Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears
Someone who uncritically swallows the claim that J D Vance explains why the white working class loves Trump, apparently without noticing its extreme thinness: Rod Dreher at the American Conservative, who interviews Vance.
RD: A friend who moved to West Virginia a couple of years ago tells me that she’s never seen poverty and hopelessness like what’s common there. And she says you can drive through the poorest parts of the state, and see nothing but TRUMP signs. Reading “Hillbilly Elegy” tells me why. Explain it to people who haven’t yet read your book.
J.D. VANCE: The simple answer is that these people–my people–are really struggling, and there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time. Donald Trump at least tries.
What many don’t understand is how truly desperate these places are, and we’re not talking about small enclaves or a few towns–we’re talking about multiple states where a significant chunk of the white working class struggles to get by. Heroin addiction is rampant. In my medium-sized Ohio county last year, deaths from drug addiction outnumbered deaths from natural causes. The average kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a constant cycle of growing close to a “stepdad” only to see him walk out on the family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a bit (or at least in the home of an unofficial foster like an aunt or grandparent), watch friends and family get arrested, and on and on. And on top of that is the economic struggle, from the factories shuttering their doors to the Main Streets with nothing but cash-for-gold stores and pawn shops.
But what does Trump have to do with that? Why is that a reason to vote for and support Trump?
The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades. From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues, a la Thomas Frank (more on that below). Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.
From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth. Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth (and I believe there are many), the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very real social crisis. More importantly, these policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.
Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears. He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas. His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground. He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.
That is pathetic. The only item that makes any sense is “He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas,” and does Vance seriously think Trump would do anything about factories shipping jobs overseas? All that’s left is annoying the elites, and that’s not good enough. It’s childish.
This is incredibly thin stuff, and it’s annoying that there’s a media stampede to take it seriously.
But Trump had his neckties manufactured overseas, Vietnam I think. He’s part of the problem. Trump annoys part of the elite, but that doesn’t stop him from being part of it, economic at least (I don’t see him as elite in any other way; if he had a first class education, it didn’t take, not in his vocabulary and phraseology).
Clearly written by a neoconservative, one who thinks new liberals are the Left.
I know a lot of people who aren’t desperate, aren’t even poor, to whom Trump’s candidacy is “music to their ears”, and the music has a lot more to do with the hatred he spews. The white working class has been conditioned for a long time to hate the rest of the working class, those who look different, speak a different language, or sit down to use the bathroom. This was probably a calculated strategy – divide and conquer, so people don’t realize there are more of them than there are of you. Now the Republican leadership is reaping what they’ve sown – a white male electorate that is angry, not because they’re desperate, but because they are no longer the default human being (or they think they’re not; we know they still are, just that there are now a large number of people who are not passively accepting a secondary position).
I come from a family and a world that is white supremacist, Christian dominionist, and patriarchal. They aren’t that way because they are poor or desperate. They are that way because they are that way. It is part of their “identity”. They are that way because they believe they are superior to all the other people in the world who do not look like them, sound like them, or stand up to urinate. And although they are perfectly capable of seeing that some of these “inferior” people are out-achieving them, they can cope with that knowledge simply by telling themselves that these “inferior” people have been given everything and haven’t worked for anything. They can hold onto their superiority only by believing that they have been violently, brutally oppressed, even against all the evidence. And they like it that way. Being angry at their perceived oppression has become a way of life for them, and they get an extreme high from it, without having to actually suffer any real oppression, violence, or brutality. Meanwhile, it gives them an excuse (in their minds) for committing their own oppression, violence, and brutality against their so-called oppressors.
Yes, I speak from knowledge. I lived in that world for far too long. I hid in corners and under beds, I spoke only when I had to, and I got the hell out when the opportunity came up. But I can’t get it out of my memory, no matter how hard I scrub away at it (god, what I wouldn’t give for the ability to repress memories! If only…)
Now I have to relive it every time that huge orange face appears on the TV screen, the computer screen, the front page of the newspaper…and that is constant. The only way to avoid it is to lock myself away until after the election…and then it will still be everywhere, anyway. Even if he loses, as he throws the mother of all temper tantrums.
If by chance you should begin to get the idea that I am an angry woman (whatever euphemism may come to mind, forget it – I am not uppity, mouthy, bitchy, or whatever. I am pissed), you’d be right. I’m angry that there are so many people who think they own the country we all live in, and want to snatch back the small bits of this country that some of us have worked so hard to cave out for ourselves, the fraction of the world we have been able to move into, while they still sit with their legs spread wide apart on the other seat, taking up half our seat, and complaining that we are keeping them from being comfortable. I’m angry that there are so many people who will vote for this great orange monster simply because the woman on the other ticket once said something they found too “uppity” or because she is not a perfect specimen of liberalism. I am angry that the news cycle is giving free press to this monstrosity, so fascinated by him and the ratings he brings with him that they can’t break the spell, sit up, and say “Hey, wait just a minute…”. I’m angry that the media is willing to promote the idea that his support is justified by the support of the working class, ignoring the glaring fact that the non-white working class is not on his team.
Sorry. Just needed to let a little steam come out my ears. I’ll be good now.
Huh. Funny how black former factory workers don’t seem to get excited by Trump’s brave criticism of outsourcing. It’s almost like there’s something else going on here.
I have a dream. No, I mean I have a theory (coughs repeatedly):
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1255056161179509/?type=3&theater
Logic doesn’t enter into it, empty rhetoric is all, hence Brexit. All we need is an imagined threat. For some reason a real threat won’t do. We have many real threats but our capacity to ignore them is overshadowed only by our eagerness to overreact to false threats.
Worst. Species. Ever.
Vance and Dreher are the same rural born made urban good types taking their ultimate, concern trolling revenge on their roots. Dreher did it in his book about his sister. Vance does it in Elegy. It’s the same Frank Schaeffer revenge syndrome, passive-aggressive in the cases of Dreher and Vance. Linking the poor white roots they both loathe to Trump mutually insults both, in a deeply concerned, “explainer” manner. None of it was ever meant to make any more sense than that.