Index

The Trump Voter Unwrapped

After a few hours of fighting with Trump trolls on social media, I finally figured out a single sure-fire way to make them go livid and abandon any pretense of having a logical reason to vote for Trump: Ask for intelligent reasons why, or ask them to think about it for a second, or any other sort of request that requires any sort of intellectual activity.  One sentence of that sort, and Kablooie! - No more pretense of rationality.  I took that and the published demographics of the Trump voter, and thought about it for a while.

Putting it into a historical context finally made it clear.  Back when I started in the working world as a technician, the attitude of factory management in the places I ended up was “Check your brain at the door” - thinking too much was actively discouraged, because the management was so insecure that they couldn’t handle the challenge of someone out-thinking them.  The workers were drones, paid to shut up and slave away at their assigned tasks.

That combination of brainless labor and the fact that industry paid living wages and benefits for people to do that kind of job meant that the baby boomers had a bubble of people who fit the archetype of “Joe Sixpack” - drifting through a physically comfortable existence, with cheap alcohol and the various churches ready to sooth any existential pain and supply a pseudo-rationale for living should that thought occur to anyone, and occur it did.

With thought suppressed by the work environment, and replaced by alcohol and religious pseudo-rationales the rest of the time, we ended up with a large chunk of populace that was “Fat, Dumb and Happy” with the happiness being the one thing that was in doubt.  This was what passed for normal through the 50s up into the early 80s, with the production system divided into two castes - the thinking/managing class (white collar), and the non-thinking/working class (blue collar).

From somewhere around the 80s onward, management started pushing responsibility for thinking about what was being made down onto the factory floor - quality was becoming an issue thanks to Japanese Automakers and one W. Edwards Deming - and the false dichotomy between blue and white collar workers began to break down, as did the pay for the remaining truly no-brain jobs.  What had previously been a small subclass of technicians (a thinking blue-collar group) grew immensely, with lots of different technician classes set up, often within the unions, to handle the technical chores required by the new quality demands.  Another trend during this time was the training-up of blue-collar workers to handle some of the quality tasks, further eroding the jobs available to the non-thinking worker.

Fast-forward to today, and the no-brain jobs are non-existent.  Even flipping burgers requires more brain cells than factory work used to, and the remaining no-brain workers are out of the workforce, voluntarily or not.  These are people that have drifted through life, not thinking about anything, with their peer group and pseudo-religions as support systems, and with their poor abused wives and children left to change their metaphorical diapers.  Their support systems are drying up and blowing away as reality begins to replace religion and thought is forced on them anyway, causing a lot of stress and anger in people with no coping mechanisms to deal with those things.

Finally, the last element in the mix is the continuous drumming of a “poor me” victim rationale into these people by the Republican party and Fox News.  Ever since Reagan, the Republicans have been promising improvements to this group of people, then turning around and tightening the screws on them by cutting jobs, education, unemployment, welfare, etc., etc., ad nauseum. Now along comes Trump with his bag of big, bad, angry lies about tearing down the establishment, draining the swamp, whatever, and these non-thinking people fell into the con job like lemmings off a cliff, believing that Trump really could turn the clock back and all the other nonsense, and completely ignoring the Hitler/Mussolini tactics and obviously not realizing that it was just a big con.

The rabble rousing has worked, and this group has turned on the very people that have kept them alive like a mean child whose diaper hasn’t been changed in too long. To spite the rest of us, they have smeared shit all over everything they could reach and are now happily pointing at the stinking mess they have made and crowing about it, proud of their accomplishment and happy to have really pissed off all the adults in the area as revenge for “not taking care of me.”

Welcome to the mind of the Trump voter.  The barf bags are on the seat in front of you, and I apologize for not having pointed them out earlier, but we at least have generated some mindless employment for some of those Trump voters.

P.S. – While I was working on this a mid-80s Wierd Al parody song came to mind that truly fit the situation, maybe a bit too well.  Try going back and re-reading this with Dare to be Stupid playing, and the Trump voter mindset actually starts to make more sense.