Tom McCarthy writes an insightful article on Trump’s appeal to the working class in The Guardian here. (BTW, Those who do not subscribe to The Guardian may find themselves blocked if they have read too many articles in a given month.)
McCarthy writes with great deftness but without showing off. I especially like his metaphor, that Trump’s victory felt to many people “as if a trapdoor in history had clumsily sprung open and the country fallen through.”
His piece speaks for itself, but there’s one note that I’ve heard rung not only in Northampton County, PA, but elsewhere in the U.S.: that the expression ‘Merry Christmas’ had, while recently under a cloud, had made a welcome comeback. Despite the number of times Obama said ‘Merry Christmas’ (MSNBC played a collage of about ten instances of Obama wishing ‘Merry Christmas’ in various settings), during the last few decades a sense of shame had gotten attached to the expression among Christians who have felt themselves under siege. People got used to saying ‘Happy Holidays,’ but all along have been feeling a loss as well as resentment against the ‘Political Correctness’ that had taken the away the merriment.