{"id":49736,"date":"2021-05-05T17:42:35","date_gmt":"2021-05-05T21:42:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sidebarforplaintiffs.naomifein.net\/?p=49736"},"modified":"2021-05-05T17:42:35","modified_gmt":"2021-05-05T21:42:35","slug":"why-did-anyone-vote-for-the-former-guy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sidebarforplaintiffs.naomifein.net\/?p=49736","title":{"rendered":"Why did anyone vote for the former guy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This question has been plaguing a lot of us for more than four years. And I’ve spent four years trying to find answers to the question. I found a number of answers which, when compiled, satisfied me fairly well.<\/a><\/p>\n

In today’s New York Times, Thomas Edsall does a thorough compilation of his own in, <\/a>“Why Trump Still Has Millions of Americans in His Grip.”<\/p>\n

It’s the best I’ve seen. (The only item not cited is my favorite amygdala study but I’ll give him a pass on that one. At least until the end of this post.)<\/p>\n

He summarized his points in the first three paragraphs:<\/p>\n

Beginning in the mid-1960s, the priorities of the Democratic Party began to shift away from white working- and middle-class voters \u2014 many of them socially conservative, Christian and religiously observant \u2014 to a set of emerging constituencies seeking rights and privileges previously reserved for white men: African-Americans; women\u2019s rights activists; proponents of ethnic diversity, sexual freedom and self-expressive individualism.<\/em><\/p>\n

By the 1970s, many white Americans \u2014 who had taken their own centrality for granted \u2014 felt that they were being shouldered aside, left to face alone the brunt of the long process of deindustrialization: a cluster of adverse economic trends including the decline in manufacturing employment, the erosion of wages by foreign competition and the implosion of trade unionism.<\/em><\/p>\n

These voters became the shock troops of the Reagan Revolution; they now dominate Trump\u2019s Republican Party.<\/em><\/p>\n

I want to emphasize one line in his first paragraph. The “[e]merging constituencies” Edsall cites, you’ll notice, are groups which historically had not had<\/em> the “rights and privileges” of the dominant, white, conservative, Christian male class. Nobody was handing these groups — several of which I belong to — those “rights and privileges;” groups that had been suppressed sort of forever had to demand<\/em> equal rights. They still must because they don’t have them yet.<\/p>\n

Edsall continues, quoting some erudite researchers:<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Bitter Heartland<\/a>,\u201d an essay in American Purpose<\/a>, William Galston<\/a>, a veteran of the Clinton White House and a senior fellow at Brookings, captures the forces at work in the lives of many of Trump\u2019s most loyal backers:<\/em><\/p>\n

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Resentment is one of the most powerful forces in human life…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Edsall continues, referring to Galston:<\/p>\n

They \u2014 \u201csocial conservatives and white Christians\u201d \u2014 have what Galston calls a \u201cbill of particulars\u201d against political and cultural liberalism. I am going to quote from it at length because Galston\u2019s rendering of this bill of particulars is on target.<\/em><\/p>\n