How Dumb Are Trump Voters? This Dumb
How can Trump voters fall for his lies? How dumb do you have to be for Trump’s obvious, transparent phoniness to read as sincerity, for his bullshit to smell like roses?
This dumb:
Valerie Volcovici of Reuters went to coal country and found that workers there are widely rejecting offers of job retraining because they’re convinced Trump was telling them the truth about a comeback for coal.
In western Pennsylvania’s Greene and Washington counties, 120 people have signed up for jobs retraining outside the mines,; the target was 700. In Westmoreland and Fayette counties, participation in federal jobs retraining programs has been about 15% of capacity. The pattern repeats all over coal country.
“I have a lot of faith in President Trump,” said Mike Sylvester, 33, who passed up retraining in more than 100 fields for a course in coal mining. “I think there is a coal comeback.”
You can’t fix stupid.
If you read Hillbilly Elegy, you find out that not only are they dumb, they’re lazy.
They don’t want those jobs b/c it’s hard work. They don’t want ‘retraining’ b/c they don’t want to work.
They deserve the fix they’re in. Call ’em Trump’s Chumps.
With China turning to solar and other renewables, a peak coal demand has already come and gone.
Also – As much attention as Coal Miners are getting – there must be zillions of them right? Not so much. 50,000 Coal Miners in 2016.
“If you read Hillbilly Elegy, you find out that not only are they dumb, they’re lazy. They don’t want those jobs b/c it’s hard work. They don’t want ‘retraining’ b/c they don’t want to work. They deserve the fix they’re in. Call ‘em Trump’s Chumps.” Hillbilly Elegy or not, your attack on workers does all workers a disservice, and feeds into the oligarch’s narrative that the poor deserve to be poor. I find your comment disappointing.
The word ‘workers’ is misplaced. As JD Vance points out in the book, so many of these guys avoid work at all costs, then blame others for their fate.
And they’re the same guys who buy into the ‘lazy, shiftless’ meme of racists everywhere.
This excerpt from a New Yorker review of Hillbilly Elegy accurately summarizes Vance’s perspective, which is not unsympathetic:
“Vance, too, is proud to be a hillbilly: he uses the term in a dignified and respectful way throughout his book. All the same, he comes to believe that his community suffers from “cognitive dissonance”; there is, he writes, “a broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.” If family is all-important, then why are alcoholism and domestic abuse so common? If hillbillies are so hardworking, then why do so few people in Middletown work? Plenty of people, of course, work hard, often struggling to assemble a livelihood out of part-time jobs. But they live alongside able-bodied neighbors who are lifetime welfare recipients (and experts at gaming the welfare system). One friend quits a good job because he’s “sick of waking up early,” then takes to Facebook to bemoan the “Obama economy.”
In Vance’s view, the depredations of globalization have been sharpened by poorly implemented social programs, which, though well-intentioned, allow “a large minority . . . to live off the dole,” while breeding resentment and rage among everyone else. But “hillbilly culture,” which allows “the white working class to blame its problems on society or the government,” is part of the problem, too. Vance criticizes its violence, its stubbornness, its pride, its incuriosity, and its “bizarre sexism,” which, he thinks, all encourage “reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible.” While communities elsewhere in America are enthralled by the prosperity gospel, Vance’s friends and family recite a disengaged catechism: “We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs. You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society.” He concludes, “There is a lack of agency here—a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America.”
Speaking as someone who has always avoided work at all costs, I never minded learning things.
I read Vance and found his argument wanting for the same reasons I find most “personal responsibility” arguments wanting. Sure, a person deserves some blame, but so do the societal structures that the more intelligent among them cite. After all, they are the same societal structures that hold back all people without means.
The credo of personal responsibility is wanting because it holds that as long as everyone has opportunity, all is as it should be. It begs the question — how can a society that distributes its benefits in a pyramid-shaped pattern claim that those at the bottom had an equal shot at the top? Or is it claiming that all those at the bottom simply blew their opportunities?
Either way, it’s an indictment of a capitalistic system that fails to hold those at the top responsible for keeping the broad base from falling into decrepitude.
Coal mining is hard work.
Not really. It’s dangerous, but they don’t use pickaxes anymore. It’s running heavy machinery in tight spaces underground in atmosphere that’s bad for your lungs. On the plus side, there’s not a lot of homework.