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The Disinherited: There is a reason that the white American underclass is so out of step with the rest of America: if you live in a pretend world for long enough you snap

The Disinherited: There is a reason that the white American underclass is so out of step with the rest of America: if you live in a pretend world for long enough you snap

Last updated on: October 27, 2016 at 7:54 am by Frank Schaeffer

The Disinherited: There is a reason that the white American underclass is so out of step with the rest of America: if you live in a pretend world for long enough you snap 2016-10-27T07:54:07-06:00 Frank Schaeffer

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There is a reason that the white American underclass is so out of step with the rest of America: if you live in a pretend world for long enough you snap. The white Trump-loving underclass is uneducated. But lack of university education isn’t their problem. Their problem is that they live in a fantasy world.

That world was concocted by two implacable enemies of fact-based truth: evangelical Christianity and right wing mythology.

And when I use the words white underclass I’m not talking about wealth or poverty. Delusion is a state of mind, not an economic bracket. You can be a billionaire who went to Harvard and still be a member of the delusional white underclass. I give you two words as proof: Peter Thiel. (Thiel is an evangelical Trump backer with an education that apparently passed his brain by.)

The white underclass has not just drunk the Cool Aid (as it were) of the so-called Alt-Right, it has deformed its collective brain with overlapping religious and political mythology to such an extent that it is now incapable of functioning in the actual real world. It is a tribe of losers because you can’t get ahead if you embrace unreality as truth.

The white underclass is living in an alternative reality. Thus it is made up of people condemned to be losers. They are losers because those who deny reality can’t function well. They believe lies such as-

Guns make you safer…

The economy is in trouble…

Terrorists are a deadly threat to America…

Climate change isn’t real…

Crime is going up…

The economy is in trouble…

Noah’s Ark was real…

Jesus is coming back soon…

The Bible is true…

Hillary Clinton is a crook…

Donald Trump is a winner…

None of these things are true. Thirty million or so Americans believe they are. These folks aren’t evil. They are however insane– quite literally.

in·san·i·ty

inˈsanədē/

noun

the state of being seriously mentally ill; madness.

“he suffered from bouts of insanity”

extreme foolishness or irrationality.

In the real and actual world:

Consumer confidence is near its highest level since the end of the recession.

The stock market is near all-time highs.

Wages are growing at the fastest pace of the recovery.

The unemployment rate is below 5% . Crime is down –way down.

The rate of violent crime is at a 45-year low.

As of 2014, the most recent year of national data from the FBI, during the Obama presidency violent crime is down 20.3 percent, for a rate of 365.5.

The decline in the murder rate is even more impressive. At 4.5, it’s the lowest since 1957, down 55 percent since its peak in 1980.

The teen birth rate in the U.S. is at a record low, dropping below 25 births per 1,000 teen females for the first time since the government began collecting consistent data.

Nonwhite and younger teens have led the way in declining birth rates in recent years. Since the most recent peak in 2007, the birth rate among all teens has dropped by 42%. The declines among Hispanic (50%), Asian or Pacific Islander (48%) and black (44%) teens have outpaced this national average, while the decline among white teens (36%) has been somewhat more modest. Birth rates among younger teens ages 15-17 have also fallen faster – dropping by 50%, compared with a 39% decline among older teens ages 18 and 19.

The mentally ill white underclass of Americans are choosing to arm themselves at a time when the FBI tells us violent crime and property crime have been falling dramatically for two decades.

Yet owning a gun has been linked to higher risks of homicide, suicide, and accidental death by gun. For every time a gun is used in self-defense in the home, there are 7 assaults or murders, 11 suicide attempts, and 4 accidents involving guns in or around a home. 43 percent of homes with guns and kids have at least one unlocked firearm.

In one experiment, one third of 8-to-12-year-old boys who found a handgun pulled the trigger. In 2014, according to FBI data, nearly eight times more people were shot and killed in arguments than by civilians trying to stop a crime.

