From Mark Cunningham’s column “Donald Trump Has Invented A New Way To Win“. Among the reasons Cunningham lists is the crucial reality that white Americans, particularly working class white Americans, have been completely ignored by both political parties for the better part of 50 years:
Beating the elite on behalf of his voters — who’ve been invisible to the politicians and the media for decades.
Consider a huge story that vanished almost immediately in early November: Two Princeton economists discovered that deaths are soaring among middle-aged, low-education whites.
The rise in mortality from 1999 to 2014 was 22 percent: Up 134 deaths per 100,000 for whites aged 45 to 54 whose education ended in high school.
To blame: jumps in suicides and in deaths from drug abuse — that is, from alcoholic liver disease plus overdoses of heroin and prescription opiates.
One of the economists, Nobel winner Angus Deaton, notes that the only modern trend that compares is the AIDS epidemic.
AIDS won headlines for a decade. The Deaton findings basically vanished from the media after a day.
And these soaring death rates are just one sign of the stresses the American working class faces. Many other blue-collar folks struggle on OK. But they know they’ve got huge problems that just don’t get talked about — and anyone who does raise them gets denounced and then ignored.
Until Trump.
