Trump supporters feel loss of privilege
- By Mitchell Blatt
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E-mail China.org.cn, September 18, 2015
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U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during "Stop the Iran Deal" rally at West Lawn of the Capitol in Washington D.C., capital of the United States, Sept. 9, 2015. [Xinhua/Bao Dandan] |
Donald Trump continues to confound many by his success in wooing Republican voters during presidential campaign. This, however, almost certainly reflects the growing rage of the white American underclass.
His candidacy is an angry shout from those low-skilled white males who for a long time got by on racial privilege, but are now seeing this chipped away by civil rights and women's rights advances, and, most of all, by the rise of the third-world.
White men benefited relative to other demographic groups throughout history due to receiving preferential treatment at schools, jobs and other aspects of society. America is still a great place for skilled people to earn money. What is happening is that the playing field is becoming fairer. Throughout the last century, barriers against ethnic minorities and women have slowly eroded.
With most former third-world countries developing quickly, the last vestiges of unearned white American privilege, which was earned from imperialism, are being torn down. And, as with past movements for civil rights, many lower-class whites are angrily trying to stop this.
In 1962, when the University of Mississippi was finally desegregated eight years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, federal troops were required to quell a riot of racist whites afraid of black advancement. In his new book The Last Season, political strategist Stuart Stevens, who grew up in Mississippi, quotes his father as saying that those who wanted to prevent the African-American James Meredith from attending the university were "scared he's smarter than they are."
Now, many white Americans are scared that Chinese, Mexican, Japanese, South Korean and Indonesian workers are harder-working than they are, so are drawn to presidential candidates who attack foreign workers.
For centuries, imperialism and outright colonization ensured the West didn't face economic competition from the less-developed countries they kept under thumb; also, the West could utilize their colonies' resources and favorable trade conditions for their benefit.
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