People have been sending me articles about reaching out to Trump supporters. “Five Things People don’t Get about the American Working Class”
( http://www.afr.com/news/politics/election/5-key-things-people-dont-get-about-the-american-working-class-20161117-gsra1s)is one of those. Here is my reply to that article. I will read articles about reaching out to Trumpfsupporters when I see a Trump supporter circulating something like the article below.

Five Things People Don’t Get About the Professional Class

In this difficult and divisive time, we need to search our souls and ask ourselves “Why did Hillary Clinton receive almost two million more votes than our candidate did?” Clearly we have abandoned the professional class, and have been oblivious to their anger and alienation, as Republicans have gained control of Congress despite the total votes for members of Congress being a majority for Democrats. I believe that our unwillingness to listen to the professional class and understand their values is an important cause of that anger. If we ever hope to actually win a majority of the popular vote, we must reach out and find ways of bridging the gap between us and the professional class.

One little-known element of that gap is that those in the professional class find many of the rich immoral and actually admire and want to help the working class! Many in the professional class grew up in working class homes, and struggle to stay close to their relatives despite having been laughed at for listening to NPR and called pretentious snobs because they read books for fun. Some even continue trying to reach out after being disowned for being homosexual, punched or verbally abused for defending Black Lives Matter activists or scorned as an elitist know it all for believing that the New York Times is more balanced than Fox News! Even now after we Trump supporters told them to basically go fuck themselves, they persist in exhorting each other to reach out to us.

That said, many in the professional class resent the working class, yet admire and feel sympathy for the poor! Why the difference? For one thing, few in the professional class came from truly poor families, and so their experience with being disowned, spat on, laughed at, beat up,  insulted for being “dorky” or “arrogant” has come from working class relatives. It’s generally working class people who they have heard cat-calling professional women, addressing people of color with slurs or mocking homosexuals. “When Trump said he could ‘grab them by the pussy’, that just brought back how I used to have to walk 3 extra blocks to work every day just to avoid the construction site,” Says Polly Prof. of Boulder CO. “The way Trump mocked that disabled person, it just made me cry because it was so much like how my uncle acted after I brought my disabled friend to dinner.” Worse, Trump’s mere presence rubs it in that even men from her class can treat professional women men with disrespect. Look at how he scorns Hillary and looms over her as she tries to present policy positions, and dismisses her supporters out of hand as “elitist”, “fat pigs” and “losers.”
Hillary’s wonky policy statements tap into another professional class value: informed discussion. “Basing decisions on examining facts is a professional-class norm,” notes Moxie Lawful. As one professional woman told her, “If you have a problem with me, come and tell me why. If you have a decision that you need me to make, be sure I have all of the relevant information! I don’t like people who make gut-based decisions based on false beliefs!” Being informed is seen as requiring morally-responsible effort, not “thinking it’s funny to be a dumbass,” a doctor told Lawful. Of course Clinton appeals! Trump’s snarky brags that the “knows more than the generals” and doesn’t need to know anything about foreign countries? Seems to them like further proof he’s an ignorant bigot.

Human mutual respect is a big deal for professional class men and women, and they’re not feeling that they have it. Clinton promises a world free of bigotry and progress toward an era when all people have a place at the table. It’s comfort food for people with advanced degrees whose mothers could have been doctors or lawyers if they had been born 30 years later. Today they feel like progress is stalled – or they did, until they met Hillary.

Human rights are a big deal for most college graduates. Many still measure human rights in global terms. So is willingness to combat racism. These things are more important to them than a paycheck. In the 1960s, a White college professor could afford a nice house on the leafy main street, with only one breadwinner in the family. Now families with both parents working struggle to save enough to send their children to college. But do they look for scapegoats, or blame their stagnant standard of living on globalization? No, they celebrate the fact that poverty worldwide has decreased dramatically over the past 40 years, and they pursue their work for reasons that they find more fulfilling than money. For most professionals, all they’re asking for is basic human open-mindedness and respect for education. Hillary promises to deliver it.

