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.

women against pit closures | Jessica Scott

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.

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