT WHITEY NIGHT!”
You know how many crimes happened at the Iowa State Fair when I lived there through high school and college? None. You went to the fair, you petted a goat, you had a fried Twinkie, you rode a ride or two and then you went home sunburned and happy. There were no Beat Whitey Nights.
The Des Moines Register preposterously claimed that the motive for the riot was unknown. A reporter asked the police info officer if it was true that all the assailants were all black and all the victims white? When she answered yes, she was demoted to the traffic division for telling the truth.
The bottom line is that the government is waging war on the white middle class with their own tax money, subsidizing the growth of welfare dependents and seeding them in the suburbs to wreck them. You can’t fight this, you can only flee to the far suburbs and small towns.
The political strategy is a dynamic form of the Curley strategy, growing a dependent block of voters in one city, then migrating the excess to colonize another town. It appears that there are other welfare Chernobyls, other than Chicago, in other regions.
If you want to know what’s driving Trump’s popularity, there it is. The white working people don’t understand the fine points of what’s happening, but they know they are getting screwed and the government is behind it all. You can’t fool all the people all the time.
Donald Trump is their inarticulate reply. Putting Trump up for president is akin to the medieval tactic of catapulting a rabid dog into the enemy camp. It may not be a great idea, but it’s the best idea they’ve got.
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