So much for Donald Trump's "purple" values: His red-state support stems from flagrant sexism

[DonViejo]

Trump’s messy personal life doesn’t turn off red-state voters — because he shares their sexist view of women

AMANDA MARCOTTE
JULY 3, 2018 10:00AM (UTC)

One of the most chronic sources of irritation in the era of President Donald Trump is watching publications like the New York Times roll out an endless number of articles that purport to explain red-state voters in sympathetic tones, but instead come across as condescending head-pats to the presumably half-literate yokels of middle America. Such pieces appear to irritate liberal readers in general, but I feel a special, personal antipathy for them. The people being so woefully misrepresented to readers are the same kinds of people that I grew up with and am related to. I have strong social and moral disagreements with them, but by and large they are not actually morons.

The latest installment of this ongoing New York Times project of hick-gawking disguised as compassion comes from Matthew Schmitz, a senior editor at the Christian-right magazine First Things. In a piece entitled "Trump's 'Purple' Family Values," Schmitz claims to explain why red-state Americans — whom he presents as uniformly working-class, while only college-educated "elites" live in New York — support Trump despite his chronic adultery and multiple marriages. They themselves have "messy lives," Schmitz writes, and can relate to him, unlike both liberal and conservative elites who, he believes, "share an upper-class stress on respectability and a strong taboo against out-of-wedlock birth." Schmitz then pushes the argument further:

A third model can be found among working-class whites, blacks and Hispanics — let’s call it purple. In these families, bonds between mothers and children are prized above those between couples. Unstable relationships are the norm, and fathers quickly end up out of the picture.

Schmitz's piece is incoherent and badly argued. This paragraph doesn't merely rely on racist and classist stereotypes, although that's repulsive enough. It also doesn't make sense. If working class black and Hispanic voters have "purple" values that Schmitz believes lead to Trumpian sympathies, then why did only 20 percent of nonwhite voters without college degrees vote for Trump?

Schmitz's implication that "elites" of all political persuasions rejected Trump also collapses in the face of evidence. More white college graduates voted for Trump than for Hillary Clinton. To bolster his claim that "[e]lite evangelicals decried [Trump's] infidelity," Schmitz invokes Episcopalians and Presbyterians. But those two denominations have largely eschewed the evangelical model and are more commonly understood as mainline denominations. (Both churches, for instance, have infant baptism, in contrast with the "born again" model more common to evangelical churches.)

more
https://www.salon.com/2018/07/03/so-much-for-donald-trumps-purple-values-his-red-state-support-stems-from-flagrant-sexism/

[Achilleaze]

1. "Unstable relationships are the norm" (R)

Who the hell wants to stay in a relationship with a mysogynist a-hole?

Get your shit together, republicans, and start acting like decent, honest human beings with integrity and respect. Then your relationships will be stable.

d'oh.