Richard Jernigan -> RE: State of the USA (Jan. 28 2020 4:55:10)
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Estebanana my friend, Nope. Not what I was talking about. When I took the management job at Kwaj in 1995, almost to a man the field engineers and techs had a resentful attitude toward the engineers who made more money than they did, and who bossed them around. I don't remember offhand what Hillary Clinton was up to in 1995*, but I don't think she had any influence whatsoever on the attitudes of the men. Their attitudes had been formed by ten, fifteen, twenty years of putting up with condescending engineers, who often knew less about the job than the field engineers and techs. I tried to do what I could about the attitudes, both resentment and condescension. It had some local effect. I don't know whether it lasted. For a few years before Clinton went for the presidential nomination, I often said that one of her disadvantages was that the Republicans quickly recognized her as a contender and had twenty years to blacken her name with fake scandals. When the 2016 election came along, my four friends all voted for Trump, and they still support him. These guys aren't dumb. Among them they hold a 100-ton All Oceans Master's License, a Master Electrician License, a Nuclear Power Plant Operations Supervisor License, a Shipyard Welder License...and a bunch more certifications. The one who just retired from working for Shell on an offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico was making $140K/year, 4 weeks on, 4 weeks off. Another is Master Electrician in a power plant in Tampa, Florida. When they worked at Kwaj my friends were making good money, had all their housing, food, medical, etc. expenses paid, and were getting the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion on their income tax. These guys are not economically marginalized. They don't fear the extinction of the white race: one of them was married to a Samoan beauty, another is now married to a really sweet Filipina. They're no more misogynistic than the average American male, and a lot more tolerant of gays and lesbians, because they have worked with them in overseas jobs, where their sexual orientation became apparent long before it was common for people to reveal LGBTQ identity in the USA. As long as someone does a good job and is easy to get along with, they don't care. They don't want the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade which established women's right to abortion. I'm pretty sure some of my highly educated and quite prosperous relatives do. They were just sick of taking sh1t from people with college degrees who made more money, often for less work, and who felt entitled to boss them around. They identified Clinton with the boss class. I assume they put McCain and Romney in the same bucket. I don't know whether they voted for Obama, nor what class identity they assigned to him, if any. Trump came along, the most victimized billionaire ever to exist, and not only promised to stick it to the boss class, but did it on live TV all through the primary and general election campaigns. My friends seem to me almost hypnotized by Trump's combination of malignantly inflated victimhood and defiance. It blinds them to his prodigious defects, or at least lets them excuse his lies and malfeasance. In my view, the campaign details you cite were not significant to my friends’ choices, compared to Trump's fake persona.Well, it must have started out as fake. It's who he actually is now. Recently, when Trump did something particularly egregious, one of my friends responded to a negative comment about him on Facebook, saying, "Well, that might be true, but at least he makes the Libs' heads explode." As I said, these guys aren't dumb. It's just that their resentment overwhelms their perception and logic. It happens to just about everybody at some point. When Bill Clinton went on TV, wagged his finger, sweated, trembled and said, "I never had sex with that woman, Ms Lewinsky," and went on to imply it was OK to lie to the grand jury, I lost it. I was so mad for 45 minutes that I couldn't figure out why I was mad. After I calmed down a little I realized it was because I had seen people lose their security clearance, their job, and eventually their family for a lot less severe offenses than lying to a grand jury. And here was the Commander in Chief lying to the country about lying to the grand jury. I calmed down fairly quickly and returned to whatever state of rationality I customarily inhabit. It was an acute attack of resentment. My friends suffer from a chronic version. My friends don't have a negative attitude. The ones who are now retired are having a lot of fun, rehabbing a good sized boat, tuning up a Harley and taking long road trips, even posting memes bemoaning the USA's political and cultural polarization, and exhorting people to do better. They just support Trump--enthusiastically. I hear and see a lot of chronic resentment, not only from my friends but from people in the small towns around here, from people who were Chief Petty Officers and Master Sergeants, the man who quickly diagnoses and fixes my air conditioning system.... I'm not saying chronic resentment is justified, righteous, ought to be forgiven or tolerated, I'm just saying it exists. It exists in much greater quantity than I perceived in the 1950s and early 1960s. One of my father's first cousins was an Air Force Master Sergeant. The younger genration called him Uncle Bud. He was among the world's most skilled radar techs in the 1940s-50s, an Air Force pioneer in the trade. He set up much of the Air Force's training program. One of my uncles started out as a house painter and ended up as business agent for the painters' union in Houston, sitting at the table and negotiating contracts with the huge oil refineries and chemical plants. Uncle Bud joked about General "Concrete Head" Mc Mullin's screwups. My uncle lampooned the big oil and chemical executives. Neither one went around with a low grade fever of resentment. I don't know what has caused the change, but something has. As I said, I don't know of any political science papers or books that have tried to measure how many people are suffering from chronic resentment, or how important resentment of condescension was in the election. It seems to me it may have been significant. RNJ (Edit) *In 1995 Hillary Clinton was the wife of the President. She had figured prominently as Chair of the commission that formulated the Clinton Health Care Plan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_health_care_plan_of_1993 The plan failed in Congress in 1994. The Clinton administration was widely criticized for the strategy of formulating the plan largely in secret, then presenting it to Congress as a finished product.
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