Poor, White, and Republican
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/02/poor-white-and-republican.htmlF.D.R. called him “the forgotten man,” but that was long ago. By 1972, he was a member of the silent majority and had become a Democrat for Nixon (he wore a hard hat with an American-flag sticker). 1980 produced the Reagan Democrat (this time he came from Macomb County, Michigan, and was discovered by the pollster Stan Greenberg). By 1994 he had curdled into the Angry White Male (he elected the Gingrich Congress). In 2008, he was simply the working-class white—by then he was no longer forgotten, and no longer a Democrat of any kind; he was a member of the much-analyzed Republican base. The television godfather of the type, of course, is Archie Bunker, but you can also trace his lineage more darkly through the string of hard-bitten blue-collar movies that begins with “Joe” (Peter Boyle, 1970), goes on to “Falling Down” (Michael Douglas, 1993), “Gran Torino” (Clint Eastwood, 2008), and, in a rural context, “Winter’s Bone” (2010). He’s a descendant of the thirties Everyman played by Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper, except that in the intervening decades he lost his idealism and grew surly, if not violent, consumed with a hatred of hippies, immigrants, blacks, government, and, finally, himself.
This election year, he’s back and getting a lot of attention from sociologists and pundits (Charles Murray’s new book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” sparked the current flurry of commentary). But in 2012 he’s no longer even working class. He’s fallen through the last restraints of decency and industriousness, down into the demoralized and pathological underclass that, in the past, Americans associated with the black poor. There, he lives on disability, is no longer fit for employment nor has any impulse to get a job, is divorced, fathers illegitimate children who grow up to do the same, gets hooked on meth or prescription drugs, does time in prison now and then, and has bad teeth.
Is it useful to make generalizations about whole classes of people? We all know the reasons why it’s not—they stoke prejudice, crush nuance, distort reality, are unkind and unfair. But just as it was wrong for a generation of liberals to reject Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s notorious 1965 report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” it would be a mistake to dismiss the subject of Murray’s new book simply because it insults half of the Americans who weren’t already tarred by “The Bell Curve.” Murray has a talent for raising important questions on the way to arriving at invidious answers.
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they are failing in their pro-business, profit-driven mission.
Not a problem for me, but it's something they might want to look at. 
He must be listening to his daily hypnosis sessions.
Unconscious self-destruction. 
It's quite a lovely small (borderline "up north"
town, with lakes, woods, lots of natural recreation. It never has had an industrial base (that I know of); more likely farming, recreation, and now a bit of a bedroom community to Mpls./St. Paul. The only sizable business that caught my attention was the hospital.
If Mr. Gulbranson is native to the area, I'm surprised that he expects to make more than $49k a year printing t-shirts and making jewelry. Perhaps the temporary housing boom that sent conservative and blue collar city people north for cheaper housing and an escape from "urban problems" left him with unrealistic expectations. The boom is over and so are the construction jobs. Isn't the Rethuglican/Tea Pots answer to his dilemma that he should pull himself up by his bootstraps?
How can he accept so much help from the government and still "don his Gadsen snake t-shirt?" Knowing how that area has changed in the last two decades, I imagine he's just trying so hard to fit in that he can't face his hypocrisy.
