PeonForHer
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quote:
ORIGINAL: longwayhome
I also suspect that the bad attitude that the "establishments" in the US and Europe have had towards "white trash" is exactly why the "populists" have been gaining ground.
Immigrants into the UK on average pay more tax per head than native Brits, especially immigrants from Europe (who many people thought they were voting to control by voting to leave Europe). However central government has repeatedly failed to use the tax that immigrants pay to make sure that there are sufficient schools, hospitals and houses for such people.
You can hardly blame "ordinary people" for getting the impression that immigrants are taking "their" resources when central government is doing them over, and everyone else to too scared to speak about it in case it causes an upsurge in racism.
Result - upsurge in anti-immigrant sentiment (and often but, not always, racism). People become more distrustful of the establishment/government and the complacent establishment characterises people expressing their concerns as "red necks", "white trash" or "chavs" depending on where they are.
All these anti-immigrant populist movements (Trump included) have often been ridiculed. Quite rightly in many cases because they repeatedly make a fool of themselves while they are doing their straight talking. But both Trump in the US and Farage in the UK have got away with saying ridiculous things just by denying them or saying "at least I'm not an 'establishment' stooge - those guys have really messed things up".
Holy crap Trump and Farage, are two very rich white men and are exactly part of the establishment. They only way we can tell them apart from the establishment is the fact that they are crap politicians and they speak unpolished shit, compared to the carefully crafted turds the more experienced politicians come up with.
The problem is that the distrust of government, the establishment, immigrants and other countries is very real, whoever the muppets are who emerge to ride that wave of distrust to power.
The failure to address these sentiments and concerns directly, and instead to slag off "ordinary" people who don't have sophisticated views, is why we have a bunch of scare-mongers like Trump dominating our national debates.
I pretty much agree - and some of it applies to the left-populists, too, of course. And it's been bubbling up for decades, now. But re the right-populists and the matter of immigration, particularly... I keep hearing, 'We should stop sneering and engage with these people' ... without a strategy that shows us exactly how that can be done.
I mean, on the one hand, you can make the argument till you're blue in the face that, for instance, it's the fault of central government policy, not immigration, that the infrastructure we have has got to the stage where it's teetering on the brink of collapse. Or, even more commonly, the simple and easily-demonstrable one that immigrants contribute more than they take. I've done so myself. At some point, though, you begin to realise that if you're arguing with a racist who *gives his racism priority in his outlook*, you'll be doing all your reading, all your thinking and all your carefully-considered arguing, to little or no avail. As one old boy in the pub said to me just before the EU referendum, 'I just don't like them, and now's my chance to get rid of them'. It's difficult to penetrate that because at the kernel of it is something that just isn't open to reason at all.
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