They don’t like sharing their country
by digby
I don’t know about you but I’m shocked that the pussy grabbing anti-feminist, immigrant deporting, Muslim banning, law and order enforcing candidate won over a bunch of people who are economically comfortable but have “cultural anxiety:”
In the wake of Trump’s surprise win, some journalists, scholars, and political strategists argued that economic anxiety drove these Americans to Trump. But new analysis of post-election survey data conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic found something different: Evidence suggests financially troubled voters in the white working class were more likely to prefer Clinton over Trump. Besides partisan affiliation, it was cultural anxiety—feeling like a stranger in America, supporting the deportation of immigrants, and hesitating about educational investment—that best predicted support for Trump.
This data adds to the public’s mosaic-like understanding of the 2016 election. It suggests Trump’s most powerful message, at least among some Americans, was about defending the country’s putative culture. Because this message seems to have resonated so deeply with voters, Trump’s policies, speeches, and eventual reelection may depend on their perception of how well he fulfills it.
Actually, I don’t think this is the case. As the NY Times Thomas Edsell wrote last week, these people don’t expect him to fulfill anything. They just want him to articulate their hate. And he is going to do that.
Over the past 50 years, overarching and underlying conflicts about morality, family, autonomy, religious conviction, fairness and even patriotism have been forced into two relatively weak vessels, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The political system is not equipped to resolve these social and cultural conflicts, which produce a gamut of emotions, often outside our conscious awareness. Threatening issues — conflicts over race, immigration, sexuality and many other questions that cut to the core of how we see ourselves and the people around us — cannot be contained in ordinary political speech, even as these issues dominate our political decision-making.
It is Trump’s willingness to violate the boundaries of conventional discourse that has granted him immunity to mainstream criticism. Pretty much everything he does that goes overboard helps him. He is given a free hand by those who feel in their gut that he is fighting their fight — that he is their leader and their defender. As the enemy of their enemies, President Trump is their friend.
Of course it was “culture.”
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