This article has been pissing me off for a month. The coded language within it is "you should be okay with fucking over the poor because the less-poor won't vote for you unless you demonize their boogeyman." JD Vance DOESN'T get it: his book is about hating on liberals and democrats because they're liberals and democrats, despite the fact that his family has voted democrat for generations. There's an anecdote in there where the choad, who is going to fucking Yale, sees a woman at the gas station wearing a Yale shirt. He asks her if she went to yale and she says "no, but my nephew does, do you?" which throws him into an existential fucking crisis because he might have to identify with a woman he's talking to at a gas station:

I wasn’t sure what to say. It was stupid—her nephew went to school there, for Christ’s sake— but I was still uncomfortable admitting that I’d become an Ivy Leaguer. The moment she told me her nephew went to Yale, I had to choose: Was I a Yale Law student, or was I a Middletown kid with hillbilly grandparents? If the former, I could exchange pleasantries and talk about New Haven’s beauty; if the latter, she occupied the other side of an invisible divide and could not to be trusted. At her cocktail parties and fancy dinners, she and her nephew probably even laughed about the unsophisticates of Ohio and how they clung to their guns and religion. I would not join forces with her. My answer was a pathetic attempt at cultural defiance: “No, I don’t go to Yale. But my girlfriend does.” And then I got in my car and drove away.

Articles such as this try to paint this as cultural confusion, a "hillbilly pride" about ethics and values and dumb shit like that rather than painting it as an asshole being an asshole for assholish reasons. Fucker's on a full fuckin' ride to Yale, getting a leg up from every teacher there, embraced by his classmates, marrying a Ukrainian immigrant, moving to mutherfucking Berkeley, GETTING A JOB WITH PETER FUCKING THIEL and still hating on "the liberal elite".

So what's left to get? The fact that they'll fucking hate you no matter what. There's another bit in there about how "hillbillies" don't trust "the mainstream media" with no explanation but a long litany about all the dumb shit Fox News has ever said. It basically comes down to "they fucking hate you for who you are" and nothing else fucking matters. Get a JD from Yale Law, move to the Bay, marry a girl named Usha and the world is still going to shit because of people from the bay named Usha.

Saying this is so unpopular that I risk making myself a pariah among my friends on the left coast. But the biggest risk today for me and other Americans is continued class cluelessness. If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, Ohio, the consequences could turn dangerous.

Here, I'll say something else dangerous: Democratic policies are deliberately designed as cultural eradication for these kinds of "middle class" values. AND I ENDORSE THEM FULLY. Fuckin' A the Left lost to the white trash racists of America but so long as we continue to say "it's okay to be a white trash racist" we'll be fighting Trumps and Nazis at every fucking election.

Know how the Apaches were defeated? By giving them land, food and horses. You can be a reaver. You can be a homesteader. You can't be both. A rising tide raises all ships but if some insist on sinking, I'm not going to stand in their way.

Not gonna lie, I somewhat posted this to trigger kleinbl00. But I also think it is worth reading to understand the mindsets involved in justifying Trump.

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich.

I think this is key to understanding why his supporters vote against themselves. America's white poor "see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires". This mindset has been played to again and again by Republicans. Trump has just taken it to its logical extreme. This idea corresponds with conversations I've had with Trump supporters, many of them idolize the wealthy. That's part of why racism flourishes: they need someone to blame, and it's not going to be the 1%.

Progressives’ obsession with prioritizing cultural issues infuriates many Americans whose chief concerns are economic

He's almost describing something I agree with but he's missing something key: most people's "economic views" are a whole lot more subjective than they'll admit to. The obsession with the "welfare queen" on the right is very telling in this regard - it's bullshit but it sounds right... if you want to blame brown people. It's worth pointing out that many people feel like economics were their reasons, but the author flops by not going past that self-justification. The actual sentence should read

Progressives’ obsession with prioritizing cultural issues infuriates many Americans who claim their chief concerns are economic but are actually just also cultural issues in disguise

Hey ducky! Haven't seen you around for a while. Are you getting ready for your first set of college exams? Hope all is well.