Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: If you really respect Trump voters, tell them the truth: “A wave of recent columns argue that what Trump superfans… http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/24/15375206/respect-trump-voters-truth
…or at least some hazily imagined, hard-pressed Northern working-class version of them—really want is respect. By all appearances, though, the opposite is the case. Those voters want what most voters want from politicians: to be disrespected, via shameless pandering and the occasional blatant lie. This was true of the men I spoke to in Bucksport, Maine, in the summer of 2016…. They seemed most of all to want to be told that reopening the [paper] mill was a realistic dream, even though it almost certainly is not. That doesn’t make Trump fans unique. It makes them normal….
But if you really respect people and really want to help them, you need to level with them…. When my grandparents were growing up in Brooklyn, it was a great hub of American manufacturing. Those jobs vanished, hard times ensued, and between 1950 and 1980 the borough lost nearly 20 percent of its population. Things have turned around over the course of my lifetime. But the specific lost jobs never came back…. Seattle, San Francisco, and other prosperous metropolitan areas, similarly, aren’t rich today because they never lost any good-paying jobs or industries. They’re rich today because they are home to brand-new industries….
Texas is successful because it’s grown big cities that anchor modern service economies, has built a world-class public university system, and has K-12 schools that, despite stingy funding, perform extremely well on a demographically adjusted basis. Successfully navigating this sort of transition is objectively difficult, especially if you don’t have Southern California’s weather or Texas’s fossil fuel resources…. But to change and adapt successfully, you need to want to do it. To accept that your kid may grow up to wear cowboy boots but probably won’t be an actual cowboy….
Claire Garofalo of the Associated Press recently published a brilliant examination of the small city of Lewiston, Maine—a long-declining factory town that has in many ways been revitalized by an influx of refugees from Somalia…. But… the majority of local whites don’t seem to like it—they wanted Lewiston’s glory days restored, not for culturally alien newcomers to transform their hometown…. The ultimate irony of today’s era of nostalgia politics, after all, is that the era people are nostalgic for was itself an era of incredibly rapid change. The “good old days” were a time when new industries were rising, the population was growing fast, and the built environment shifted rapidly in the direction of suburbanization….
Telling people that their community needs to change is probably not what they want to hear. But when you really respect people, you tell them the truth.