Even including the 9/11 attacks an American’s chance of being killed within the United States by a terrorist was about one in four million per year. For industrial accidents, it’s one in 53,000, homicides, one in 22,000, auto accidents, one in 8,200. Since 9/11, an American’s chance of being killed by an Islamist terrorist is about one in 40 million per year.

In white underclass La-La Land none of this good news can pierce the thick wall of Alt-Right Bible-based “End Times” fantasies and doom…

In “The Great Democratic Inversion” Thomas B. Edsall writes in the New York Times that “Three recent studies of the American electorate illuminate the upheaval in the two political parties: the first, published on Oct. 12 by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, the other two published Oct. 19 and Oct. 25 by the Public Religion Research Institute.”

The UVA-IASC survey highlighted the political and cultural gulf between upscale, predominately Democratic whites and downscale, predominately Republican whites.

The first group, “the Social Elite” in UVA-IASC’s terminology, is made up of whites with advanced degrees. They are 49 percent Democratic, 16.8 percent Republican. 87.5 percent say the Democratic Party represents their views very or fairly well, compared to zero percent who say the Republican Party represents them very well and 24.2 percent who say that it does so “fairly well.” They plan to vote for Clinton over Trump by 74.3 to 14.1 percent.

The second group, termed “the Disinherited” in the UVA-IASC survey, comprises religiously conservative whites without college degrees. Republicans outnumber Democrats 52.3 to 11.1, and 60.9 percent say the Republican Party represents their views very or fairly well. They plan to vote for Trump by 74.3 to 13.5 percent.

…More affluent and well-educated white voters have substantially different policy agendas from their less affluent and less well-educated fellow citizens.

First, the downscale whites.

Nearly half say they feel alienated from contemporary America (“a stranger in their own land”), that they have little or no power to change the course of events — 84.4 percent believe public officials do not care “what people like me think.” 83.5 percent agreed that “in general, Americans lived more moral and ethical lives 50 year ago.”

These voters are convinced (72.6 percent) that they can no longer get ahead in America through hard work, and that the government in Washington threatens the freedom of “ordinary Americans” (75.3 percent). In a nation where same-sex marriage has gained public acceptance and gays routinely appear in television and movies, 54.9 percent of these voters say their own “beliefs and values” are different from those of gays and lesbians, and 66.2 percent oppose requiring every state to permit same-sex marriages.

White evangelical Protestants have the bleakest view of all: “Nearly three-quarters (74%) say American culture has changed for the worse since the 1950s.”

The origins of this bleak evangelical view–a new anti-Americanism of the right–lie in the bitter social and cultural conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s my dad and I helped foment.

As long as the white underclass combines a belief in the Bible as “true” with the view that actual information is “rigged” and only alternative “information” be that about climate change, evolution or a “woman’s place” is reliable… no amount of job training will help.

The white underclass can’t be helped. They are prisoners of their own minds.

While most Americans head to college or a job, learn to use a new app or read a book, The Disinherited head to the Creation Museum or another gun show.

When floods rise and heat destroys they see God’s judgment or a foreshadowing of the End Times not a call to examine the science of human-caused environmental destruction. Meanwhile the rest of us have to cope with what amounts to the ravings of 30 million village idiots who have a nasty habit of vindictively engaging in society wide vandalism of our social fabric.

And these days the white underclass have been given a new voice by the world’s biggest Loser’s Loser. Call this a murder-suicide pact: Trump is murdering the last hope of a return to sanity for the white underclass, and they in turn are committing moral and intellectual suicide. A vote for Hillary Clinton is — therefore — a declaration that the rest of us aren’t willing to kill ourselves too.

“““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““

P.S. If you want to know a little more about where I’m coming from and my perspective on politics, religion and the intersection of faith and life– here’s a new movie about me. (It’s below the poster on YouTube) scroll down and watch it for free…

WATCH “Let me be FRANK” HERE:

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Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace

Available now on Amazon

Please read about my journey through then out of the religious right and Republican Party.

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https://www.amazon.com/Crazy-God-Helped-Relig…/…/ref=sr_1_1…

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