Trump's speech got a 75% approval rating from a CNN poll, leading them to discredit their own poll right away.
I agree that folks are more pessimistic than the immediate circumstances may justify, but older folks have seen America go backward over a longer span of time than, say, millennials. For those folks, even for some folks who aren't Trump partisans, Trump's view of the way things are in America are quite realistic, because while things may have gotten better on the margins over the last few years, things have gotten markedly worse over their adult lifetimes, all things considered. They have seen their social contract discarded, as if it never existed. Many of them have lost good jobs due to globalism, and they've lost them late in life. It's one thing to tell a 25 year old to go out and get another job; they can start at the bottom and go somewhere. But a 55 year old? They face age discrimination at every turn. Many of them are offered employment of a nature where there is no upward mobility, as if their life experiences matter not one whit. Yes they can go back to school; if they don't deplete their retirement accounts to do so, they can enter their Golden Years with student debt and face age discrimination even in professions where there is a shortage of qualified applicants.
What Hillary Clinton and Black Lives Matter have in common is disregard for law. Hillary's disregard is well-documented. BLM actually believes that folks have the legal right to resist a lawful arrest. BLM actually believe that they have the right to use intimidation and coercion to interrupt folks at their own rallies and take over the podium, and they don't seem to understand why folks have a problem with Donald Trump assert that he's not going to be rolled at HIS podium. They get it that black folks have, indeed, been mistreated by police, but they also get it that Michael Brown had committed a strong-arm robbery of a frail woman at a convenience store just prior to his being shot by an officer (for which the officer was not charged), and they get it that Eric Garner, a man with over 30 arrests, was actively resisting a lawful arrest by NYPD, albeit, for a misdemeanor. They see the attacks on police and they remember 1968, and regardless of how crime rates have dropped over time, they realize that it's in no small measure BECAUSE of the so-called "militarization of police" and tougher sentencing laws that have taken habitual criminals off the streets, and they see "reform" proposals as things that undo what has helped make the public safer.
Older Americans lived through violent attacks and they lived through 9/11, but now they see deadly attacks becoming commonplace, and they don't understand why the enemy can't be named. We named Communists as our enemy. We named Nazis as our enemy. But we can't say "Radical Islamic Jihadism" as our current enemy ideology? What's the deal here?
Why, then, would it surprise folks that Trump's negativity would play well? They have a longer view of the world, and the long-term trends haven't bode well for them.
Excellent insights from Fuzzy, as usual. (And very little in the way of useful followup comments from Adam T, as usual).
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