I’m not convinced they’ve ever come to the conclusion that they can only rely on themselves. They got told that their steel mills and manufacturing got shipped overseas by big city globalist democrats. They got told that the environmentalists are shutting down the coal mines. They got told that it was Obama’s fault that the post recession recovery skipped their communities. They got told that Biden was going to shut down fracking and turn off their gas wells. They got told that the Muslims were coming to destroy their way of life. They got told that millions of brown people are streaming across the border to come take what little they have.
They’ve been eating nothing but lies for decades and have absolutely no connection to reality. No ability to connect with what’s really happening. Because they actively seek out an echo chamber that is happy to feed them the lies that they desperately want to hear.
They are told that the shining city on the hill is being torn down by everything different than rural white Christians. They are told that there’s no possible way that the party that represents minorities or gays or trans or cities could possibly be good for them.
And in what is probably the greatest con of all time, Donald fucking Trump convinced them that he was the only one that could save them. By speaking in simple words and making fun of all of the things that they weren’t, they bought it. They swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
He perfectly fed them the lie that they wanted to hear. That the cause of their situation was a grand conspiracy against them and only he could set things right. A brilliant, white, man of god was going to lead the charge to bring back a time where Christian whites were superior to everyone else, men worked, women cooked and everyone else knew their place.
They aren’t looking for bootstraps to pull themselves up by. They are looking for a party that will knock down anyone different than them so that they can climb over them.