I was 17, working at the rec center watching over the few remaining kids waiting for their parents to come pick them up from the after-school program. I sat on the bench watching them play tag or something similar along with a coworker who was also a neighborhood friend. Not a particularly close friend but the kind of friend that comes with playing pick-up basketball with the same people 4-5 times a week for the better part of a decade. At the time, I had just been accepted to college and was looking forward to adulthood, so I asked my friend who was also about to graduate high school where he was going to college after this year.
::Liberals tend to find it hard to see the stereotypical racist “working class” Trump voter as a victim of economic policies that have deindustrialized large swaths of the country and removed traditional paths to economic security that the white working class had previously enjoyed.
::I mean, we all told them they should learn to code, right?::
Yeah, so why didn't they learn to code? Isn't all that Poor White Bigoted Trash always going on about "personal responsibility" and "pull yourself up by your bootstraps"? Seems to me they're finally getting the reckoning that's been coming to them for a LONG time.... Those are the very White men and women who form lynch mobs (and I should know, some of them are my relatives!), so my sympathy for them kind of went for a jog and never came back.
That said, I get your point—and I agree with adin thayer below that Clinton NeoLiberalism is what sent a LOT of well-paying Blue-Collar jobs to other lands so the bosses could get richer...at least until the Robots take over. I hear it in my youngest brother's voice when he had to stop driving long-distance trucks because of decades of repetitive stress injuries, and in my kid brother's voice when he works more than full-time as a "consultant" so the companies that hire him don't have to pay medical benefits to someone with a synthetic heart valve. Of course, I also hear my kid brother's injured tone when his Latino shift foreman didn't appreciate his "Messican" jokes and he was let go from his last job, too....
(I wish I was making that last one up.)
I'm with adin on reading more about your take on why Trump is the hallowed victim/champion of people he sees as nothing more than suckers.
hey, there's a lot to chew on here. i wholly agree with the last section of your argument. i think liberals are ready to swallow stories of victimhood easily and present their/ourselves as their champions. i find myself in tough corners sometimes sounding unsympathetic when i'm pointing out the way this victim is also a harmer, or is using victimhood to obscure other reasons for failure.
there's more to say, and i hope you will, about trump as victim in chief and how the legions of blue collar white men who see him as their champion identify with his capital V as a description of their own status. you might saying i'm doing the thing you're arguing against, ie seeing their identity as victims more clearly than the ways in which their economic decline makes them actual victims of capitalism and neo liberal policies promulgated by clinton to send their jobs elsewhere where others in poorer countries could become victims of foreign bosses who cared nothing about them. but the experience of themselves as victims has also enabled them to accept and employ violent rhetoric and actions against people who are not victims. so i hope you write more about the particular way in which trump, a perpetrator of the first degree, has succeeded in becoming their hallowed victim/champion.
::Liberals tend to find it hard to see the stereotypical racist “working class” Trump voter as a victim of economic policies that have deindustrialized large swaths of the country and removed traditional paths to economic security that the white working class had previously enjoyed.
::I mean, we all told them they should learn to code, right?::
Yeah, so why didn't they learn to code? Isn't all that Poor White Bigoted Trash always going on about "personal responsibility" and "pull yourself up by your bootstraps"? Seems to me they're finally getting the reckoning that's been coming to them for a LONG time.... Those are the very White men and women who form lynch mobs (and I should know, some of them are my relatives!), so my sympathy for them kind of went for a jog and never came back.
That said, I get your point—and I agree with adin thayer below that Clinton NeoLiberalism is what sent a LOT of well-paying Blue-Collar jobs to other lands so the bosses could get richer...at least until the Robots take over. I hear it in my youngest brother's voice when he had to stop driving long-distance trucks because of decades of repetitive stress injuries, and in my kid brother's voice when he works more than full-time as a "consultant" so the companies that hire him don't have to pay medical benefits to someone with a synthetic heart valve. Of course, I also hear my kid brother's injured tone when his Latino shift foreman didn't appreciate his "Messican" jokes and he was let go from his last job, too....
(I wish I was making that last one up.)
I'm with adin on reading more about your take on why Trump is the hallowed victim/champion of people he sees as nothing more than suckers.
hey, there's a lot to chew on here. i wholly agree with the last section of your argument. i think liberals are ready to swallow stories of victimhood easily and present their/ourselves as their champions. i find myself in tough corners sometimes sounding unsympathetic when i'm pointing out the way this victim is also a harmer, or is using victimhood to obscure other reasons for failure.
there's more to say, and i hope you will, about trump as victim in chief and how the legions of blue collar white men who see him as their champion identify with his capital V as a description of their own status. you might saying i'm doing the thing you're arguing against, ie seeing their identity as victims more clearly than the ways in which their economic decline makes them actual victims of capitalism and neo liberal policies promulgated by clinton to send their jobs elsewhere where others in poorer countries could become victims of foreign bosses who cared nothing about them. but the experience of themselves as victims has also enabled them to accept and employ violent rhetoric and actions against people who are not victims. so i hope you write more about the particular way in which trump, a perpetrator of the first degree, has succeeded in becoming their hallowed victim/champion.