Yet another writer describes why Trump leads the Republican Party

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Perhaps this gentleman has read the same pieces that I reported on last week, but now George Packer has written a post for the New Yorker Magazine on the topic: How Donald Trump appeals to the White Working Class.

The article is very easy to read, and a lot shorter than the similar piece on Stir Journal.

Here is the gist of the article; I might deviate a bit from the points of the author if I have a slightly different view of matters.

Off the Beaten Track
Sara Palin and Trump are walking the road between Reality TV and Politics, one going one way, the other going the other.  They both appeal to middle-aged, white Americans, who have been made furious by "globalization, low-wage immigrant labor, and free trade."  They are minimally pious, anti-government, and (inexplicably) pro-business.  Trump is also using "White Identity Rhetoric," which is a clever way of saying that he appeals to poor white voters who feel marginalized by National Politics, insinuating that their economically disadvantaged status is caused specifically by their race, and that Trump will work specifically to help this demographic, as signaled by his professed hostility towards immigrant labor.

Traditional Republicans
The mainstream of the Republican Party only had Ted Cruz to represent them.  They were not happy with the Tea Party rhetoric that some of the candidates had adopted, and are not happy with the contentious stupidity of Trump's rhetoric either.  (More importantly, the conservatives in the GOP did not like Cruz either, because he was too extremely Right.)  Trump loves the non-logic of those he perceives to be his supporters; in fact he goes out of his way to make arguments that make absolutely no sense, but depend on superficial verbal cleverness which is either his natural style of speech, or has been adopted specifically to appeal to an audience that is tired of hearing the logic of upliftment of the racial minorities, as if it were synonymous with the upliftment of the economically disadvantaged.  Mainstream Conservatives, even if many of them are not religious, like to maintain the appearance of being believers.  They argue against abortion and gay marriage from a traditional Christian viewpoint, though they could not care less about the religious objections.  (Some conservatives undoubtedly do, but I'm sure they're in the minority.)  This makes the GOP deeply unhappy with Trump.

How Democrats feel about the White Working Class
The Democrats (the author says), have had an uncomfortable relationship with (members of) the White American working class.  They support them in principle, but when the educated Democrat supporters of Bernie Sanders (for instance) actually encounter working-class whites, "the feeling [of empathy with them] can vanish ... [because these working-class folk] often arrive with disturbing beliefs and powerful resentments—[and] might not sound or look like people urban progressives want to know."  In short, a Democrat encountering someone who looks and sounds like the Trump supporters we see on TV, but might not actually be a Trump supporter, will be acutely uncomfortable, because though the Democrat agenda is intended to address the needs of the working class, no matter of what race the individual might be, the encounter is going to be uncomfortable to the one who is supposedly bringing the good news.  Trump does a better job of speaking to this demographic, because often their views are repugnant to those of us brought up on a diet of Political Correctness and Equality of Women, and such things which some guys find objectionable, bless them.

To put a more serious complexion on this situation, the writer reports that according to a certain study, in recent decades working-class white Americans have been dying at increasing rates.   The cause, says one author of the study, is mainly alcohol, suicide, and death due to opioids.  The study concludes that it is an epidemic of despair; the psychology of the poor white population has gone far beyond being of merely academic interest.  Indeed, there is certainly an epidemic of narcotic abuse within the white population of all economic levels, which is signaled by a new interest in providing social services for addiction.  Traditional Conservatives would view addressing the mental-health (and chemical health!) of drug-users as important simply as a means of preventing the scourge from spreading to their own families, and for preserving the health of the workforce.  Liberals (and other Democrats) must view the task of addressing the needs of poor whites as something that has not been done up until now, and must be taken care of on moral grounds.  But it is a difficult job, because the target audience is a highly illogical, prejudiced one with actually very conservative social views, which must be battled all the way.

(I suspect that Trump supporters shown on TV are far from being typical.  They are selected to be interesting viewing, and not to be representative.  It is very likely that the majority of Trump supporters are pretty much like our own friends who are impatient with Crybaby Progressives.)

My Take
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are splitting the Democratic Party into the idealists, and the cynical pragmatics.  After Carter, the Democrats reinvented themselves under the Clintons as business-friendly (for the sake of the Nation).  I don't know the inside story of how they managed to gain control of the party; they probably assured them that they (the Clintons) had powerful business support, and that therefore the financial backing to win the White House.  That was the time when we had Enron and all those crazy Wall Street bandits, and half the time the Republicans wanted to put the Clintons in jail, while the rest of the time, they wished they could be bigger Wall Street bandits themselves.  The Clinton years were all about a bunch of adulterers trying to convict Bill Clinton of sexual depravity.  The fact that US citizens were better off in Clinton's presidency than they have ever been since then was of no import: they wanted a highly moral guy as President.

But the fact remained that the Clintons played a lot of financial games in their day, which made them the darlings of the big Banks and Insurance companies, and this makes it very hard to trust Hillary Clinton in her bid for President, because being beholden to the Banks, she might be as dangerous in the White House as Cheney was.  Make no mistake: I would trust Hillary Clinton a lot further than the Bush-Cheney team.  A lot further.  But there is still a little niggling doubt.

With Bernie Sanders (and with Donald Trump, for completely different reasons) one feels anxious about how well he would actually perform in the White House.  With Trump, I'm not going to rack my brains trying to see how he could succeed.  With Bernie Sanders, we shall need not only to win the White House, but win the Congress with Bernie supporters, and there would have to be a credible team behind him, who will help to put together legislation that will bring about a significant part of the political and social changes that he has been talking about, in such a way that it does not end with a huge fiasco with calls for impeachment, and martial law, and a new constitution, and yadda yadda, and repeals of the legislation within a year or two.  Obamacare survives, because, ultimately, the Insurance Industry is happy with it.  But Big Business will not be happy with the majority of legislation that Bernie has planned.  That's good for us, as long as the legislation stands.

[Added still later:

George Blow, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, summarizes many of my feelings about Trump, and the sector of US society that gets inspiration from him, and presumably will win Trump the nomination of the GOP for the presidency in 2016.

I am embarrassed to be delighted at every criticism he hurls at this demographic, but in some ways his characterization of this sliver of our society is somewhat more compassionate, because he indicates the curve of the legislation that took resources away from middle-class white men, and spread it to other sectors of society that was in need.  Most of all, he delineates why Social Security, in its earliest form, left out large sectors of the population who sorely needed it, and (if I understand him correctly) how, when these inequities were corrected, it left middle class white men with less, in order that other sectors of society could catch up with them. This is the nature of a zero-sum game: if I win a little more, you win a little less.
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[Added later:

I believe that Hillary Clinton could be a good President for the USA, probably one of the best.  But my problem with her is that she frequently does not say what she really believes, and says what seems expedient at the time.  The hearts of the Clintons are probably in the right place, but ... she still has to earn my trust.  A good number of Democrats will vote for Hillary without a second thought, but I'm not that comfortable with her.]

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