Reply #2: I grew up in the equivalent of a small town. [View All]

[Igel]

It was close to Baltimore, but nobody ever went there. Sort of self-contained, with a suburb mall that met needs that we couldn't have met "in house".

There was racism, homophobia, xenophobia. There were people that clung to their religion, and, no doubt, to guns. Anti-immigrant sentiment wasn't an issue; this was before the latest surge in immigration, legal and otherwise. It was also before the "free trade" movement. But the things that are "clung to", viewed negatively, apart from anti-immigrant and anti-free-trade sentiment were alive and well.

The problem was that almost everybody had union jobs at a large corporate plant; they were all but guaranteed having single-family incomes at a family-supporting level, they had their own homes with 20-year fixed mortgages. They were Everyman and Everywoman. There was no turmoil.

The residents had some problems when they lost their jobs, when the company put so much into wages and benefits that they let their physical plant become decrepit. Then when they tried to compensate, it was too late--"designer" products made in small batches were the rage, for niche markets, and then S. Korea and China squashed them all, pretty much.

However, the people I knew weren't exposed to people that had much more than they were until the local plant closed. The envy would have made them unhappy before, when they were prosperous enough; when they realized they'd never have as much as others, they would easily become bitter. And they did, to a large extent. But it wasn't free trade and immigration; ultimately, it was envy--their conditioned wants exceeded their needs by a fair margin, and they became frustrated.

However, they "clung" to most of the negative things Obama points out before they became bitter, and the bitterness arrived before immigration and free-trade became an issue. If you have A in the absence of B, and then A in the presence of B, you can't claim B is the cause of A however much you may believe that B is the end-all of explanations. He has his theory, but it's not clearly rooted in reality. Although I'm sure that it's "objectively true", to use an outmoded bit of jargon.