Trump doesn't care about poor people.

Sounds to me like higher taxes to redistribute wealth to those down and out white people may be helpful to the situation. We can even allow them to satisfy their need to feel good about themselves and work hard by redistributing the wealth via jobs to make much needed repairs to our nation's infrastructure. Now, if we could only convince them to stop voting against their own self-interest to implement this common sense plan....

Am I the only one to put that in Google translate? WP

these people are largely futureless by choice. They aren't systematically discriminated against based on race or religion and still choose to remain in those "futureless white communities" instead of seeking out better opportunities for themselves and their families. They also do nothing to expose themselves to diverse populations and a diversity of ideas that can easily be found throughout the US and which may help catapult themselves upwards in social and economic status.

These are the exact types of people who can do something positive about their situation, but would rather stay rooted in some small town without opportunity because its where they're from.

edit: there are plenty of small town, poor white people who are content with living a very simple life with no extravagances and just barely enough food on the table. These people understand there are other opportunities out there though and mostly just plod through living simply in an echo chamber around family and friends.

purely on a practical level they really are making themselves an unattractive section of society for effective and intelligent politicians to appeal to.

look at all the personal debasement that intelligent republican politicians have put themselves through in an effort to capture the white idiot vote, and then those people turn around and and elect as their standard bearer a cartoon man who spends his time saying absurd and disgraceful things which the aforementioned debased politicians then have to desperately try to explain away (and fail, because its impossible)

look at poor paul ryan trying to balance on that knife edge of loyalty to party/oops drumpf just said another racist thing and i'm gonna get asked about it a million times. and then as if that's not bad enough the white idiot coalition get on twitter and start the #DumpRyan hashtag as payback for what they believe to be insufficient loyalty to frog emperor drumpf (because ryan for some reason refuses to treat the mother of a dead US soldier like the terrorist that her head furniture so clearly indicates she is)

who is gonna chase their votes in the future when this is the repayment one can expect? no-one with any real ambition or talent. they'll end up getting represented by ineffective people such as bachmann and palin and drumpf. oh this already happened

It is beyond rich for anyone to defend the evangelical poor, confederate, Fox-viewing, internet-having, staunch white Republican cohort on the grounds that they haven't had the opportunity to git learnin', or that liberals do not appreciate them, when:

1. They reliably vote for the party that wants their opportunities restricted, wants minimum wage to remain low, wants them to have to pay for private health care, wants taxes to remain low so that social programs designed to benefit specifically these people cannot be funded, wants to reduce spending on education for specifically these people, wants to celebrate the "real America" manifested by the Confederate South, wants to defeat net neutrality so that private business can control access to information on the internet, wants to maintain vast wealth inequality as a matter of first principles, and wants to protect the 'right' of corporate persons to evade taxation even though those same corporations refuse to hire this exact set of people and even though the economic 'benefits' of corporate tax avoidance harm these same people.

2. They have the internet.

3. They actively espouse retrograde social values taught to them by the same Republican Party that wants to demonize liberals for not appreciating this retrograde voting cohort.

4. They constitute the one voting cohort the Republican Party can rely on, which means they are coddled and reaffirmed by the Republican Party so that it can win elections while simultaneously disenfranchinsing them on purpose to maintain that one voting edge.

5. They remain white and thus comparatively privileged, especially in their usually-racist communities, and still fail to grasp opportunities.

6. Are PROUD members of the "work hard, get there" school of American thought. Their OWN ETHOS indicates that it IS their fault they're failures.

I'm sympathetic to the lack of economic opportunity presented to these people. That's a problem worth solving. But they are going to fight tooth and nail and rifle to prevent that from ever happening, and the Republican Party is going to encourage every scratch, bite and bullet because it literally cannot survive without white nationalist objective morons supporting it.

That voting cohort is the literal worst of America. They are morons. They do not help themselves. There's no reason to discuss this problem as if there's some innately non-moronic excuse for their innate need to sabotage themselves and the rest of the country.

I mean, if you are

1. A racist

or

2. Someone who fundamentally misunderstands the root causes of your life's problems and either does nothing about that or doubles and triples down on the same solution that does not work

then you are, in fact, an idiot.

Note: I'm not saying all Trump supporters fall in one or both of these categories

Baids, CDL, Hoya and Riverman all on the same page, I think they might be on to something.

how are people still getting baited by thay3r?

good work, sir

Blame the propaganda all you want. But liberals have significant blame for losing the white working class vote. Joe Bageant, my favorite writer (RIP), wrote a lot about that topic since he came from a redneck background, but became liberal. Liberals mock these people openly claiming they are stupid and ignorant, but have not fought for universal education that could help these people gain a better understanding of the world.

