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Trump's Victory, the "Educated," and the "Un-Educated"
[News With Views] A recent article in the U.K’s left wing newspaper The Guardian caught my eye when its author, Peter Hyman, put his finger on something important.Many American conservatives, he said, didn’t vote for Trump because they thought he was a savior. They voted for Trump [because] they despise his most visible enemy: the organized left. They see leftists as both dishonest and power-hungry, and think you’d have to be blind to miss it. Another article on the same site actually put it that way, calling it a "simple, inescapable message" that many people despise the left. I probably have to count myself in that category, however uncomfortable I am saying so. I don’t despise leftists as individuals. If they talk respectfully to me, I’ll talk respectfully to them. But as a group? A major reason we despise leftists as a group: their air of moral superiority (epistemic superiority as well) wrapped in arrogance and virtue-signaling, all alongside an almost-unbelievable lack of self-awareness. The resounding Trump victory has motivated at least some self-awareness, and may shatter other delusions, given time. Hence Hyman’s article. And Harris’s. We’re seeing more than a few leftists groping towards something like an examination of their assumptions. Hyman quoted Tucker Carlson who provided a clear statement of what probably motivated a lot of Trump voters: "They tell you, the people who can actually change a tire, who pay your taxes and work 40 hours a week, that you are somehow immoral. We have a message for them: you are not better than us, you are not smarter than us." Despite using the smug word "swagger" to describe Carlson’s demeanor, what Hyman says next is worthy of comment: "To dismiss this as the politics of grievance is to dismiss what it feels like to be disrespected, to feel ’a stranger in your own land.’ To feel as though the college-educated are looking down at the non-college-educated." Hyman thus puts his finger on the meat of what I want to discuss here: this presumption that only "the non-college-educated" support Trump. Only the deluded, those confused by "misinformation" and "conspiracy theories" (two of leftists’ favorite words). I have three advanced degrees, and I voted for Trump. I know many other exceptions to the simple-minded dichotomy between the credentialed who fancy themselves "too smart," versus the non-credentialed who are presumed too stupid to direct their own lives. Posted by: Besoeker 2024-11-17 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=725903 |