Hillary Clinton recent called half of Donald Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.” Here Pat Buchanan responds to the impolitic and offensive remark.
And who might be in the other basket backing Donald Trump?
They are people, said Clinton, “who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them. … These are people we have to understand and empathize with.”
In short, Trump’s support consists of one-half xenophobes, bigots and racists, and one-half losers we should pity.
And she is running on the slogan “Stronger Together.”
Her remarks echo those of Barack Obama in 2008 to San Francisco fat cats puzzled about those strange Pennsylvanians.
They are “bitter,” said Obama, they “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration.”
In short, Pennsylvania is a backwater of alienated Bible-banging gun nuts and bigots suspicious of outsiders and foreigners.
But who really are these folks our new class detests, sneers at and pities? As African-Americans are 90 percent behind Clinton, it is not black folks. Nor is it Hispanics, who are solidly in the Clinton camp.
Nor would Clinton tolerate such slurs directed at Third World immigrants who are making America better by making us more diverse than that old “America that no longer exists.”
No, the folks Obama and Clinton detest, disparage, and pity are the white working- and middle-class folks Richard Nixon celebrated as Middle Americans and the Silent Majority.
They are the folks who brought America through the Depression, won World War II, and carried us through the Cold War from Truman in 1945 to victory with Ronald Reagan in 1989.
