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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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Please give the following article a read. I don't think you've got an accurate picture or understanding of Trump and the forces animating his campaign. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/

Specifically, please pay attention to the part where he outlines the salary/wage class and the distinctions between them. It neatly answers and resolves the quandaries you've posted.

For those interested, the "managerial revolution" expands this a lot further. A dash of "elite theory" spices it up.

In the class framework of that article (which is a valuable one), Trump's best demographics are small business owners and retirees - the groups which together make up the vast majority of the investor class. He clearly does better with the wage class than the salary class, but the idea that the wage class is his core vote is incorrect, unless you skew the numbers by insisting that non-white members of the wage class don't count. Considered in the round, the wage class are still swing voters.

The thing that both the MAGA right and movement conservatism have in common (to the point that it is no longer easy to tell them apart) is that they are the "country party" in the classic court-vs-country dynamic - their core constituency is local elites in unfashionable places who think the national elite is dissing them. The woman who waits tables at an Arby's in Peoria thinks she is getting the short end of the stick. Whether she ends up blaming her asshole boss or the smug librulelites on TV more is the meat and drink of court vs country politics.

The nature of the American culture war is that there is a large-enough-to-matter minority of white men who are not local elites but who see themselves as local elites because they are white and male - they are mostly "wage class" and make up the noisiest subset of Trump supporters. (They are also the reason why "country party" right-wing politics works better in the US than in other countries even pre-Trump). But the core Trump voter is rich enough to own a boat.

I was skeptical of this but it really was well worth the click.