“There are so many well to do suburban & small town women — mostly white — for whom all the ideological stuff, all the character issues, all the racism & white supremacist baiting, all the stuff so many people find morally repugnant, it just doesnt figure” https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-lifestyle-blog-voter
“part of it has to do with an eagle-eyed focus on their own financial future.

Other concerns, no matter how morally pertinent, fall to the side.

Yes, they want to maintain their lifestyle — it’s just not the “working class” lifestyle so many people map onto them.”
“I don’t mean to degrade those things — I have fucking shiplap on my walls & grains in Mason jars — so much as highlight how aspirationally bourgeois they are.

This Trump Lifestyle voter doesn’t think Trump Tower is classy.

They think that Ivanka is.”
“most of their middle class work, in everything from car sales to health care, is steady.

They don’t pay attention to Trump’s tweets.

They just want more of the status quo for them and theirs.”
“He may be a terd, but done well for the economy…I don’t want socialism/communism.”

These women aren’t anti-Communist because of holdover from Cold War.

They’re anti-Communist because they don’t want other people to have more money if it means that they will have less of it.”
“When people talk about Trump supporters voting against their own interests, they’re eliding this very basic motivation:

people voting *entirely* in their own interest.”
“To me, that rationale signals just how quietly unstable many of these voters actually find themselves.

Even in a place like Idaho, with relatively cheap cost of living, there’s still a feeling that the bottom could fall out at any moment.”
“The house of carefully balanced credit cards could collapse at any point.

Some people look outward, for a way to change the society that has fostered that precarity.

And some respond by looking inward, frantically trying to maintain what they’ve carved out for themselves.”
“That turn inward is often facilitated by overtly and covertly racist ideas about poverty, addiction, crime, prison, education, and so much more.

But the animating principle:

self-preservation.”
“Of class position, of course, but also placement in the racial hierarchy, dominance of religious beliefs, and general worldview.

They want to maintain the status quo because, at least in this moment, it continues to favor them.”
Speak of the devil: https://twitter.com/_almaqah/status/1311516809582063616
Related: this new piece about low-income whites in Southeast Ohio: https://twitter.com/torrhl/status/1311713708851171332
You can follow @torrHL.
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