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Why I Will Never Abandon Trump
Lately there’s been a lot of talk among pundits on what it would take for Trump’s base to abandon him. For me, the answer is: nothing. I feel I must support Trump, regardless of what he does, because I fear what would happen if he got impeached. That’s not to say I don’t criticize Trump from time to time. But said criticism has no bearing on my generic support for him.
Ever since World War II, American elites have tried to build this narrative that democracy is about impersonal public policy, not power/status competition between groups. If you believe that policy is all that matters, than of course there won’t be any consequences to impeaching Trump, certainly not for his base. He’ll just be replaced by Pence, and things will go on mostly as they have before.
This is completely absurd. Trump’s base is socially vulnerable, much more so than I think any of us want to admit. Impeaching Trump would be a complete disaster. At the very least we would see a rash of suicides. The discrimination working-class white people face could intensify, especially in employment. The nihilism that’s been growing in the middle and upper middle classes for 50 years could start to spiral out of control. And that’s before we get to the rioting which, let’s be honest, would be intense.
If you don’t believe me, just look at what happened to Christians after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. Liberals went on a judicial jihad to persecute them. The status of Christians fell so low that the courts actually ruled that Trump’s travel ban’s prioritization of religious minorities was unconstitutional. Yes, Christians are dying en masse in Middle Eastern countries, but apparently we can’t do anything about it because, well, the First Amendment prohibits it. Go figure.
Elite coups have consequences. Politics is not a dispassionate fight over public policy, but a struggle between groups. The consequences of impeaching Trump would be just too dire for me to abandon my generic support for the man, and I don’t think there’s anything Trump could that would change that.
Published in General
Well, now, Bob. I think there are principled reasons to dislike the president that have nothing to do with being a sheep or a member of the upper middle class or a person with Wall Street investments who pushes for legislation that benefits those investments.
I will applaud Donald Trump when he does things well, but I view him as a very imperfect champion for the exact people who are hurt by the bi-flation of which you speak.
That said, I understand on this thread that I am in the minority, and I certainly don’t want to start a “Trump Good/Trump Bad” discussion. (To that I’ll always answer… yes.)
I think you prove here that the notion that only blue collar workers fall into traps is wrong.
I don’t know how you rid yourself of all those student loans and get ahead, but I am glad that you’re at peace with all of that, and I wish you luck.
Why do you think you wound up in the particular circumstances that now make your life so difficult when it obviously did not have to go that way?
I listened to authority figures who told me that I would be wasting my intellect by not going to college, that borrowing money for college was an investment that would be guaranteed to pay off, and that if I dropped out I would never be able to go back as a full time student. This was combined with being a lazy student with no real clue what I wanted to do with my education, beyond getting that all important BA and then JD behind my name, and having the terrible luck to graduate law school in the middle of not only a recession but also a major restructuring of the legal profession.
At this point, all I want out of life is to be a stay at home mom. Between my barren career and barren womb, it just ain’t going to happen.
Absolutely. The pros and cons of Trump/not Trump can get very convoluted. Recall that many who went with Trump were there because he’s not Hillary and this was not typical of how those people make their electoral decisions. It sounds silly and much ridicule rained on these people. But I think those people have been vindicated by the hysterical behavior of the progressives since the election of Trump. Many of the issues conservatives have with how the country is moving are centered on the concentration of power in Washington. Unless this can be changed, and that means a devolution of power to more local levels, this fight is lost. So Trump is seen as an opportunity to change things and, of course, for the other side in this contest Trump is a threat who must be deposed. Perfection and principled behavior of the type you and I might normally look for in a leader is not here. We must look at what is at stake.
Oh, my goodness, Amy. I will seriously pray for you tonight. I mean, I hope that’s okay? I can totally relate to your experiences as well… not knowing what to do, deferring to others, and having factors way beyond your control influence your life’s direction.
