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Monday, March 07, 2016

Subject: Trump Taps Something That's Long Been Ignored

If Super Tuesday proved anything, it’s that a large number of American voters will, indeed, pull the lever for Donald Trump — and for valid reasons. No, we haven’t suddenly jumped on the Trump Train (and don’t expect us to any time soon), but it’s clear Trump has found a trigger point among many voters. And he’s hitting it with incredible consistency.

“My market is the people in the country who want to see America be great again,” Trump explained. “It’s very simple. That’s a lot of people. That’s not broken down by age, or race or anything.”

While it’s all too easy to judge Trump supporters by the candidate they follow, Trumpmania’s real appeal goes much deeper than political theater — and it’s worth understanding.

As much as we despise politics via class stratification, that’s where we must begin. For it’s working-class Americans — blue-collar, lacking political power and without friends in high places — who believe they have at last found an ally, an advocate, a voice in the man who proudly claimed to “love the poorly educated.”

In an astute explanation of “Trump’s America,” Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute writes of “the emergence of a new upper class and a new lower class and … the plight of the working class caught in between.” Populating the new upper class are the elites — politicians, professors, cultural icons, business moguls. They shape policy, wield power, and are heard simply by nature of their status.

The new lower class includes those “who have dropped out of some of the most basic institutions of American civic culture, especially work and marriage.”

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5 comments:

  1. One specific group of people will still vote democratic as they have done for the last six decades. Six decades of support and all you have to show for it is a free phone. So sad.

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  2. What really disgusts me Is all this talk about the fracture of the Republican Party!!look at the Democrats they have an outright socialist communist on their ticket.That's the real problem not the Republicans.

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  3. 1:17 - naaw - I got me a new set of rims for the Jag too!

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  4. As the GOP and the media show their true colors and attack Trump the voters stand even more with him.

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  5. That exactly how I feel 3:18, I think there are a lot of us, some in the open, a lot more covert, including Independants and Democrats. This country has turned to crap under Obama and it's going to take more than the "same old BS" to turn it around.

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