The Trump phenomenon does more than anything to validate the thesis that white working class support for the GOP is founded in racial, religious, cultural, and gender identity politics.
Those white folks are just not interested in the class war politics of the Wall Street conservatives who have all this time exploited and betrayed this large, white nationalist chunk of the party's popular base.
And these people are willing to see government do some pretty awful stuff to protect their endangered status as the majority race in the US of A.
Too awful, for this old white guy.
And what the hell is their problem with Hispanics, anyway?
Some are white, but most from Mexico and Central America are Indians and mestizos.
And that's more a problem, apparently, than I would have guessed.
Pat Buchanan and folks like him have spent quite a lot of effort publicizing Mexican/Aztec irredentism to terrify white folks.
I suppose we have them to thank for the popularity of Trump's vast project of ethnic cleansing - a project that, within the Republican Party, most certainly did not originate with him.
Total refusal to accept any significant number of the 11 million Latino illegals in the US as permanent additions to the US population has been the position of the paleocons among the pundits and at least half of the self-declared Republican Party membership for many decades.
Still, not everyone on the left thinks Trump's white working class support is all about identity and nothing else.
Some see it as rebellion against the Democrats' neglect and even betrayal of working class interests and politics for several decades - the same betrayal Bernie's whole campaign is about.
And the key, revealing point in Trump's agenda, for this view, is not his espousal of ethnic cleansing but his total rejection of free trade and the devastation it has wrought, the utter destruction of Middle America.
Even his rejection of immigration can be defended as a move to protect the working class from a flood of low wage competition.
And if you don't see that then you have no idea what Bernie Sanders is about.
Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why.
Thomas Frank, he of What's the Matter with Kansas?
But then shouldn't somebody ask Mr. Frank why these people are in the GOP to begin with?
Why are they in a party that loudly trumpets its dedication to destroying the social safety net built for them by generations of Democrats, of Big Government liberals?
Why are they waving signs for The Donald rather than Bernie Sanders?
How explain that without admitting partisans of both major parties have trampled America's sore racial toes for many decades, privileging race politics over class politics since at least as far back as LBJ?
It can't be done.
Update.
This guy is totally full of shit.
Figures he writes for IBD, a bunch of shocking fanatics whose radicalism and craziness make Cruz and the shutdown freaks (shutdown was a cause that united George Will and Pat Buchanan) look moderate.
Still, not everyone on the left thinks Trump's white working class support is all about identity and nothing else.
Some see it as rebellion against the Democrats' neglect and even betrayal of working class interests and politics for several decades - the same betrayal Bernie's whole campaign is about.
And the key, revealing point in Trump's agenda, for this view, is not his espousal of ethnic cleansing but his total rejection of free trade and the devastation it has wrought, the utter destruction of Middle America.
Even his rejection of immigration can be defended as a move to protect the working class from a flood of low wage competition.
And if you don't see that then you have no idea what Bernie Sanders is about.
Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why.
Thomas Frank, he of What's the Matter with Kansas?
But then shouldn't somebody ask Mr. Frank why these people are in the GOP to begin with?
Why are they in a party that loudly trumpets its dedication to destroying the social safety net built for them by generations of Democrats, of Big Government liberals?
Why are they waving signs for The Donald rather than Bernie Sanders?
How explain that without admitting partisans of both major parties have trampled America's sore racial toes for many decades, privileging race politics over class politics since at least as far back as LBJ?
It can't be done.
Update.
This guy is totally full of shit.
Figures he writes for IBD, a bunch of shocking fanatics whose radicalism and craziness make Cruz and the shutdown freaks (shutdown was a cause that united George Will and Pat Buchanan) look moderate.
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