People who voted for Trump knew their shot at the elites was fired through the guts of their neighbors

Laurie Penny says we’ve done enough listening to “real people” — that the working-class whites who deplore racism and were not duped by Trump are done no favors by lumping them in with their neighbors who voted for a confessed rapist and white supremacist who believes in torture and mass deportations.

The time for complacency is long gone. So too is the time for cowing to the hurt feelings of those who were willing to fire at the elite directly through the stomachs of their neighbours. Every effort has been made to sympathise with their distress at perceived loss of privilege that is felt, wrongly, as prejudice. The media on both sides of the pond has fallen over itself to consider whether the boiling bigotry on display might somehow conceal “legitimate concerns.” Somehow, the concerns of working-class people are only considered legitimate when they reflect a reactionary strain that does not threaten vested interests. Somehow, the concerns of working-class women who want basic reproductive rights, the concerns of working-class people of colour who want the police to stop shooting them with impunity, the concerns of working-class trans people who don’t want to be beaten up in bathrooms, have been landscaped into the territory of the “liberal elite”. That rubbish needs to stop right now. If you’re angry and upset right, that does not make you out of touch. If you suspect that a great wrong has been done today, that does not make you a bourgeois shill. It makes you sensible.

Today, hundreds of millions of people in America and around the world have woken up afraid — for themselves, for their children, for the future of a planet where an authoritarian psychopath has his hands on the nuclear codes and the fate of a burning world waiting on his pleasure. Those people are being told that they are sore losers. That they should shut up and accept it. That their fear is somehow funny. Laughing at the pain of the most vulnerable. Squealing with glee when the bully lands a blow. That’s the world millions of notionally decent human beings voted for, and don’t tell me for a second they didn’t know what they were buying.

On the election of Donald J Trump
[Laurie Penny/New Statesman]

(via Making Light)

(Image: Jared Huffman)