Have You Ever Tried to Think Like a Deplorable?

[Buckeye_Democrat]

21. Well written.

Poor Jake. Loneliness is something that I understand very well! I also stayed here to help care for my elderly parents (who were in their 40's when I was born) before they passed away, so I lost some personal opportunities that way. I have a bachelor's degree, but I didn't get to apply it. I'm typecast as a "factory laborer" now. I'm losing my eyesight in the meantime, so career concerns don't matter to me very much anyway.

Single people are more likely to vote for Democrats, though. Polls indicate that married people are more likely to vote for Republicans, and even more if they have other types of security.

Noam Chomsky thinks many of them believe that they've been doing everything they "should" do as Americans, so they're more likely to seek out the simplistic ideas of right-wingers to explain why their lives didn't turn out the way they expected.

There's been many optimistic myths accepted by white people over the years. If your expectations are high, you're more likely to become angry when it doesn't turn out well. One of the "myths" that my parents taught me was that hard work would be recognized by my employers, resulting in further training and pay raises. That seemed to be true for my father (who didn't even have a high school diploma), but not so much for me. My experience was that hard work meant having even more work tossed at me while managers received most of the benefits. I've been on the receiving end of "from each according to their ability" for years, doing the work that was formerly assigned to 8 people at my last job (and not the result of technology). I'm not sure how capitalism is supposedly superior to communism in my case.

I'm very liberal, so I took a different path than Jake.