In the liberal thermometer that is Salon, Kim Messick has a piece titled “Donald Trump is the last whimper of the angry white man”. Regarding Trump’s rise and perseverance in the polls:
Two facts about all this deserve special notice. The first is that the tenor of Trump’s rhetoric has been directly related to the trend in his poll numbers — the wilder and harsher the former, the higher he has climbed in the latter. The second is the desperate (and largely futile) struggle of our political media to make some sense of the first fact…
Central to that idea is the concept of dispossession. As I have argued before, the deeply Protestant roots of Southern revanchism posit a world in which rightful authority belongs to white heterosexual males who have, through fortitude and invention, wrested wealth from the detritus of a fallen world. The men of the Tea Party experience modern life as one continuous assault on this birthright. It began with the hated Lincoln’s defeat of the Slave Power, which toppled the racial order of the Old South; today’s hysteria over “illegals”— not to be confused with a rational concern for border security— simply sublimates this most primal of racial insults. Then came socialist-inspired efforts to level wealth and to distribute its hard-won gains to the undeserving and unproductive; then the agitations of “feminism” to remove women from their rightful place in a domestic sphere presided over by men.
Mainstream liberals have a license to discuss, in a more frank and candid approach, the dynamics of white dispossession occurring in America, and the messy, limited way this dispossession manifests itself in platform politics.
Mainstream conservatives have no such license, and more accurately, none of the requisite courage to do so.
