{"id":3806,"date":"2016-10-24T23:41:08","date_gmt":"2016-10-24T23:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/?p=3806"},"modified":"2016-10-24T23:41:08","modified_gmt":"2016-10-24T23:41:08","slug":"hillary-clinton-and-the-populist-revolt-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2016\/10\/24\/hillary-clinton-and-the-populist-revolt-the-new-yorker\/","title":{"rendered":"Hillary Clinton and the Populist Revolt – The New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

[A well-written and wide-ranging essay about Republicans, Democrats, and the voice of the white working class. -egg]<\/p>\n

In March, the Washington Post<\/em> reported that Trump voters were both more economically hard-pressed and more racially biased than supporters of other Republican candidates. But in September a Gallup-poll economist, Jonathan T. Rothwell, released survey results that complicated the picture. Those voters with favorable views of Trump are not, by and large, the poorest Americans; nor are they personally affected by trade deals or cross-border immigration. But they tend to be less educated, in poorer health, and less confident in their children\u2019s prospects\u2014and they\u2019re often residents of nearly all-white neighborhoods. They\u2019re more deficient in social capital than in economic capital. The Gallup poll doesn\u2019t indicate how many Trump supporters are racists. Of course, there\u2019s no way to disentangle economic and cultural motives, to draw a clear map of the stresses and resentments that animate the psyches of tens of millions of people. Some Americans have shown themselves to be implacably bigoted, but bias is not a fixed quality in most of us; it\u2019s subject to manipulation, and it can wax and wane with circumstances. A sense of isolation and siege is unlikely to make anyone more tolerant.<\/p>\n

In one way, these calculations don\u2019t matter. Anyone who votes for Trump\u2014including the Dartmouth-educated moderate Republican financial adviser who wouldn\u2019t dream of using racial code words but just can\u2019t stand Hillary Clinton\u2014will have tried to put a dangerous and despicable man in charge of the country. Trump is a national threat like no one else who has come close to the Presidency. Win or lose, he has already defined politics so far down that a shocking degree of hatred, ignorance, and lies is becoming normal.<\/p>\n

At the same time, it isn\u2019t possible to wait around for demography to turn millions of disenchanted Americans into relics and expect to live in a decent country. This election has told us that many Americans feel their way of life is disappearing. Perhaps their lament is futile\u2014the world is inexorably becoming Thomas Friedman\u2019s. Perhaps their nostalgia is misguided\u2014multicultural America is more free and equal than the republic of Hamilton and Jefferson. Perhaps their feeling is immoral, implying ugly biases. But it shouldn\u2019t be dismissed. If nearly half of your compatriots feel deeply at odds with the drift of things, it\u2019s a matter of self-interest to try to understand why. Nationalism is a force that \u00e9lites always underestimate\u2014that\u2019s been a lesson of the year\u2019s seismic political events, here and in Europe. It can be turned to good or ill, but it never completely goes away. It\u2019s as real and abiding as an attachment to family or to home. \u201cAmericanism, not globalism, will be our credo,\u201d Trump declared in his convention speech. In his hands, nationalism is a loaded gun, aimed not just at foreigners but also at Americans who don\u2019t make the cut. But people are not wrong to want to live in cohesive communities, to ask new arrivals to become part of the melting pot, and to crave a degree of stability in a moral order based on values other than just diversity and efficiency. A world of heirloom tomatoes and self-driving cars isn\u2019t the true and only Heaven.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hillary Clinton and the Populist Revolt – The New Yorker<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[A well-written and wide-ranging essay about Republicans, Democrats, and the voice of the white working class. -egg] In March, the Washington Post reported that Trump voters were both more economically hard-pressed and more racially biased than supporters of other Republican candidates. But in September a Gallup-poll economist, Jonathan T. Rothwell, released survey results that complicated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-Zo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3806"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3808,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3806\/revisions\/3808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}