From Francis Fukuyama to Barack Obama to The New Yorker, nobody to the left of Joe Bageant seems to understand why poor white hillbillies prefer Republican oligarchs to the glorious rainbow coalition of the condescending. They wonder why the white working class lost the loving feeling they used to have for the Democratic Party.
Perhaps like a modern-day Squanto, I can help the lefties understand my tribe. I was born to the lower middle class and spent a couple of adult years living the life. I score a 63 in Charles Murray’s “bubble quiz,” which puts me into the “first generation middle class with working class parents” category. When I was a boy, people around me came from intact families, went to Catholic Church, knew people in the military, and worked jobs which soil the hands. They enjoyed pastimes such as deer hunting, mud bogging, and backyard wrestling. We were dimly aware of a hostile tribe in the nearby college town. These were folks who drank coffee with foam in it, who thought so little of the average hayseed that they would walk out in front of a moving pickup truck. The latte-sippers didn’t control the Democratic Party in those days: Working-class white men such as Tip O’Neill did, and everyone in my town voted for the Party of the Working Man.
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