Look, sister. I’m not trying to make you into a Marxist when I say I care about your very human plight even though I don’t know you, and I hope that your path leads you to good places, even if you can’t envision what those places will look like where you’re standing right now.
What do you think about all that bad advice geared mostly to benefit others? I know some must have come from those close to you yet they were snookered as well by our consumption oriented society led by Washington and Wall Street.
The progressive response to Trump is crazy. I would love for devolution of power. I don’t look for perfection in any human being–much less in a politician–but I am extremely wary of “ends justify means” arguments, especially when it comes to world leaders. In the end, I reserve my approval for those times when I think it’s warranted, and I am honest about my disapproval when I feel that’s appropriate. My little voice doesn’t really matter much either way, but I hope it all works out in the end.
How’s that? :)
I don’t think my parents or high school guidance counselor were snookered so much as unaware of how things had changed from their own youth. Mr. Lucas was happy to note how he could have borrowed $5K for a car, but instead he borrowed it for college and had a great career to show for it. Well, if I’d only borrowed $5K for a career that went nowhere, I’d be a lot more sanguine about it.
As for my parents, Mom had a long time inferiority complex from being the only one of her four siblings not to have a bachelor’s until she went back 15 years later, and Dad’s never earned his. So for them, a college degree always looked like a golden ticket to not needing to work as hard. Of course, after seeing their two daughters who have 3 bachelor’s and 3 master’s between them both lose their homes in foreclosure, they’re not swallowing the “college is the only path to financial stability” line anymore.
I guess I always admired learning and knew I would get what I wanted or needed in terms of that but my college degrees always trailed my career development so I never made much of a connection. I was 31 when I got my BS and 38 when I got my MS. Those degrees have never meant much even though I was first in my family to get one. Of course, I was in information systems and software development in the early years so that was perhaps much more fortuitous than your experiences. Although I lived and worked through recessions and high interest rates and high inflation, I never experienced the kind of beatdown that happened at the first decade of this century while I was working. I retired in 2005.
I do think that a college degree is often necessary to get a job. For example, I used to be in sales, which had jack all to do with the Shakespeare I studied in school, but a BA was a necessary hoop through which I had to jump to open the door to get into that company. I don’t think that’s less true now. There are certain companies/professions that require academic credentials.
However, college degrees are not golden tickets; academia itself has made merely getting a degree less relevant, and costs should be taken into consideration at all points on the path.
There is also the basic supply/demand principle that’s at work in certain fields. If one became a lawyer around ten years ago–especially if one wasn’t in a T-14 school with great grades–one was going to enter a horrible, terrible, no good job market because there were more lawyers than there is work. And all law schools are suuuupppper expensive, whatever their employment stats because… well… if you become a lawyer you’ll make tons of money, right? Yet an astonishing number of JDs never practice.
So I have a great amount of sympathy for anyone who graduated from law school at what was the worst time to do so, and some of those trends are really hard to predict.
I also find the inflation of higher education criminal. This is part of my beef with how I am paid. I don’t really care that I don’t make a lot of money, but kids keep paying more and more and more and more, and where does that money go? The rock climbing wall in their gyms? Administrators who expand diversity programs? Some “rock star” profs, for sure, but even typical tenured faculty isn’t making that much. There’s a disconnect between what they are paying and what they are actually buying.
I am also a lifelong learner, and I am going back to school in the fall for pure fun. But where am I taking a class? At the community college where I work. This is because a course on philosophy is a little under $300. The same course at a 4 year university would be more than $3,000. I’d tell every child on the planet to spend their first two years getting their core classes at community colleges.
And when kids come to me and say they want to be history majors??????
I’m honest with them about what they can do with that degree. (There’s a lot, actually, but becoming a tenured professor? If that’s the goal? Um. It’s best if he/she goes to Harvard, and even then, he/she might end up an adjunct….)
None of it’s easy.
