LINK: Great comment from Dana Posey Zimbleman, in response to this NR article:
It is people like Vance who end up being the so-called representatives of the white working poor because they grew up among them and presume they understand them. I encounter these folks in academia all the time. They fled their rural, working class roots for better opportunities and an education, which is commendable, but they became embittered and contemptuous of home. For all their complaints about whites’ lacking empathy, they never seem to demonstrate any compassion or empathy for those they grew up with. They sneer at those people, their religion, their traditions, and tell their new friends they are glad they made it the hell out. I grew up working class and did a lot of sneering myself after graduate school in my twenties and thirties. However, something changed in me when I got older and took a look around academia and saw some of the most unhappy, miserable people I had ever encountered. Then when I’d go home and encounter my relatives who went to church, gardened, produced beautiful quilts, made homemade jams and jellies, and enjoyed playing with their kids, I realized the folks back home possessed a humility and a knowledge about life that my colleagues with all their advanced degrees had missed.
Vance and others delude themselves into believing that Trump supporters are desperate, drug-addled, miserable people. In truth, those who support Trump are the ones who get up and go to work every single day and are sick of seeing their communities rot because the welfare state has, in an odd way, made welfare dependancy a way to gentrify young women and n’er-do-well men who have one child after another. This behavior is condoned–even glorified– as “single motherhood.” Then the progressive, non-judgmental judgmentalists will tell those who object to such dissipation that they are the ones who need to check their “privilege.”
The “young man from West Virginia” doesn’t have to read Breitbart to know that elites hate him. If he enrolls in his local community college and tries to better himself, he’ll likely encounter a slew of essays about white privilege in his English Composition 101 reader. He’ll either agree with that assessment and join the ranks of the self-loathing white-collar classes that have forgotten where they came from or laugh at the utter nonsense of it, move beyond the stereotyping, and make something of himself.
