Salon - It’s not the economy, stupid! How Trump succeeds by saying what many voters think

[TomCADem]

Nice article about how Trump liberates his supporters to engage in hate and racism. Trump is more attractive than many establishment Republicans who rely on dog whistles and code words, which still make the Republican base engage in a denial of their hateful impulses and beliefs. Trump did not create the hate among the Republican faithful. He just gave it a voice. Even if Trump were to lose, the fact that he won the nomination will likely encourage future Republicans to try to thread the needle as a Trump-lite. Openly voice racists and sexist views, but with a little more discipline in campaigning.

http://www.salon.com/2016/08/18/it-is-not-the-econom_partner/

One of the things you can’t help but notice is that in this time of great economic despair, Donald Trump isn’t running on how he will improve the economy. He barely mentions it, his silly economic speech last week notwithstanding. In truth, he isn’t running on the issues at all, unless you think building a wall or torturing terrorists are issues. In this most peculiar of campaigns, he is running instead against the force that he seems to think really threatens America and that really has Americans lathered: political correctness.

When you get past all the bloviation, Trump’s really big promise is that he will loosen Americans’ tongues, just as he has loosened his own. That is what he means when he says, “I am your voice” — not that he will represent the working class in the halls of power, but that he will express their hostility against social etiquette. As Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic noted after examining comments of Trump supporters explaining why they liked him, “political correctness loomed large in those accounts.”

Even so, you don’t hear much about PC in the political coverage of the election except when Trump is attacking it. One of his big applause lines is, “I’m so tired of this political correctness crap.” And there is a good reason why the media don’t like talking about this, even though Trump has been, in Nicholas Kristof’s words, “mainstreaming hate,” and even though Trump’s anti-PC scourge may be one of the lasting effects of the campaign. The reason is that the media have been anti-PC too. Now that Trump has tossed etiquette aside, they seem to be having second thoughts about what an anti-PC society looks like. Here’s the problem: It looks like Trump.

Given all the grave problems that beset us, political correctness would seem to be a rather slender one. That is the media’s assessment, too. Just about every political analyst and just about every political survey concurs that this election pits disaffected older working-class white males, largely without college degrees, against a cohort of the young, women, minorities and college-educated whites — a sort of “last gasp” election of a declining group against a bundle of ascendant ones.

[spanone]

1. it's reality teevee, there's no 'how to'. he has no answers.