"Trump made them feel good about themselves by creating enemies for them to hate."
To me the question is why do they need to feel good about themselves. My answer is that elites have slowly leached away any status that working class people might accrue from the work they do.
From David Brooks' Atlantic article.
“We now have a single route into a single dominant cognitive class,” the journalist David Goodhart has written. And because members of the educated class dominate media and culture, they possess the power of consecration, the power to determine what gets admired and what gets ignored or disdained. Goodhart notes further that over the past two decades, it’s been as though “an enormous social vacuum cleaner has sucked up status from manual occupations, even skilled ones,” and reallocated that status to white-collar jobs, even low-level ones, in “prosperous metropolitan centers and university towns.” This has had terrible social and political consequences."
"Trump made them feel good about themselves by creating enemies for them to hate."
To me the question is why do they need to feel good about themselves. My answer is that elites have slowly leached away any status that working class people might accrue from the work they do.
From David Brooks' Atlantic article.
“We now have a single route into a single dominant cognitive class,” the journalist David Goodhart has written. And because members of the educated class dominate media and culture, they possess the power of consecration, the power to determine what gets admired and what gets ignored or disdained. Goodhart notes further that over the past two decades, it’s been as though “an enormous social vacuum cleaner has sucked up status from manual occupations, even skilled ones,” and reallocated that status to white-collar jobs, even low-level ones, in “prosperous metropolitan centers and university towns.” This has had terrible social and political consequences."
David's article was spot on. Thanks for adding that important context!