In a comment on the Trump the Trickster post, Sam M went all Occam’s Razor on us:
Strangers to the primitive. Jungian analysis. Psychogenic storms.
Gadzooks. Maybe that’s our Loki right there. I mean, look. We can talk all day about what kind of mass psychosis is leading to Donald Trump. Maybe sometimes the hardest thing is seeing what’s right in front of your face.
In 1993, while I was in college, I got a summer job in a factory in my hometown. I made $11.66 an hour and time and a half for anything over eight hours in any day. I worked a ton and made about $10,000 in three months. Guys in my high school class who were working there full time made about 30-40 percent more per hour.
Right now, the starting wage in this area is more like $9.50 an hour. The plant I worked at is gone.
Twenty three years later, and the NOMINAL starting wage has gone DOWN 18.5 percent. Of course, $9.50 an hour today is the equivalent of about $5.60 an hour in 1993. So the real starting wage has gone down more like 53 percent.
Over that time a regular-cab Ford F-150 has gone from starting at about $11,000 to starting at about $26,000.
In 1993 I could have put a 90 percent down payment on a new truck by working part time at a summer job for a few months. Twenty three years later a guy would need to work the same job for a year and half or so. Except he can’t because that job went away.
In the summer of 1993 I earned enough to pay for TWO full years of tuition at Penn State. Today a kid in my position might earn enough for half a semester.
So that guy is mad. And now he’s hearing that he’s a racist, the big problem for college kids is racist chicken dishes in the cafeteria and an insufficiently militant attitude toward sombreros, and by the way tell your daughter to watch out for the occasional penis in the school locker room. Because she will need to graduate and get a good job to pay all the reparations required to pay for her unfair privileges.
Do we really need to look to Jung to see why this guy thinks he might need to pull the level for someone other than Mitt or Jeb or Hillary or any of the other politicians who oversaw that transition? Is it really that mysterious? Do we need to bring Joseph Campbell into it?
Heh. Reminds me of this fascinating piece in The Guardian, in which some of the left-wing British newspaper’s American readers told them why they are voting Trump, but not telling a soul. Excerpts:
The gay Arab Muslim student (20, Missouri)
As a gay muslim, the Republican Party has not been kind to me, to say the least. However the Democrats almost arrogantly expect me to hand my vote to them because of who I am, which insults me.
I am a son of immigrants but we have always followed the law to the letter. Donald Trump’s discussion on immigration is extremely relevant. I even support the temporary ban on Muslims, even though I still have many law abiding family members in Syria who deserve the opportunity to come to the US and escape the horrors of the war. We don’t vet these people properly. To let them in willy nilly is ludicrous.
Trump will break the poisonous bonds that hold America and the cult state of Saudi Arabia. Clinton would never do that; she would continue supporting Saudi Arabia while bombing Islamic countries left and right.
My parents are horrified at the thought of a Trump presidency. They say things like “Trump is going to round up all the Muslims and put them in camps.” For all his bombastic remarks, Trump will not attack innocent Muslim countries. Ironically enough, he may be the best thing for moderate average Muslims. He isn’t our enemy, he is the enemy of the globalist Wahhabi cult that has propagated mass violence and murder through out the world.
The anti-PC college professor (50, California)
‘I’m angry at forced diversity’I’m a liberal-left college professor in the social sciences. I’m going to vote for Trump but I won’t tell hardly anybody.
My main reason is anger at the two-party system and the horrible presidencies of Obama and Bush. But I’m also furious at political correctness on campus and in the media.
I’m angry at forced diversity and constant, frequently unjustified complaints about racism/sexism/homophobia/lack of trans rights. I’m particularly angry at social justice warriors and my main reason to vote Trump is to see the looks on your faces when he wins.
It’s not that I like Trump. It’s that I hate those who can’t stand him. I want them to suffer the shock of knowing all their torrents of blog posts and Tumblr bitch-fests and “I just can’t …” and accusations of mansplaining didn’t actually matter. That they’re still losing. And that things are not getting better for them. They’re getting worse.
Read the whole thing. It’s enlightening.
UPDATE: You may be wondering, “Why is Dreher posting so much on Trump?” The answer is because he is the biggest political story since Reagan, and maybe even bigger than Reagan — not because of who he is, but because of what he represents. That is, what he’s a symptom of.