Ain't It Awful

A friend of mine here in Pennsylvania gave me a quotation the other day that made me imagine a grandmother replying to a complaining teenage about some issue in the youngster's bountiful life.  "Ain't it awful" goes the saying - so awful - you live in a world of instant light, hot water, three meals a day, heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, the Internet, security from violence, a roof over your head, college in front of you, a nation where the government is kept in check and is a servant, and in the United States of America where the standard of living is the highest in the world.  Oh yes, ain't it awful.

So in an election cycle, where one party proclaims how terrible the world and USA is and its downward trajectory, I present a blog sent to me this morning by a second cousin in Georgia, an educator who has devoted his career to helping economically under privileged children. 

Frank Schaeffer is an American author, film director, screenwriter and public speaker. He is the son of the late evangelical theologian and author Francis Schaeffer.  One does not have to accept his theology, but Mr. Schaeffer, whom I would call a post-Christian Christian, does present some controversial, highly-opinionated, blistering and telling observations. Here are some exerts from his newsletter.  And one does not have to agree with everything he says. - Glenn N. Holliman

Frank on Frank...an Ex-Evangelist Looks at the Election

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. 

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.

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…

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 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. 

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. - Frank Schaeffer's Newsletter

Whew!....Comments?

From a Librarian in Virginia....

I find myself nodding in agreement as I read your "Aint It Awful" article.  

I fear we are looking at 4 more years of gridlock, no matter who wins.  I hope for the Establishment Republicans to grow a backbone and establish a new party.  I doubt that Paul Ryan makes it a second year as Speaker.  

From a Businessman in Tennessee...

I largely agree with the "Ain't It Awful" article. We need an honest assessment of the Trump phenomenon, and why he and his ridiculous views are so popular with the "white underclass". However, the article screams of an us versus them mentality:  smart, enlightened liberals against the ignorant conservatives. That mentality will only continue to alienate those in that "white underclass".  

Compromise and moderation are the way forward -- not continued division into us vs. them camps.

From an Educator in Tennessee....
Glenn, has anyone mentioned the book, Hillbilly Elegy, in any of the postings?  If not, I encourage you to read it.  You may know of it already.  (Yes, I know of it and find it enlightening and disturbing....)