from The American Conservative Rob Dreher writes Trump: Fishtown’s Champion Against Belmont:
The Davos elites of the Democrat and Republican parties didn’t get the teenage daughters of Fishtown pregnant, or didn’t get the Fishtown sons busted for possession or fired from his job for failing a drug test. Those elites didn’t make them stop going to church, or break up their marriage, and don’t tell them to sit on their butts playing video games all day instead of trying to hustle up a living. But those elites did, in many cases, have a lot to do with why they got laid off in their fifties and can’t find work, and why their adult children have to make do with crappy service industry jobs instead of manufacturing jobs that paid well, and on which a family could build a future.
Dreher links to a few other pertinent articles:
from JD Vance in USA Today, Trump speaks for those Bush betrayed
Trump’s voters, instead, wear an almost existential sense of betrayal. He relies onunmarried voters, individuals who rarely attend church services and those without much higher education. Many of these Trump voters have abandoned the faith of their forefathers and myriad social benefits that come with it. Their marriages have failed, and their families have fractured. The factories that moved overseas used to provide not just high-paying jobs, but also a sense of purpose and community. Their kids (and themselves) might be more likely to die from a heroin overdose than any other group in the country.
Cruz’s voters dislike Jeb Bush because he has strayed from conservative orthodoxy. Trump’s voters loathe Jeb Bush because their lives are falling apart, and they blame people like him.
In The Daily Beast Joel Kotkin writes We Now Join the U.S. Class War Already in Progress
The reasons for this opposition are obvious. Progressive policies like higher minimum wages and stricter environmental and labor laws hit small businesses harder than bigger firms, which have the staff and resources to adapt to the regulatory vise. Once seen as the leading, creative edge of the economy, small business has not done well under Obama: For the first time in modern history, more firms (PDF) are going out of business than staying solvent.
But there’s another, more ascendant part of the middle class—highly educated professionals, government workers, and teachers—who have done far better under President Obama. In 2012, professionals generally approved of his regime, according to Gallup, by a 52 to 43 percent margin. These voters have become a critical part of the Democratic coalition; indeed, eight of the nation’s 10 wealthiest counties—including Westchester County in New York, Morris County in New Jersey, and Marin County in California—all went Democratic in 2012.
These middle-income workers increasingly do not work for the private economy; they occupy quasi-public jobs dependent on public dollars rather than private markets. Universities, a core Democratic constituency, have been hiring like mad: Between 1987 and 2011, they added 517,636 administrators and professional employees, or an average of 87 every working day.
This educated and often well credentialed middle class tends toward progressive politics; in fact, university professors have become ever more leftist, outnumbering conservatives six to one. Indeed, those voters with advanced degrees were the only group of whites by education to support Obama in 2012.
In modern America, these people serve largely as a clerisy, hectoring the public and instructing them how to live. A bigger state is not a threat to them, but a boon. No surprise that public unions and academics have emerged as among the largest and most loyal donors to Democrats.
The bulk of this population belongs to what some social scientists call the “precariat,” people who face diminished prospects of achieving middle-class status—a good job, homeownership, some decent retirement. The precariat is made up of a broad variety of jobs that include adjunct professors, freelancers, substitute teachers—essentially any worker without long-term job stability. According to one estimate, at least one-third of the U.S. workforce falls into this category. By 2020, a separate study estimates, more than 40 percent of Americans, or 60 million people, will be independent workers—freelancers, contractors, and temporary employees.
This constituency—notably the white majority—is angry, and with good cause. Between 1998 and 2013, white Americans have seen declines in both their incomes and their life expectancy, with large spikes in suicide and fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse. They have, as one writer notes, “lost the narrative of their lives,” while being widely regarded as a dying species by a media that views them with contempt and ridicule.
In this sense, the flocking by stressed working-class whites to the Trump banner—the New York billionaire won 45 percent of New Hampshire Republican voters who did not attend college—represents a blowback from an increasingly stressed group that tends to attend church less and follow less conventional morality, which is perhaps one reason they prefer the looser Trump to the Bible-thumping Cruz, not to mention the failing Ben Carson.
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