Do I sound like a snob? The rise of Trump correlates directly with the abysmal degradation

[Odin2005]

81. Anti-Intellectualism is as American as baseball and apple pie.

Populist politics and anti-intellectualism have gone together throughout American history from Andrew Jackson onward. It is no accident that William Jennings Bryan was both a champion of the common man against the Banksters and also a Fundamentalist Christian who rejected Evolution.

The RW populism Trump represents is the result of people in Middle America and in parts of the Rust Belt feeling belittled and patronized by educated upper-middle class urban people who see them (or I should say, us, because I am from a rural working class background, myself) as nothing but "dumb rednecks". Cruz attacked "New York values", but ironically it is Trump who is the one sucessfully feeding off people's resentment of "New York values", the educated middle class and the economic elites come to be seen as one thing in people's minds, the "liberal elites".

A big problem with the Democratic Party is that it has an elitist snob problem, or at least the party is seen by many as being dominated by "sophisticated" educated middle class snobs from the big cities.