The Republicans’ solution? Last week Fox news ran a story advising professional men and women to shut up and stop caring about whether people are insulted if you use racial slurs or express disgust for someone’s religion or love life. Talk about insensitivity! Working class men, you will notice, are not rushing to shut up and accept being insulted. To recommend that for professionals just fuels their anger.

Isn’t what happened to Trump with the popular vote unfair? Not really. It IS unfair that he wasn’t a plausible candidate until he had told so many lies that he was suddenly plausible because people couldn’t tell what the truth was any more. It may be unfair that Trump is called a “misogynist” when he clearly loves his daughter. It’s unfair that Trump only did so well in the primaries because he appealed to people’s deepest fears and prejudices. It’s unfair that Sanders fed into Trump’s narrative about Hillary being dishonest even though she has been fact-checked as one of the most honest politicians in existence. The election shows that propaganda retains a deeper hold than most imagined. But professionals don’t stand together: only 47% of Americans voted, with many Sanders supporters staying home or voting for third party candidates. If they had all voted for Hillary, she would have won the electoral vote.

Propaganda trumps facts, and it’s driving American politics. Policy makers of both parties — but particularly Republicans if they are to regain their majorities — need to remember five major points.
1. Understand that professional class means middle class, not rich.
The terminology here can be confusing. When republicans talk about elites, typically they mean the rich. But the rich, in the top 1% of American families, are very different from Americans who are literally in the middle: the middle 50% of families whose income is between $40,000 and $190,000 per year. “The thing that really gets me is that Republicans try to offer policies (tax cuts! privatization of health care!) that they SAY will help the middle class,” a friend just wrote me. No one below the top 1% benefits from these policies. Same with tax shelters for businesses. Most professionals are not interested in working on wall street with no goal other than to get rich, whether there are tax cuts for the rich or not. What they want is what my father-in-law had: meaningful, interesting jobs that help others, gain them the respect of others and make the world a better place. Clinton promises that, and she was much more likely to deliver on her promises than Trump.
2. Understand professional-class resentment of the rich
Remember when President Bush sold his tax cuts by pointing out that they cut the “death tax”? Just another program that taxed the middle class to help the rich, said the professional class, and in nearly all cases that has proven true: The very rich got tax cuts while most Americans got little or nothing.
Conservatives have lavished attention on the rich for over a century. That (combined with other factors) led to tax policies targeting the rich. Trickle-down programs that help the rich but exclude the middle may keep the stock market rising, but they are a recipe for class conflict. Example: 100% of rich families receive benefits in the form of tax deductions, which are largely nonexistent for the middle class. So my sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay for her own, but she did so willingly because she felt it was important to do work that makes her community better. Then, her program was cut because the Bush-caused financial collapse meant that big banks had to be bailed out at the expense of funding for children’s education. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms voted for Republicans. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying a copy of the National Enquirer that claimed Obama is a Muslim. My sister-in-law was livid.

