...All the latent class biases of the Republican gentry are now on the table, and they prove more compatible with Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump. Republican nihilism is the result.Take immigration, a hot-button issue that ignited Trumpism, even when polls suggested voters’ real concerns were the economy and health care. If your experience with illegal immigration is hiring and patronizing with a daily "Buenas tardes" a JosĂŠGarcia, your skilled, dependable--and rather inexpensive--gardener, or navigating around the political-correctness of an upper-middle-class diversity officer on campus or at work, then you are likely to embrace the Jeb Bush idea that illegal immigration is an "act of love." That is an inexpensive and easily arrived at position--but not so if you are middle class and lack the romance of the poor and the influence and money of the well off.
If you do your own lawn and clean your own home, or you live and school among the lower middle classes, and your job is always in jeopardy, then even Trump’s vulgarity on issues is proof that he "cares" while the calm perspective of Jeb Bush, or an earlier incarnation of Marco Rubio, or the sermons of John Kasich can come across as crass indifference.
...The children of Republican elites do not sit in classes where a quarter of the students do not speak English. When that specter of diversity looms, parents yank their kids and put them in the prep schools of Silicon Valley that are rapidly reaching New England numbers (or maybe better southern academies that followed integration). Their children are not on buses where an altercation between squabbling eight year olds leads to a tattooed parent arriving at your home to challenge you to a fight over "disrespecting" his family name. The establishment Republicans have rarely jogged around their neighborhoods only to be attacked by pit bulls, whose owners have little desire to speak English, much less to cage, vaccinate, or license their dogs. They have never been hit by illegal-alien drivers in Palo Alto. In other words, they do not wish to live anywhere near those who, as a result of an act of love, are desperately poor, here under illegal auspices, and assume California works and should work on the premises of Oaxaca.
...Trump, who has hired illegal alien labor, attacked Mitt Romney as insensitive on immigration and came late to the immigration debate. But even when he demagogues illegal immigration, and slurs and smears, his supporters do not care about the impracticality of his wall or his baiting of Mexico (whose leaders are far more racist than is the American working class). They care only that someone for a moment seems mad like they are, and does not lecture them on their own supposed biases and shortcomings. The way to further empower Trump is certainly to parody and mock his supporters.
...But at least for a while longer, millions of Republicans and lots of Reagan Democrats would gladly prefer to be wrong with Trump than right with anyone else.