They support trade agreements that outsource their jobs. Maybe it's for the best overall, but it's certainly not best for the white working class. The white working class just plain LIKES GUNS. Liberals don't.

Liberals used to speak in terms of social class. Not really anymore. Class issues don't seem the least bit important to any Dems to the right of Sanders and Warren.

Liberals certainly are the less Christian party. The white working class is overwhelmingly Christian.

These people aren't as dumb as many think. They know neither party will help them economically, but at least one is Christian and likes guns! And do you really think a stone cold wonk like Hilldawg is ever going to appeal to these people? LOL! Give me a break.

Until liberals make an effort to get them education, get them jobs, and actually interact and learn from rednecks rather than lol at them and hate on them, they will continue to lose their votes. And rather than reach out to them, they'll just lol at their stupidity. It's a disgrace.

ya the dems could get loads more votes by pretending that more guns = more safe and world = 6k years old. but i expect they'd lose a lot of votes as a result, and from demographics that are more important (eg the section of society that is under 70 years old)

Man you people really don't care about others when the virtue signaling isn't there. Egoism is alive and well!

jacked from politics:





what a dumb****

here's the thing, liking guns is hugely lol and people who use liking guns as an affirmative reason to vote someone deserve to have their dreams crushed.

also, religion has no place in politics so while politicians are overly white and Christian compared to the general public the more secular they are the better. Voting for "Christian values" is a hugely lol stance as these values, as interpreted in 2016 (for "traditional marriage", think lowly of non-Christians, pro-life, often racially biased, supportive of traditional gender roles, anti-equal pay, etc.), are objectively terrible for society. So while these people aren't stupid for voting for the party of Christian values since they hold these values themselves, they ARE, in fact, VERY ****ING STUPID as individuals for holding these values and thus do not deserve to have their preferred beliefs pushed on the rest of society through executive, legislative, or judicial powers.

Don't forget that if you tried to give these people jobs rebuilding the nations infrastructure, they'd riot about how it's all a plot to have the UN invade us! They're much stupider than you think.

This is all well and good, but you're acting as though this same cohort has not historically, and does not continue, to vilify everyone that isn't white, Christian and straight.

This is a group of folks that openly suggests that blacks murdered by policemen deserve it, openly suggests that gays are going to hell and should be treated as sub-human, openly vilifies the people working at slave wages doing jobs these folks would NEVER do to make the fake-food and plastic **** that they buy at Wall-Mart (which, **** trade agreements, is one of the largest perpetrators of these same communities losing jobs that have some agency and decency), and which continuously fights for the government to fund parochial schools that teach that science is a myth, a stance which they use to fight tooth and nail against any effort at responsible resource management so that we can avoid a chain of famine, flooding, and war that will decimate huge percentages of the human population in our lifetime.

**** trying to play the victim card.

Maybe Obama should meet these people halfway, like admit he was born in Casablanca, not Nairobi, and that he thinks there is no God but Yahweh, but Mohammed is his prophet, that the earth is maybe 100,000 years old, and that gays should only get half married.

You're right. I'm not saying they should be pro-gun. I'm just explaining that the policy doesn't appeal to rednecks.

100% agree. I hate guns and if god is real, that guy's a real jerk.

But why do well-off liberals mock these people who used to vote with them instead of fighting for their right to gain an education that would give them the critical thinking ability to buck these beliefs and values?

They know not what they do.

They get mocked because they left the Democratic party in droves against their economic interest due to Civil Rights.

It's so lol that some people actually think the Democrats should pander to the gun nuts and the religious nuts. They don't want those votes. The reason they have open contempt for them is that the Democratic base staunchly opposes those values. Look at the fit all the Berniebros are throwing because Hillary only 95% agrees with his platform. Now if you want to lose West Virginia and Mississippi by 10 points instead of 15, maybe you can soften your stance on gun control and gay marriage and equal rights for minorities, but what's the ****ing point?

And wait 20 years for a bunch of the lol olds to die and suddenly Ohio and Pennsylvania and Florida are solidly blue states instead of purple, and maybe Texas is now a swing state, and it's either gg GOP or this Trump thing will have been the dying grasp of that wing of the party and they evolve into something resembling the modern day center leaning Democrats, like all their political consultants said they should have done after 2012 already. That's the future, not coddling the trailer trash who are never going to vote for you anyways.

I don't act that way. Those views are deplorable. I'm just explaining that it would be best to reach out and help these people instead of mocking them. Why would they vote for people who openly mock them? And do they deserve mockery or sympathy? Would I think this way if I grew up on a dirt road in southern West Virginia and had no access to quality education?

The root cause of all of this is a lack of education. It's hard for us to relate. But it's not a coincidence these white rural communities think this way. They're a product of their environment.