I'm not qualified to speak to what's going on in your country, so I agree it sounds very opportunist. Let me give you a slightly different perspective on why Trump might be popular and why otherwise reasonable people might buy into his act. And IMO, this is an act. It's the opening salvo in a negotiation, not what a Trump presidency would look like (still, lets never find out).Mine wrote:It's really not that simple.b_i_revisited wrote:<snip>
I realize it's part of the progressive playbook to call people you disagree with racist so you never have to confront their ideas, but come on. Opposing illegal immigration does not make you white supremacist, it means that you prefer poor people in your nation have the first shot at jobs created in their homeland vice people brought in via the new, non-Atlantic slave trade from Mexico. Spying on non-US citizens in the US does not make a you white supremacist, visa holders and tourists are not protected by the fourth amendment. Just because white supremacists groups tend to support these things does not make them inherently bad, nor does it make one of them. He is an spoiled, ignorant bully and he is unafraid of being judge by the people that got the world into it's present shitty state and that appeals to wide group of Americans.
Someone in my country made the point how the poor people's well being here only became an issue for the right wingers here once the immigrants and refugees tuned up and it's true.
I think the fact that white supremacy groups support certain things should at least raise the question whether the other side has a point.
Since maybe the 70s, maybe earlier, something has been wrong with WASPy democratic capitalism. Globalization, automation, and computerization have transformed and then broken the old 'contract' between employee and employer and for a lot of the US, they will never recover what they had in "the good ol days" when a person could work for a company for their life, get a pension, and be generally happy about how things went for them. They've seen those jobs go overseas to make a few people up on the hill richer. Now we see technology moving so fast that people cannot keep up and becoming so detail orientated that most people cannot learn it, and they few that dedicate the best years of their life to do it, now compete with indentured servants from Asia who will work for a third of their salary and thus the business can hire twice as many and still increase profits by laying them off (or in Disney's case, forcing them to train their replacements). They see dozens of healthy young men who don't look like them hanging around storefronts taking what work remains at illegal wage levels and kids having huge brawls in shopping malls that used to be safe places to take their families. They see situations where schools in the middle of cornfield, Indiana now need teachers in languages that they cannot identify the country of origin for. It's not what they were brought up with, worked and studied for, and it's psychologically devastating for them. But none of this is the real kicker. What drives them to people like Trump is that the left blames them for their situation. Reno writing in the NYT last month put it quite well:
The intelligentsia on the left rarely lets a moment pass without reminding us of the demographic eclipse of white middle-class voters. Sometimes, those voters are described as racists, or derided as dull suburbanites who lack the élan of the new urban “creative class.” The message: White middle-class Americans aren’t just irrelevant to America’s future, they’re in the way.
And this, again solely IMO, is why you see support for Trump. He capitalizing on the fear and nostalgia for a past version of America (that might not have ever truly existed) and saying, "it's not your fault. Let me set things back as they should be." And honestly, if I put myself into their shoes, I can kinda see the appeal, and when you think about... it's not that far from Bernie's message either.