I wonder how much of this is Marxism and how much is Puritan work ethic. There was a time when effort was directly proportional to productivity/market worth when we were all doing manual labor and there tended to always be additional productive things to do if you put in more effort.
A ton of our attitudes are couched in Puritan work ethic. I’d totally agree with this. (See Max Weber.) There is still that cultural undercurrent that comes from Protestant concepts about who is “the elect” that creates a sorting of “good” and “bad” per “successful” and “not successful” in our country.
The issue with Marxism is that it draws no distinction between the digging of artisanal ditches by hand (no shovels allowed… that’s “capital”) and a guy operating a backhoe.
According to the labor theory of value, there’s really no reason to pay the guy digging with his bare hands less than the guy with the backhoe. But Marxism is totally bonkers about what capital does anyways, so this confusion simply follows.
Oh, agreed. A degree is increasingly necessary to a middle class lifestyle the way a high school diploma used to be — it’s a signal that you’re reasonably intelligent, literate, and numerate. (And practically mandated by the Supreme Court as employers can’t make employees take skills tests if one ethnic/racial group does better than another.) It is no longer sufficient to earn a middle class lifestyle, however, which is what took my parents by surprise. Even with magic letters behind your name, unemployment and underemployment are still real worries, and jobs are still won as much or more by who you know than what you know.
All that. :)
I don’t actually agree with this.
I very intentionally sought to distance myself from my Father’s profession in an effort to avoid a variety of things. Among them were my Father’s earned reputation as a workoholic, and his incredible skill at his job – neither of which I wanted to compete with and certainly didn’t want to reflect back upon him poorly if I didn’t match up.
Consequently, I went into a very different realm where there is almost no cross-pollination of individuals. As a result, I’ve been able to define my own path without standing in his shadow and I don’t have hanging over me the dread that I didn’t earn what I have except out of familiarity with my family’s surname.
Now, once you’ve established contacts and a reputation within an industry, what you’ve managed to create in that regard sort of takes on a life of its own and allows you to pick and choose among your associates regarding where you work.
I’m definitely a meritocracy guy.
I think that’s great, @ majestyk, and I also believe in meritocracy. However, networks are extremely important. That’s the real value, actually, of going to a top tier university. Maybe one will get a good education, but the bigger deal is meeting the people who will help each other as their careers progress, as well as having the institution open the first door.
IF one does not believe that “who one knows” does a great deal in allowing one to get on the first rung of the ladder, I’m not quite sure what to say. I don’t see anything inherently wrong with this, but it exists. Even as a teacher, I knew I had to substitute for a while in a closed market with a glut of liberal arts majors because I needed to meet this or that principal in person who might then give me a chance.
I look at my kid now who has gone to much, much better schools than I did, and I see the tremendous difference in the internship opportunities he’s had.
No one I know denies “who you know” is a giant advantage. Granted, it’s “what you know” that will allow you to continue your climb up. At least, that’s what we hope.
Also, J. D. Vance does an excellent job in his book of describing differences in “access” from when he was an undergraduate and when he was at Yale. I think he climbed up on merit, but he fully acknowledged how the playing field is different once you move across a certain yard line….
That’s what I’m talking about. “Who you know” doesn’t have to mean family connections, though they count. But hell, even the post-law-school shoe selling job I had was because I knew somebody — my pre-law-school coworker was now a manager about to go on maternity leave. (Strangely, people are reluctant to hire lawyers to sell shoes.) If you don’t make connections in school, getting that first job — at least in the middle of a recession — is really tough. It’s now been ten years since I started law school, and I still haven’t gotten that “first job” — that one that lets you get basic experience, make contacts, and start a reputation in the field, and now that I’ve moved halfway across the country, what little reputation I had I have to re-earn.
When faced with identical resumes, the one with a prior connection wins. I’m not mad that’s the way it is; to do so would be to curse the rain for being wet. The importance of making those connections, however, is not obvious to those who look at the world of college graduates from the outside.