General Discussion

A lot of Trump supporters aren't marginalised economically. They participate in the economy on the same footing as everyone else. The trucks and boats being driven in those flag waving convoys aren't cheap.

The gap is in education. My theory is that society has become more and more complex as technology gives us more things to worry about and manage. A hundred years ago if your house flooded or there was an earthquake you just wrote it off as God's will and rebuilt it when you could, often with the help of your neighbours. But now you have to try to get your insurance company to reimburse you or not based on whether their flood or seismic modelling could reasonably have predicted the event or not. If you bought somewhere you shouldn't have because you didn't do your due diligence, you're fucked. And you can't just rebuild your own house, it needs to be up to code.

You don't just get a check when you retire. You have to create a 401K and make decisions about the stock market. You have to predict where the job market is going and retrain five or six times of the course of your career with gaps of unemployment in-between. Your employer isn't going to pay to train you - you have to anticipate what they need and pay to train yourself. You have to hire someone to fix your car and set up your TV for you. You have to keep track of a million different subscriptions that it's a pain in the ass to cancel but which are sucking you dry behind the scenes.

You have to keep in mind constant updates about what to eat, whether or not to drink alcohol, how much to exercise, etc. As a voter, you need to understand proposed policy on stem cell research, genetically modified food, climate change, gender diversity, AI, regulation of toxic chemicals, foreign aid as a instrument of soft powers, nuclear containment, lowering drug prices and managing risk from pandemics.

And all of these demands have left a lot of people behind. Particularly the 66% of Americans who don't at least have a four year college degree. They don't have a clue how to lower the price of eggs or housing or incentivize clean energy or encourage on-shoring of industries in the national interest and they're pissed off that they're being asked to think about it on top of everything else. So they are burning down the system that is asking them to think about it. They want easy answers they can understand and they want to hear "just get on with your life and we'll take care of everything else for you".

And so yes, they want to stick it to the smarty-pants because deep down they know that society is leaving them behind and the one thing they can understand is that they don't really control the forces that are impacting their lives. So they want to destroy the club of people who they think do. And it's easier to blame the party that can't offer easy answers than it is to blame the system that is putting them in that position in the first place.