I’m getting tired of hearing how people are supporting Trump out of “economic desperation”✋. Do you know any Trump supporters? Are they really that impoverished?Because the ones I know are anything but.
My feeling is that the truly economically desperate in this country tend not to vote at all. And the folks who have the spare cash to buy a Trump baseball hat don’t count as desperate.
✋ This is a quote from today’s NY TIMES.
I disagree to a point. I believe the core issue is expectations. People expect to live a certain kind of live. They work for 40 years, put money away and expect to be able to retire. Now they find out they can’t, and they’re upset and angry. The political science literature has recognized the issue of failed expectations as a problem since at least the 1960s. It was presented as a cause of violence and revolt in 3rd world countries. However, the concept is just as applicable to the US.
Expectations are apart from objective reality. An American can be angry about a situation in the US that someone in Kenya might consider to be nirvana. However, in fairness, the cost of living in the two countries is also quite different.
There is a subtle difference between entitlement and expectations. Entitlement to me implies that one expects something without working for it. Expectations connotes that one expects a result from reasonably hard work that one doesn’t get.
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Of course, if by economic desperation we mean “can’t buy a plasma screen number 4 immediately”, then yes, absolutely. But we all know where I come from and what my life has been. There is no chance that I will ever see such people with anything but contempt.
I believe that it’s very sad that people live in the midst of incredible opulence and keep wanting more stuff and not more insight, more intelligence, more sex, more love. They are trying to devour more cars, TVs, gadgets, houses, etc, and feel enormously victimized when it turns out there is a limit to the material abundance they can accumulate and to food they can stuff in their faces.
I don’t think they need to be encouraged in their self-pity. I think they need to be ridiculed and shamed as much as possible. Which is what I do to the best of my ability.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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