Anthony Bourdain eviscerates privileged Eastern liberals' for utter contempt of working-class

[LeftishBrit]

71. The right-wing elite are playing a very clever game IMO

They are playing on the weak points of liberals to discourage us from fighting the Right. Liberals have a tendency to feel guilty; to feel that there must be two sides to arguments; that intolerance is wrong; that there is no absolute right or wrong; that one must not be too judgemental, especially of people who may be seen as disadvantaged. As a liberal, I think these are good things - but like all good things, they may be subject to manipulation for bad ends.

Thus, the Right are trying to convince liberals that they are being unkind to those poor, disadvantaged Trump voters; that they are prejudiced against the working-class (with a further implication that all working-class people are white); that they have 'made' people vote for Trump by not giving them enough respect (shades of 'She *made* me hit her, because she didn't respect me enough!'); and that the left have to 'reach out' to the right.

This is IMO a deliberate attempt to weaken the left and discourage us from fighting for our principles; and the implicit conclusion is 'If Democrats would only accept right-wing racial attitudes, they could go back to pre-1965, and have lots of nominally Democratic George Wallaces and Orbal Faubuses in power!'

It may indeed be true that neither party addressed some of the economic concerns of poorer people sufficiently to get them out to vote. In American presidential elections, about 45% of the electorate never get to the polls, and this disproportionately includes poor working-class people. Some of it is apathy; some of it is voter suppression; but undoubtedly some of it is never having a candidate who represents poorer people's concerns . But this does not mean that liberal criticisms of billionaire Trump and his voters are just snobbery, or that the liberals somehow lost because they were too snooty. Too complacent, and too internally divided, perhaps.

People are trying exactly the same in the UK post-Brexit. And at least there is some truth in the view that a significant proportion, though not a majority, of Brexit voters were working-class people desperate to improve their economic position, and blaming the EU or immigrants for problems which were really caused by our own governments. In America, Trump voters were better off than Clinton voters, and as usual, most really poor people didn't vote.