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What I am getting at is the following; many people believe that the rich have stolen the economy. They watch the lifestyles of the upper middle class expand while their own rema stati. They watch as the rich kids get into good colleges their own children never seem to have had a chance at going there. Real estate is up based on the swollen incomes of the professionals so their children can’t afford a home outside the family. They see their children choosing military careers and getting killed because there are no jobs where they live. Based on this experienced reality they want to choose a political person who will fight back. This is in the context of the democratic party moving from supporting the lower 90% of the economy to being the support of the 1%.
They have come into voting age as the party of their parents had become the party of the professionals.
It is striking that much of the progressive population agrees with the diagnosis: that they are losing out - but remain Democrats, because that is where the job opportunities are their education has taken them toward. What is important in the choice is not agreement on fact but an expression 0f rage. Hence most Trump supporters and their beliefs are not the same as his but the choice fits better their depair. That’s why so much vilification of Trump, seeing Trump's supporters as being Trump-minded, fails to deal with the rage and prefers to call them stupid. We fail to see that underlying Trump support is a serious diagnosis of the state of the nation. If their choice for expressing their rage appears stupid it is because we didn’t notice that they were not offered any other choice.
So we make a serious mistake if we take the thoughts of Trump supporters as the same or close to Trump’s own. Sure, reporters can select from the crowd people with limited minds, but it is ’t a representative sample. We must be better at social analysis.