“A Stranger In My Own Country”—The White Working Class
A new study published today by PRRI and The Atlantic examined why the white working class overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump during the election.
While the results are unsurprising, the questions and the corresponding number of responses, in some cases, are heartbreaking.
Before getting into the results, let’s quickly look at how the study was conducted.
Two things to know about this study.
- It was funded by the Open Society Foundation—George Soros’ main “charitable” enterprise, which also funds a plethora of domestic terror groups.
- It was conducted by telephone interviews on a “stratified, single-stage, random-digit-dialing” basis, that represented all 50 states, conducted in September and October of 2016.
Basically, it’s an attempt for Globalists to find out what exactly went wrong in November’s election for Clinton, and uncover why voters turned out in droves for Donald Trump.
So far, neocon icon, Ben Shapiro, has already used this as an excuse to push for more economic globalism within the Republican party.
Shapiro summarizes the findings:
All of which suggests that the call from “moderate” Republicans to embrace Democratic economics is a fools’ errand, and that dumping the Reagan combination of social conservatism and free markets won’t actually guarantee a winning combination in the rust belt. Trumpism is less about Trump than about rejection of Obamaism and Clintonism. And that’s a good thing for conservatism and America.
Notice how he surreptitiously uses free markets and free trade interchangeably, even though they are very, very different things.
Free markets can occur domestically, while having internationally restricted trade to protect markets and industries that may be important, and that spur economic growth.
And sometimes, in order to have free markets, you must protect them from international competition—which is often backed by foreign governments—you can’t have a free domestic market when local companies are competing with China’s state-backed monoliths.
You’re just exchanging the US government for China’s at that point.
That’s where economic nationalism comes in.
Anyways, someone is pushing an agenda either way. It’s just rage against the Trump machine.
What Ben (and many others) are missing is just how sad the results actually are when you look at the response rate for some of these questions.
Let’s do that now.
The White Working Class Loves American Culture, And Don’t Think It Needs To Change
Along with examining reasons voters identified with Trump, the study also provides a detailed profile of white working-class Americans.
According to the researchers, the main predictor for members of the white working class to vote Trump was identification with the Republican Party. If you were a Republican, you were 11 times more likely to vote Trump in this survey.
Great. No news there.
The next biggest reason was “fears about cultural displacement.” Voters who felt like “strangers in their own land” were 3.5 times more likely to vote Trump.
Strangers in their own land.
Let’s not gloss over that. This is depressing, and the study shows more—remember these statistics were taken on white working-class Americans specifically.
As it turns out, 65% of participants believed that the American way of life has deteriorated since the 1950s.
This is unsurprising because it has—Americans have been getting poorer, in real inflation-adjusted, terms for decades.
Part of this is because of offshoring to the developing world, and part is because of immigration, particularly illegal immigration. Either way, facts are facts.
Furthermore, 48% of white Americans agree with the statement “things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.”
And 68% believe that the US is in danger of losing its culture and identity, while 68% also believe that “American way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence.”
Additionally, 33% believe that society punishes men for acting like men and 52% believe that anti-white discrimination is now as bad as discrimination against blacks, or other minorities.
So, the majority of white working-class Americans, unsurprisingly, resist the idea that everything in America is A-Okay and that we are moving in the right direction.
It’s the opposite.
Unfortunately, this is actually what the data shows for the most part economically speaking.
Middle class Americans have been losing over the last 50 years.
Again, this is because of the offshoring of American industry and jobs to the developing world, illegal immigration, and racially-divisive identity politics that the Left (and even the Right) have championed.
All these things taken together have resulted in many white working-class Americans feeling like strangers in their own land.
This is not a good thing.
At all.
Answering “Why Is Trump So Popular” With The Working Class?
The best way for immigrants to feel at home in their new country is to better integrate them. It’s called assimilation.
It’s what countries universally did all throughout history, until groups of elitist intellectuals started forcing their “diversity is our strength” mantra, and rammed uncontrolled immigration down the throats of the American public—for decades.
The Right claimed it was because of the economy, and that immigrants needed to replace our workers and do the jobs Americans won’t do. Hogwash—automation does the trick.
The Left claimed it was because diversity actually is a strength, and that we are all immigrants. Balderdash.
Other cultures can be good and enriching. But when immigrants expect their culture to take precedence over that of their host culture, it becomes unreasonable.
Bottom line: when native citizens start to feel like “strangers in their own land”, we have a problem. It’s a sign of immigration saturation. It indicates failed integration and failed assimilation.
Immigrants chose to come here. They chose our culture over theirs. The appropriate solution would be to let them assimilate and bask in the glorious culture that is America’s, rather than bending American’s culture to fit theirs.
Otherwise native born Americans will feel like they have no culture. This is not only unfair, but it’s dangerous.
Here’s why is Trump so popular:
Trump embodied American culture, and recognized a problem with the way things are going; something many politicians ignored at their own peril.
