But the Democratic party over the years has grown more urban and suburban. It is a very different institution today than it was when the Panhandle farmers in Monroe, Texas, decided to change the name of their little town to New Deal. The suburbanite Democrats are consumers of luxury political goods, and as such they feel very strongly about such exotica as alternative energy. And they hate coal mining.
Coal mining hates them back. George W. Bush won 60 percent of the vote in 2000. John McCain won 70 percent in 2008, and Mitt Romney won 80 percent in 2012. Trump came in at just under 85 percent. Which is to say, Trump is about as popular in Harlan County as Clinton is in Philadelphia.
Conservatives, and populists such as Trump, sometimes look at the voting habits of low-income African Americans in such Democratic strongholds as Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Detroit, and wonder what in hell is wrong with these voters. They keep voting for the same Democrats and getting the same terrible results. Conservative “plantation” rhetoric is the obverse of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” thinking, the idea that certain Americans do not understand their own interests well enough to vote accordingly and that cultural and racial issues are used to distract them from the economic facts of life.
Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos (I am forever indebted to his publication for its first-rate journalism in uncovering the fact that I am African American, which neither I nor my parents had known before) responds to this year’s elections and Clinton’s losses in coal country in exactly the way one would expect at this moment of delicious and amusing progressive hysteria: “F*** these people,” essentially. More precisely, he writes that we should be happy that certain coal miners are losing their health insurance, because “they are getting exactly what they voted for.”
Charming fellow.
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