Rather than their usual sneering contempt for the white working class, perhaps elites of both parties should ask themselves why the white working class is collapsing. Apparently the exact same process happened in USSR before it disintegrated. Is this a canary in the coal mine, signalling something has gone very seriously wrong indeed? I think it is.
A friend in Philadelphia lives in a working class area with lots of closed down factories. All those jobs went someplace else. Sure, artists are moving in to the old factories, but that doesn’t mean new jobs. Plus, if the area gets gentrified enough, the working class will get priced out and have to move. There are way too many other cities and towns like this, with unhappy, pissed-off people wondering what happened to their lives.
This is made worse by elites mostly treating them like garbage. This also accounts for the popularity of Trump and Sanders.
White working-class men are looked down upon by the elites and get little validation in their own communities for being good providers, fathers and spouses—and that life in their communities is falling apart. To top it off, the party they have voted for in recent decades, the Republicans, hasn’t done a damn thing to help them. Who wouldn’t be angry?
A Brit expat says he appalled by the animosity US elites have for the white working class.
But in London or Oxford from the 1970s onwards I never witnessed the naked disdain for the working class that much of America’s metropolitan elite finds permissible in 2016…
When my wife and I bought some land in West Virginia and built a house there, many friends in Washington asked why we would ever do that. Jokes about guns, banjo music, in-breeding, people without teeth and so forth often followed. These Washington friends, in case you were wondering, are good people. They’d be offended by crass, cruel jokes about any other group. They deplore prejudice and keep an eye out for unconscious bias. More than a few object to the term, “illegal immigrant.” Yet somehow they feel the white working class has it coming.
Why is this?