In 1980 they were called "Reagan Democrats", a sign of the GOP's health in gaining new voters. Today the Stop Trump movement calls them a heroin addicted, uneducated white underclass, losers who deserve to lose because they make bad choices, among them falling for the words of a con-man politician like Trump.
Mainstream Republican opinion is now referring to the archetypal Trump voter as underclass, as a victim, yes, but of their own pathologies. Without using the words they are referring to people who used to be called "white trash."
There has long been a tradition of identifying poor whites, especially ones in Appalachia beginning in the 1950s when "The Other America" was noticed, and in the Depression era Dust Bowl region. Generally they were perceived as victims, locked in pockets of poverty. Their condition of chronic, multi-generational poverty was location-based rather than character-based.
They were white and native born, not ethnic. They looked like "regular Americans", only very poor.
Ethnic and racial prejudice is not just a southern thing. I saw ethnic prejudice first hand in northern and supposedly liberal Boston 45 years ago. The Irish disliked the Italians and vice versa, the Catholics disliked the Protestants and vice versa, and everyone hated the blacks.
The Southern Strategy of Nixon co-opted the George Wallace vote. Ronald Reagan's charm and communication skills further refined the message that remains Republican orthodoxy. He spoke of free enterprise and hard work and an American morning and bright future. Just get government off our back and just force some better self discipline on slackers benefiting from welfare fraud, drug abuse, Food Stamp abuse, lack of work ethic, bad families and bad values. There was a racial subtext: welfare fraud, drug abuse, slackers, Food Stamp abuse, and urban did not mean black, but it implied black, or was associated with black.
George Wallace knew it the association and voiced it until 1968, then he talked of "urban", not black. The people who wanted to hear it heard it. Reagan condemned racism. Reagan was not racist. He recognized there were a great many good hard working law abiding blacks whose efforts were made harder due to fellow blacks who were mired in a cycle of poverty, drugs, lawlessness, and self-destruction. But he could communicate to the subtle and not-so-subtle racial and ethnic judgements of Americans. Archie Bunker heard him, or heard what he wanted to hear when Reagan spoke of Welfare Queens.
The Stop Trump movement has ended the subtlety, and is speaking in as clear a voice as did George Wallace and Strom Thurmond back before 1968. Writers for respectable mainstream Republican publications are describing an underclass in racial terms and condemning it. Trump voters are white trash. They aren't victims. They are lazy, drug addicted, and government dependent. They are welfare and Food Stamp cheats. They live in poverty because they are too lazy to get a modern education and move to where jobs are. They vote for Trump because they think the solution is more government benefits and more trade protection for declining industries.
Who says this? Erick Erickson the founder of Red State dot Com and Kevin Williamson, a writer for National Review are saying it loud and clear and without niceties. Williamson: "The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles."
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| Stop Trump Ad |
A group of voters like Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment Insurance, and Disability checks for the deserving poor want a government that taxes enough to support a safety net. They want government to go to bat for them. Trump's message is that he will do exactly that, and they will win and get their share, with his help. This is in conflict with a libertarian Romney/Ryan traditional Republican orthodoxy of low taxes for the wealthy and self-reliance for the poor who get their financial reward from trickle down of jobs from factories financed by the accumulated wealth of the "job creators." This is the party of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, the party of the donors.
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| Orthodox Republican Trickle Down |
In the intra-party fight for leadership between Trump and non-Trump (currently represented by Cruz but possibly someone else, better liked and more mainstream than Cruz) the establishment Republicans recognize that it is not enough to criticize entitlements enjoyed by the black, Hispanic, women, gay groups that Hillary Clinton embraces. Those people are lost to them, and besides, this is a Republican party primary, a party that is mostly white. They need to distinguish the takers from the makers, the bad from the good. They need to distinguish between the white voters who remain comfortable with small government libertarianism and white voters who want--and use--the safety net.
That is what they are doing, and it isn't in code. They can't say "urban" because the problem is rural. And they can't say "immigrant" because the problem is native born. White "takers" need to be named and condemned, harshly. Very harshly.
"If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog—you will come to an awful realization. ... The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die."
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White Trash and Our 21st Century Plantation Economy
Yes, UpClose is right, now the Republic establishment has become the leading persecutor of disenfranchised whites. Because disenfranchised whites now largely support Trump or Sanders, Republicans are eager to denounce the whole lot of them as “white trash”. If Trump has done any service to America, it is his exposure of how mean-spirited and vicious the Republican establishment has become. It is breath taking. I welcome the curtains being yanked back, I feel liberated by it, it is high time for class warfare. Ready the firing squads like the Romanians did for Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife after the Soviets fell, or as the Parisian revolutionaries did with the guillotine for King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. We have the Second Amendment and open carry firearms. We are ready.
If entrenched wealth and the donor classes of the Republican Party want to rile up a lynch mob like those who executed the Ceaușescu’s on the street in 1989, then demonizing and trashing “white trash” is just the group to gun them down. Wall Street traders and their elite American Conservative spokesmen are banging the cage in reckless fashion. The Republican establishment’s fears of Trump are palpable and visceral. Just read Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, https://goo.gl/yKbpTS, or the warnings of Carl Ichan about prospects of violent revolution to punish a repressive American oligarchy. White trash armed to the teeth giving a deadly bite is more than merely possible. See, “Billionaire investor Carl Icahn backs Trump” http://goo.gl/Owqvu, and “The Invisible Poverty of ‘Poor White Trash’,” The American Conservative, http://goo.gl/eUgrri.
Use of the term “white trash” is more apropos than our ignorant elites might think. Wikipedia says:
In 1854, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the chapter "Poor White Trash" in her book A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe wrote that slavery not only produces "degraded, miserable slaves", but also poor whites who are even more degraded and miserable. The plantation system forced those whites to struggle for subsistence. Beyond economic factors, Stowe traces this class to the shortage of schools and churches in their community, and says that both blacks and whites in the area look down on these "poor white trash". (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_trash).
America is not just in a long recession or slow recovery. We are quickly moving to a 21st century Plantation economy. As UpClose has aptly analyzed in previous posts, take your pick of perspective: Bernie says our increasingly miserable economy should be seen as class oppression. Hillary says it’s a matter of oppressed racial and gender minorities. Trump says is opportunistic global greed that should have been restrained by smart leaders. Where do the “white trash” fit in to these political formulations? Definitely not with Hillary, unless she wants to try to spin white trash as an oppressed minority, which she cannot do without straining her actual racial coalitions. Bernie comes closer, but he makes little effort to address his class rhetoric to white trash voters since he knows they are Republicans unlikely to ever vote for him, and he still hopes to peel off some minority voters from Hillary. Only one candidate talks directly to the white trash: “We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated." Donald Trump, http://goo.gl/DUQZK6.
Elite conservatives fear Trump because they know that “white trash” includes whites who are not poor. The demographic includes a much broader socio-economic group of whites who will self-define with their ballots as to who is and who isn’t feeling stuck in the “the plantation system” described by Harriet Beecher-- those who must “struggle for subsistence”. We will know soon enough and see it all play out in cataclysms in Cleveland.
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