The Cognitive Dissident

This is a terrific article. Here are two excerpts.

“The National Review, a conservative magazine for the Republican elite, recently unleashed an attack on the “white working class”, who they see as the core of Trump’s support.

The first essay, Father Führer, was written by the National Review’s Kevin Williamson, who used his past reporting from places such as Appalachia and the Rust Belt to dissect what he calls “downscale communities”.

He describes them as filled with welfare dependency, drug and alcohol addiction, and family anarchy – and then proclaims:

“Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster, There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. … The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.”

“The differences are manifest in education. The pathway offered out of the working class is to get a college education. Yet at the best colleges there are veryfew low-income students, except for a few lucky enough to grow up in New York City, Los Angeles or Boston.

Differences are also stark around health issues, as well as social issues such asmarriage, family and where people live. The growing differences have made it easier and seemingly acceptable to ridicule the white working class, further marginalizing and isolating them. Go into an office in New York City (I worked in them for 20 years) and you will hear people joke about “white trash”, “trailer trash”, “rednecks”, “round people from square states”. Turn on the TV and you hear more cheap jokes about how they dress, talk and behave.”

My thoughts:

The author is quite right in how the Republican elites attack working class whites, but he is remiss in not pointing out that the Democrat elites do the same.

I spent over a decade as a social worker in Appalachia.  I know full well how these people feel utterly abandoned and powerless.  As a social worker I found that all of the activist and advocacy groups were based on race not income. The Urban League, NAACP and La Rasa are all good groups that do a lot of great work. However, there is no comparable group advocating for the working poor whites, especially rural and suburban whites.  It is hardly any wonder why they feel marginalized and are easy prey for those advocating white supremacy.

These are the Donald Trump voters. I am seeing and hearing increasingly virulent attacks on these low income white supporters calling them neo-NAZI’s and such, but in fact they are not; however, it is easy for them to be convinced the problem is caused by foreigners when no other easy answer is given.  You will notice that working class whites are also flocking to Bernie Sanders. He also gives the working poor whites a simplistic scapegoat (Wall Street bankers); but in reality he, just like Trump, sidesteps the larger problems facing the working poor.

To make matter worse, the working poor whites are increasingly hearing attacks on them because they are white. Poor blacks and Hispanics are being taught to scapegoat whites in general, not just rich whites, but all whites.   Talk of “White Privilege” coming from rich kids at elite universities does great harm to impoverished whites who would love to trade places with their accusers. The effect of this is to divide the working poor and further dis-empower all of them.

It seems the white working poor no longer have any political friends and are consequently easy targets for the elites of both parties. Not only is this immoral, it is a ticking time bomb in the US.