I
liked this Krugman column, which started by noting the theory (certainly correct, I reckon) that Trump gets "cred" with his working class voters because he likes fast food, and generally has dubious taste*:
What I see a lot, both
in general political discourse and in my own inbox, is a tremendous
sense of resentment against people like Hillary Clinton or, well, me,
that isn’t about policy. It boils down, instead, to something along the
lines of “You people think you’re better than us.” And it has a lot to
do with the way people live.
If populism were
simply about income inequality, someone like Trump should be deeply
resented by the working class. He has gold toilets! But he gets a pass,
partly — I think — because his tastes seem in line with those of
non-college-educated whites. That is, he lives the way they imagine they
would if they had a lot of money.
Compare that with
affluent liberals — say, my neighbors on the Upper West Side. They
aren’t nearly as rich as the plutocrats that will stuff the Trump
cabinet. What’s more, they vote for things that will raise their taxes
and cost of living, while improving the lives of the very people who
disdain them. Objectively, they’re on white workers’ side.
But they don’t eat
much fast food, because they believe it’s unhealthy and they’re watching
their weight. They don’t watch much reality TV, and do listen to a lot
of books on tape — or even read books the old-fashioned way. if they’re
rich enough to have a second home, it’s a shabby-chic country place, not
Mar-a-Lago.
So there is a sense in
which there’s a bigger cultural gulf between affluent liberals and the
white working class than there is between Trumpkins and the WWC. Do the
liberals sneer at the Joe Sixpacks? Actually, I’ve never heard it — the
people I hang out with do understand that living the way they do takes a
lot more money and time than hard-pressed Americans have, and aren’t
especially judgmental about lifestyles. But it’s easy to see how the
sense that liberals look down on regular folks might arise, and be
fanned by right-wing media.
The question is, what
do you do? Again, objectively those liberals are very much on workers’
side, while the characters who play on this perceived disdain are set to
betray the white working class on a massive scale. Is there no way to
get this across other than eating lots of burgers with fries?
* Not referring to fast food here - I like it once or twice a week as much as any Westie.
George Megalogenis 