05/08/2016
(We told you so!)Donald Trump’s destruction of all his Primary opponents seems to have freed various MSM Princelings to discuss subjects previously taboo. A fine example is Head of the Class: How Donald Trump is winning over the white working class. by George Packer The New Yorker May 16 2016 issue.
While heavily salted with the obligatory Bi-Coastal contempt for the Flyovers, Packer’s essay says the previously unsayable:
Trump… grasped what Republican élites are still struggling to fathom: the ideology that has gripped their Party since the late nineteen-seventies — anti-government, pro-business, nominally pious — has little appeal for millions of ordinary Republicans. The base of the Party, the middle-aged white working class, has suffered at least as much as any demographic group because of globalization, low-wage immigrant labor, and free trade.and recognizes the ghastly:
Trump has replaced it with something more dangerous: white identity politics.(Take that, Jeet Heer and Ramesh Ponnuru!)
Packer goes on to talk explicitly about the white vote — merely mentioning which got VDARE banned by Free Republic back in 2001. And he quietly notes a major fault line in the Democratic coalition:
Sanders…kept his campaign alive last week, in Indiana, in large part by beating Clinton nearly two to one among whites without a college degree. Coverage of Sanders has focussed on his support among the young and the progressive, but he has also outperformed Clinton with the white working class. …Sanders has shown that a candidacy based on economic populism can win back some voters who long ago deserted the Democratic Party. It’s hard to know whether these voters, faced with a choice between Clinton and Trump, will revert to the Republican side, stay home, or vote for a Democrat who until now hasn’t known how to reach them.The reality of course is that in 2008 and 2012 many of these people did not vote Republican
Packer politely chastises his readers:
Identity politics, of a different brand from Trump’s, is also gaining strength among progressives. In some cases, it comes with an aversion toward, even contempt for, their fellow-Americans who are white and sinking. Abstract sympathy with the working class as an economic entity is easy, but the feeling can vanish on contact with actual members of the group…who might not sound or look like people urban progressives want to know.Noting the surge in white blue collar death rates in some parts of America Packer shrewdly concludes
…these regions of white working-class pain tend to be areas where Trump enjoys strong support. These Americans know that they’re being left behind, by the economy and by the culture. They sense the indifference or disdain of the winners on the prosperous coasts and in the innovative cities, and it is reciprocated. Trump has seized the Republican nomination by finding scapegoats for the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of working-class whites.Of course he concludes with a bray of complacency about a Democratic victory in 2016 (without which The New Yorker would certainly not have published him) but does smuggle in:
Democratic nominee can’t afford, either politically or morally, to write off those Americans. They need a politics that offers honest answers to their legitimate grievances and keeps them from sliding further into self-destruction.A fatal sign he is out of line with the Democratic Elite.
VDARE.com readers well know these themes have been common on this site from our inception. But it has taken Donald Trump to get them permissible to discuss in the MSM.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.