Quote:Do you REALLY want to understand Trumpers and white working-class voters? Please read this. Please.
Hunter S. Thompson wrote the novel "Hell's Angels" in 1966 after spending some time with the motorcycle gang.
https://www.thenation.com/article/this-politi...-thompson/
Most people read Hell’s Angels for the lurid stories of sex and drugs. But that misses the point entirely.
What’s truly shocking about reading the book today is how well Thompson foresaw the retaliatory, right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism.
After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic.
He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on.
But though Thompson’s depiction of an alienated, white, masculine working-class culture—one that is fundamentally misunderstood by intellectuals—is not the only one out there, it was the first. And in some ways, it is still the best psychological study of those Americans often dismissed as “white trash” or “deplorables.”
Thompson’s Angels were mostly working-class white men who felt, not incorrectly, that they had been relegated to the sewer of American society. Their unswerving loyalty to the nation— the Angels had started as a World War II veterans group—had not paid them any rewards or won them any enduring public respect. The manual-labor skills that they had learned and cultivated were in declining demand.
Though most had made it through high school, they did not have the more advanced levels of training that might lead to economic or professional security. “Their lack of education,” Thompson wrote, “rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy.” Looking at the American future, they saw no place for themselves in it.
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Their skills were outdated; their knowledge was insubstantial; their powers were inferior. There was no rational way to argue that they were better workers or citizens than the competition; the competition was effectively over, and Angels had lost. The standards by which they had been built had been definitively eclipsed.
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It’s not hard to see in the demographics, the words, and the behavior of Trump supporters an ethic of total retaliation at work. These are men and women who defend their vote by saying things like: “I just wanted people to know that I’m here, that I count.” These are men and women whose scorn of “political correctness” translates into: “You can’t make me talk the way that you want me to talk, even if that way of talking is nicer and smarter and better.”
These are men and women whose denials of climate change are gleeful denials of scientific expertise in a world where scientific experts have unquestioned intellectual respect and social status.
These are men and women who seemed to applaud the incompetence of Trump’s campaign because competence itself is associated with membership in the elite.
Thompson would want us to see this: These are men and women who know that, by all intellectual and economic standards, they cannot win the game. So whether it be out of self-protection or an overcompensation for their own profound sense of shame, they lash out at politicians, judges, scientists, teachers, Wall Street, universities, the media, legislatures—even at elections.
They are not interested in contemplating serious reforms to the system; they are either too pessimistic or too disappointed to believe that is possible. So the best they can do is adopt a position of total irreverence: to show they hate the players and the game.
Added by later edit:
While many commentators say Trump will have to bring back jobs or vibrancy to places like the Rust Belt if he wants to continue to have the support of people who voted for him, Thompson’s account suggests otherwise. Many if not most Trump supporters long ago gave up on the idea that any politician, even someone like Trump, can change the direction the wind is blowing.
Even if he fails to bring back the jobs, Trump can maintain loyalty in another way: As long as he continues to offend and irritate elites, and as long as he refuses to play by certain rules of decorum—heaven forfend, the president-elect says ill-conceived things on Twitter!—Trump will still command loyalty. It’s the ethic, not the policy, that matters most.
- Some RW Evangelical recently said that the people want "real" jobs to come back, because "there's no pride in programming". (Programming is hard and takes lots of math-skills. Not everybody can do that. And it looks totally unimpressive from the outside.)
- The job-market gets tougher and tougher, even for those with excellent degrees.
- Increasing automatization means that low-skill jobs will one day simply die out. And the definition of "low-skill job" gets wider and wider with each day.
- I see lots of students who simply have no talent for higher education, no passion for their field of study, no motivation. They would be happier doing something else, but these "something else"-jobs no longer pay well. These students don't want those degrees, but the harsh reality is that they NEED those degrees.
When Trump promised them "Make America Great Again", they heard:
"I promise you to bring back an economy where ordinary, uneducated, hard-working people are high in demand, well-paid and well-respected."
When Clinton promised them "Better Together", they heard:
"I promise you to go forward with a society where everybody is equal, where you still won't be special and where you still will be drowned out by many, many other voices."
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