Tracy Kidder’s much heralded book Mountains Beyond Mountains captures this resentment. While Republicans continue to cut aid of all sorts, Dr. Paul Farmer goes to Haiti, giving up a lucrative practice to work for those in need. While wall street bankers AND construction workers work solely for a paycheck, people like Dr. Farmer who want to make a difference struggle against long odds. To accomplish that, he lives a life of rigorous thrift and self-discipline. Kidder’s book passes harsh judgment on high-living Americans who ignore problems in the Third World while buying things for themselves. This attitude is not uncommon among hard-working professionals who have tried to educate others and make the world a better place through sheer force of will. This is a second source of resentment against the rich.
Other books that get at this are The Grapes of Wrath and Capital in the 21St. Century.
3. Understand how class divisions have translated into geography
The best advice I’ve seen so far for Republicans is the recommendation that the uneducated move to a city or college town. Class conflict now closely tracks the urban-rural divide. In the huge red plains between the thin blue coasts, shockingly high numbers of working-class men are uneducated, unemployed or on disability, fuelling a wave of despair deaths in the form of the opioid epidemic. Cities and college towns have more jobs than rural areas and offer many free educational opportunities. When did you hear any American politician talk about that?  Never. People in the Professional class are much more willing to move where the jobs are, but do politicians suggest that people in coal country stop sitting around complaining that miners’ jobs are gone and move to places where they can get training and a good job?  No.
4. If you want to connect with professional-class voters, place education at the centre.
“The professional class is just so dorky. Don’t they realize that people aren’t convinced by facts, and that hearing policy statements is boring?” I have heard some version of this over and over again, and it’s actually a sentiment the professional class agrees with, which is why they supported Sanders in large numbers this year. But to them, Republicans are worse, since they ignore facts and thrive on ignorance.
Both parties have supported free-trade deals because of the net positive GDP gains, overlooking the people who lost jobs, which, includes both working class people and professional workers who lost work as new universities opened up in India and China to train workers for high-tech jobs. These are precisely the foreign countries that Republicans spent a lot of time and energy figuring out how to cause people to fear. Excuse me. Who’s dorky?
One key message is that trade deals are far more expensive than we’ve treated them, because sustained job development and training programs need to be counted as part of their costs. Another is that Americans cannot continue to have a standard of living that is exponentially higher than in the rest of world without returning vast numbers of people around the world into abject poverty.
At a deeper level, both parties need an economic program that can deliver middle-class jobs. Democrats have one: restrain the excesses that have led to the rich getting so much richer. Republicans? They remain obsessed with immigrants and other scapegoats. I fully understand why Islamic Fundamentalism is important, but I also understand why conservatives’ obsession with rounding up immigrants and harassing people of color infuriates many Americans whose chief concerns are the actual reality of the economic situation.
Back when blue-collar voters used to be solidly Democratic (1930–1970), good jobs were at the core of the progressive agenda. A modern industrial policy would follow Germany’s path. (Want really good scissors? Buy German.) Massive funding is needed for community college programs linked with local businesses to train workers for well-paying new economy jobs. Republicans have been consistently blocking efforts to fund such programs for 40 years. Clinton advocated for such programs, along with 600,000 other policy suggestions. She did not abandon social issues and look for scapegoats in order to work toward her goals.
5. Avoid the temptation to write off professional resentment as elitism.
Economic resentment has fueled racial anxiety that, in some Drumpf supporters (and Drumpf himself), bleeds into open racism. This plus the indifference of many Drumpf supporters to facts has led many professionals to become frustrated that their efforts to educate people are met with scorn and a preference for emotional slogans and scapegoating over knowledge. But to write off professionals’ anger as nothing more than elitism is intellectual comfort food, and it is dangerous.
National debates about policing are fuelling class tensions today in precisely the same way they did in the 1970s, when college kids derided policemen as “pigs.” This is a recipe for class conflict. Being in the police is one of the few good jobs open to Americans without a college education. Police get solid wages, great benefits, and a respected place in their communities. For working class people to write off anyone who objects to the too-frequent killings of black civilians by police as elitist and anti-police is a telling example of how, although race- and sex-based insults are rarely said in front of professional class people, class-based insults still are.

I do not defend protesters who condemn all police because of some who kill citizens for selling cigarettes. But the current demonization of “black lives matter” and other human rights activists underestimates the difficulty of ending police violence against communities of color. Police need to make split-second decisions in life-threatening situations. They need to be trained to understand how often implicit bias can affect how they act under duress. I don’t have to worry about my son being shot by police. If I did, or knew someone who did, I might protest too.
Saying this is so unpopular that I risk making myself a pariah among my friends in the red middle. But the biggest risk today for me and other Americans is continued class cluelessness. If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap and try to understand those who voted against Trump, when he proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, Ohio, the consequences could turn dangerous.
In 2010, while on a book tour I gave a talk about all of this at the Youngstown Kiwanis Club. The woman who ran the speaker series, a major Republican operative, liked my talk. “You are saying exactly what the Republicans need to hear,” she mused, “and they’ll never listen.” I hope now they will.