Trump and the Republican party have played the white working class. Democrats have played the black working class. Together, both parties have conspired to prop up the elites while screwing over their constituents.

There is a sizable block of white working class voters in the Midwest who voted for Obama in 2012 but swung over to Trump in 2016. Trying to explain away these voters by dismissing them as racists is painfully stupid, but many political commentators from the coasts are stuck trying to do it anyway because they cannot conceive of anything else. It's pathetic.

They were probably already racist in 2012, but aside from a few *single issue* racists, were more interested in the promise of change than in the skin color of the person promising it. In 2016 they voted the same way, only this time around the candidate promising change wasn't the Democrat.

Yeah. And last time the candidate promising change immediately turned around and French kissed Wall Street's ass. The Obama administration was staffed with Friends Of Wall Street and not a single senior Wall Street banker was arrested or prosecuted. And that was with Democratic control of the House, Senate, and Oval Office. Think how that felt.

"single senior Wall Street banker was arrested or prosecuted" - That makes an assumption that what they were (are) doing is illegal, and I haven't seen anything to show it was.

Sure, edit my comment then to "individually criminal."

I'm not sure about how the liabilities work out and what was criminal vs reckless. It seems suspect, certainly.

I'm pretty sure a number of those settlements are structured so that we will never find that out.

You haven't seen anything because the Justice Department never bothered to properly investigate.

Not all are racist, but right-wing media sure does its part to make people either racist or, more probably, historically ignorant to racial issues. The latter winds up causing a sort of racist-like dilemma.

What do you hope to accomplish with these posts? Imagine we all started agreeing with you: Trump won because working class white people are all evil racist jerks. OK, now what?

That's when suddenly, our insufficiently woke asses will realize we are all the worst people ever and the collective guilt over other people with our skin colour voting for a fascist troll doll will collapse the known universe.

"That's a nice universe you've got there. It'd be a shame if something were to happen to it..."

What is the point of this? It might make you feel better in the short run to dismiss all Trump voters as a bunch of ignorant racists whose problems don't matter to you, but that doesn't change the fact that their problems are real, difficult to solve, and not going away. It's just smug and lazy. No wonder they didn't vote the way you wanted them to. When one party is telling you "you're fucked and there's nothing anyone can do, tough shit, you're expendable" and the other party is telling you "we know how to get your jobs back, it's the fault of all those immigrants, we just have to get rid of them", which one are you going to listen to?

Keep "othering" the voters who used to be the Democratic Party's base, that's a sure path to electoral power.

I once was in a furious argument with a friend which grew out of a comment that I made that, in a way, poverty is far worse in the US than in India (where I had lived). My view was that the possibility of starving to death was taught to children in the latter whereas it is rarely even considered in the US. Americans die of poverty and the broken promise of the American Dream and it is the latter that makes it worse. And it isn't restricted to race because that promise is made universally. In my view to die of starvation is terrible; to die of starvation and to realise at the end that the dream one held all one's life and which was constantly reaffirmed, is not only terrible but heartbreaking.

Not only that, but being poor in America is basically considered a personal moral failure, meaning the poor are reluctant to ask for help or even admit that they're poor, and they're sure as hell not going to cooperate with other poor people to improve their lot collectively.

It's not so simple as this and despite how inflammatory the writer is being, she has a point:

Trump courted racial grievance to win. Doing this with white people is dangerous, and that is why the whole Bannon/Breitbart thing is especially dangerous. We can't pretend that there wasn't an element of "whitelash" (Van Jones ref) in this.

The problem with this is that it is a slippery slope to court it.

I don't know how many fine SE citizens have been watching Fox News or reading/listening to right wing media, but everything not white and not Christian is essentially the enemy. Sorry, but go back and do your research into right wing media. Look back at the last 8 years. They were so rabid that they let countless conspiracy theorists on their shows. This is what millions and millions of people listen to and believe as their bible - practically more than their bible.

To them BLM is a terrorist organization, mexicans suck, Muslims suck, even legal immigrants suck, gays suck, atheists suck, the elite suck, the educated suck, schools suck, science sucks, other countries suck.

I think our biggest problem is that we are one gigantic divided country with a lot of fools in between. I'd rather we split amicably than try to keep going at this point.

This is getting a little redundant.

You know who else was redundant? Hitler. Hitler was redundant. Hitler.

In an alternate universe Hitler shouted down the Reichstag by yelling, "Godwin!" Which in another alternate Universe turned the war into a purely religious endeavour.

I'm all for discussion. But we've had this discussion multiple times in the past week, and frankly, I'd rather focus on what we do next rather than keep arguing over whether Trump voters are racists or not.

I'd say focus on state politics and policies and make the federal government irrelevant.

I disagree. While there are things that the states can do better than the federal government, there are definitely things that the federal government can do better than the states. Making the federal government irrelevant just turns us into 50 independent countries. Some of which don't have self-sustaining economies.

Actually that's exactly the goal of the GOP and Trump supporting right.