Comment of the Day: Maynard Handley: Live from Trumpland: Who is attracted to voting for Trump?:
We enrage them not just because in many cases we are the nerds they bullied in class, who somehow have now ended up "running the world." We enrage them because we lecture them about how they need to be more open to those who compete with them for jobs and housing and wealth--minorities, immigrants, and women--even though in most cases we are ourselves not exposed to said competition...
I think this misses one essential psychological point: it is not being lectured to that people dislike, it is being lectured to by someone who turns out to be RIGHT...
What makes these people so angry is that they're built for themselves a perfect cage of bars of their own devising.
They mocked people who said smoking would kill them--and have then seen their parents die painfully. They mocked people who said that opiates or crystal meth would destroy people's lives--and they've seen that happen to too many of their friends. They may possibly have mocked people who pointed out the danger of guns only to know someone who used a gun for suicide, or was in an accident. They mocked people who pointed out the likely end-game of Reagan Republicanism--and now they're living through those Kansas government pullbacks. And it just keeps going. Their team said Iraq would easy--hah. Their team said global climate change was a conspiracy--hah. Their team said cheap fossil fuel would persist forever--hah.
The anger is irrational, inchoate, and incapable of being assuaged because how could it be otherwise? The sin of the liberals is not that they lecture, it's that they're right...
Not 100% of the time, but close enough, with an ever-growing pile of evidence to this effect. That's a nasty place to be in for the guy who's built his identity on mocking the liberal, and he's reminded of it every time he uses the health care system, every time he cashes a welfare or unemployment check, ever time he is screwed over (yet again) by the grifters that the liberals WARNED him were grifters who would screw him over.
And so he listens to his Rush and watches his Hannity, but it's like being a Brezhnev communist, not a Lenin communist. Sure you mouth the words, you know the arguments for why you're right and how to interpret everything around you "correctly", but the joy is gone and only a strange stew of negative emotions remains. And let's recall that the Brezhnev communists, while they mean seem like a joke today, were perfectly capable of destroying most of Africa, much of South America, and giving us the gift that keeps on giving of Afghanistan.
