If the Key to Winning Hispanics Is for the GOP to Convince Them They Don't Despise Them, What's the Key To Winning the Working Class?

Instapundit notes that Trump said, "I love the poorly educated."

Kind of inartful. He had to say that because he inartfully said he'd won with the highly educated "and the poorly educated," then realized the poorly educated probably don't like being called "the poorly educated," so he said he loved them.

So... Eh, not a great recovery, but still, an effort at a recovery.

Meanwhile, what's the message from a certain candidate I could name as far as whether he loves or despises the working class?

It has become a badge of honor among the Midcult types -- the middlebrows, not terribly smart but proud to not be stupid -- to sneer down anyone lower on the totem pole. That's always been a major part of class insecurity -- the need to assert one's own position by sneering down those allegedly lower.

Secure people don't have to do that.

Anyway, an awful lot of the agitation for a certain candidate I could name has this nasty sneer to it. A lot of insecure middlebrow types furiously buttressing their bona fides by demonstrating their hostility to their presumed inferiors.

It's not a winning strategy, fellas.

It's hard to restrain feelings of superiority -- we all have them; we are all vain; our egos work hard to protect our sense of self, as part of the survival instinct, without which we'd just curl up in depression and die -- but it's best not to broadcast those (largely illusory) feelings of superiority at 50,000 watts across all frequencies.

It's not really the candidate himself who's guilty of this. The candidate himself is bland and generic and well-positioned to be palatable to a mass audience, like any other carefully-engineered corporate product.

It's his supporters, who seem to believe that the only way to demonstrate that you went to college, if you don't have your sheepskin handy, is to sneer down supporters of any other candidate as insufficiently enlightened and a bit declasse.

(And if you didn't go to college, or didn't finish, you can at least imply you did by fulsomely agitating for the Only Candidate of the Intellectual Elite, the guy who talks about his Pop-Pop.)

Trump's supporters? Uneducated, racist Trumpenproletariat Poors. (About one third of the party, it turns out!)

Cruz's supporters? Wild-eyed Jesus freaks, Bible-humping circus folk. A lot of guileless uneducated fools, and probably also mostly Poors.

At some point you have to ask what your goal is: To win converts, or to further decorate yourself with class membership badges?

posted by Ace at 12:26 PM

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