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[Tye The Czar]

So I found an interesting article analyzing how Trump won the support of the working class and how a lot of US culture vilifies these people as "white trash."

http://billmoyers.com/story/class-america-donald-trump/

Donald Trump’s success is rooted in a raw, unscripted speech, outright rudeness and his ability to project anger without being constrained by the well-measured idiom of the politician. His campaign manager admits he is “projecting an image.” Who’s surprised? Our electoral politics has always countenanced con artists and has abided identity politics. An Australian observer described the phenomenon succinctly back in 1949, and it’s true today: Americans have a taste for a “democracy of manners,” he insisted, which was in fact different from real democracy. Voters accept huge disparities in wealth, he observed, while expecting their leaders to “cultivate the appearance of being no different from the rest of us.” By talking tough, by boasting that he’d love to throw a punch at a protester or squash Michael Bloomberg, Trump pretends he is stepping down from his opulent Manhattan penthouse to commingle with the masses. Wearing his bright red Bubba cap, and crooning at one rally, “I love the poorly educated,” he has built upon a familiar strain of American populism. A dose of redneck bluster goes a long way. It helped Bill Clinton to call himself Bubba and play the sax. It helped, too, that journalists dubbed him the “Arkansas Elvis.”
Since voters who feel unrepresented don’t expect anything new from practiced politicians, they have become convinced that Trump is talking to and not about them.

Beyond his riches-to-rags stage act, Trump’s message is that he is a headstrong businessman who will not only create jobs, but also make sure the government defends hard-working Americans. As he exploits the fear of labor competition from immigrants, he taps into the anxiety produced by the erosion of unions and manufacturing jobs and the increase in low-paying service jobs that is shifting the ground beneath working-class Americans. In the game of identity politics, complex social processes are reduced to a convenient bogeyman. Trump’s mostly symbolic wall represents an imagined power to keep immigrants out; but for many of his followers who hate free trade globalism, it really means keeping jobs in the country. There may be no substance behind the words, but it can be argued that overgeneralization is any candidate’s stock-in-trade.

This excerpt in particular really puts a perspective on Trump and many politicians of his ilk:

Trump’s style echoes the story of the Arkansas Traveler, which dates to the 1840s. It told of a rich politician riding in the Arkansas backcountry, who comes upon a poor squatter. The politician asks the squatter for a drink, but the squatter ignores him. (The drink is a metaphor for his vote.) To obtain the man’s support, the rich politician must get off his horse, grab the squatter’s fiddle and play his kind of music. That is, he had to speak the poor man’s language. Of course, when the rich politician returns to his mansion, or gets re-elected, the condition of the poor squatter, living in his dismal cabin with his brood of children with dirty feet and faces, is left unchanged.

It's astonishingly insightful and shows that we need to build a bridge(not a wall, har de har) to these guys.

 

[nynt9]

Problem is these people are generally not interested in bridging with you. Same thing happened in Turkey, and we ended up getting Erdogan and his fascism. You can't reason with someone who doesn't want to reason. You'll keep compromising to meet their needs and they'll keep taking and never take a step back.

How do you even build a bridge with the "immigrants suck" stance? It's not a nuanced stance worth compromising to. It's Inhumane towards the immigrants.

 

[Viewt]

I'd love to be able to have a civil, impassioned conversation with Trump supporters about how they came to have their views and, hopefully, show them that there's a better way to channel their frustration with the status quo. I really would. But these people have been lied to, purposefully led into destruction and chaos, and now their worldview is completely warped.

I have family that's deeply conservative. They're also the type that likes to discuss politics and genuinely engages me in debate because they "like to know what the other side thinks." As patronizing and eye-rolling as that sounds, they'll at least show up to an intellectual discussion open to hearing a different view.

But Trump supporters aren't just conservative. They only trade in soundbites, diluted "facts," and yelling over someone else to bully them into silence.

Tell me I'm generalizing, tell me I shouldn't speak about Trump supporters like they're all the same. But if you look at the demographics, isn't the sampling pretty... homogenous?

So the onus sits with whom, then? Who needs to bridge the gap between working class whites and the rest of us? I can't see how it should be on any minorities, because asking them to walk into that kind of lion's den is insensitive and shitty at best, and at worst, life-threatening. Is it with liberal whites? Are we the only ones who can repair the damage done? And if we are (which I'm willing to accept), how do we go about it? I'm genuinely curious, because my experiences in the past have all gone poorly.