Are Trump voters really victims?

Then there was moaning about the fate of people uprooted from their lifelong communities to move to fast-growing places such as Texas. Moving is a pain, but it struck me that people leaving Youngstown were less painfully uprooted than their grandparents were when they moved there from rural Poland.

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Earlier generations of Americans, after being moved around the country and the world in World War II, moved readily to seek better lives. Several million Midwesterners moved to California. One-third of American blacks moved from the segregated South to what seemed the promised land of the North.

Inadvertently perhaps, we have made it easier to stay put, through disability insurance, through low-priced goods at Wal-Mart and its competitors, through opioid prescriptions written by dollar-hungry doctors — even as family and community ties grow frayed.

People in such situations evidently see themselves as victims and Donald Trump as someone who will make them winners again. Their sense of victimhood resembles that of the Emory University students who couldn’t bear seeing “Trump 2016” chalked on the sidewalk.

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