Good article

Ha. That was purty awesome. Reminded me of “Deer Hunting with Jesus” by Joe Bageant.

Lottsa truth in that article.

No ‘answers’ offered though.

Trump is indeed a ‘brick through the fucking window’. I think ‘X’ and bnw would go along with that description. As well as us ole leftists

w
v

Zooey wrote:

Yeah, that rings true to me, too.

————-

Yeah and if you read posts by people that like trump, they REALLY
WANT him to be a ‘brick through the window’. They want/need it so bad,
that they are convinced that a Billionaire-lying-weasel is a ‘good thing’.
They WANT to believe in him SO much. Cause they HATE the system so MUCH.

Thats how bad ‘the situation’ is.

Course if he were to win, a LOT of the trumpies would go through what many of
the true-Obama-believers have gone through — disillusionment.

w
v

That is a good article. I kinda took the opposite trek from the writer’s. I grew up within a stone’s throw of DC, but left for small town and semi-rural environs as soon as I could. The usual American story is country to city. I did the opposite. Well, almost. Truly rural places in America are fast disappearing.

That said, I think one of the major ironies of this election season is this: Trump is a quintessential New Yorker and “Big City” guy, and one of the things that has driven him throughout his career is the desire to be accepted by Big City “elites.” He’s always wanted to be one, and it always pissed him off that “sophisticated” New Yorkers found him too vulgar and uncouth to play in their reindeer games.

As in, Trump has never aspired to be “country,” and he has never demonstrated the slightest interest in sharing those family values the writer — and so many of Trump’s supporters — talk about. He has nothing in common with any of them. Nothing at all. I sometimes feel a pang of major sympathy for the Trumpsters because they really don’t see how he’s using them and exploiting them and whipping them up into a fury about nothing. Just like the billionaires who started the Tea Party, Trump is conning them to the max . . . but they’re so desperate for a messiah, they either can’t see it or don’t care.

It’s a long story, but I accidentally deleted a Zooey post. (Apologies. Brain glitch.) Fortunately when I went backwards to when the post still existed on my computer, I could copy it. That’s it here. It goes like this–me, zooey, then bt. So this “restored post” is out of order.

===

zn wrote:
I don’t agree that he’s a brick through a window.

I think he’s a regression to a time before windows.

His followers see him as shaking things up. And if he wins some won’t even notice how badly they are getting screwed over.

…
ZOOEY:

Oh, I have come around to agree with you on that.

If Trump wins, his supporters are going to be ELATED, and I understand why. They think they are sticking it to the Man. And they will be, a little bit.

But long term, these rural dispossessed people are going to get it worse from him than they will get it from Hillary. Nobody is going to “restore” what they want. Nobody. Not Trump with 100 Trumps in the Senate, 435 Trumps in Congress, and 9 Trumps on the Supreme Court. That economy is gone; those jobs are gone.

There is no going back.

There is only going forward from here. And Trump’s “going forward” is going to be about Trump. And he is interested in making easy money off Real Estate without all the cumbersome legal structures, and that is where he is going to focus. And that is going to screw rural America even more. They are voting for a man who is simply going to grab their resources by the pussy, leave them, and not remember their names later while denying he ever met them.

I live in the city. Always have.

But I know some people like the article describes, and the picture he paints matches up pretty well to the one I formed in my head when I gave it any thought at all.

I think there may be a bit more to it than that.

And he seems to dismiss racism as being part of it–at least in the sense of hating blacks for being black. I’m not sure I agree with that. I think there is plenty of that on Trump’s side.

And I’m not saying everyone–for any Trump supporters reading this—but yeah–there are plenty of David Dukes.

Also–change.

As societies modernize and change there is always conflict.

This is not new.

And honestly, there are things that these very divided sides can agree on. The system, as it is being run today doesn’t work for everyone. The establishment MUST address the economic disparity and yet–where the agreements come, there are large disagreements over the solution.

I’m not sure how that gets fixed.

PA Ram wrote:

I live in the city. Always have.

But I know some people like the article describes, and the picture he paints matches up pretty well to the one I formed in my head when I gave it any thought at all.

I think there may be a bit more to it than that.

And he seems to dismiss racism as being part of it–at least in the sense of hating blacks for being black. I’m not sure I agree with that. I think there is plenty of that on Trump’s side.

And I’m not saying everyone–for any Trump supporters reading this—but yeah–there are plenty of David Dukes.

Also–change.

As societies modernize and change there is always conflict.

This is not new.

And honestly, there are things that these very divided sides can agree on. The system, as it is being run today doesn’t work for everyone. The establishment MUST address the economic disparity and yet–where the agreements come, there are large disagreements over the solution.

I’m not sure how that gets fixed.

I think he glossed over the “race” aspect as well.

Which triggered this thought for me: And I know this is a major generalization, and there are all kinds of exceptions, but . . . .

Lefties tend to be more empathetic than righties, and recent science backs this up. So our tendency is to look for the good in others, to sympathize, to downplay negatives and to try to “understand where they’re coming from.” From decades of personal observation, it’s rare that the favor is returned. It’s pretty rare when righties do their best to try to “understand” us. It’s pretty rare for them to ratchet down the heat, the anger, the demonization of the people they see as their enemies, choosing the road to understanding instead.

The tea party was an escalation of this over the already heated Gingrich era. The Trumpsters are yet another escalation. But this has been the case in general for the right going back a long, long time. It’s a war to them, and I think they actually see it as a sign of weakness — all of that artsy fartsy “understanding” stuff.

This creates yet more asymmetry, and it puts “the left” at a great disadvantage — politically, economically and socially.

Not saying we should stop trying to “understand stuff.” Just saying we should recognize that our attempts aren’t likely to bear fruit. In fact, it may just tick folks off even more.