Here is Paul Krugman identifying an essential irony in the current political maelstrom,
"Seriously, Republican political strategy has been exploiting racial antagonism, getting working-class whites to despise government because it dares to help Those People, for almost half a century. So it’s amazing to see the party’s elite utterly astonished by the success of a candidate who is just saying outright what they have consistently tried to convey with dog whistles."
As he notes, since Reagan inveighed against "Welfare Queens" who lived high on the hog, driving Cadillacs and wearing mink, while drawing welfare checks, the Republican party has mined the rich source of resentment among white, high school educated, blue collar workers who dimly perceive and full embrace the notion that while they slave away earning dollars, the government takes those dollars and gives them to the undeserving.
The Undeserving are undeserving because:
1/ They do not want to work. They are lazy.
2/ They are cheating, gaming the system and laughing all the way to the bank, living a wonderful life of ease and oppulence.
3/ They are not White.
There you have Donald Trump's appeal in a nutshell: He says openly what Reagan had said in veiled, politically correct, i.e. oblique terms.
Paul, you have seen the truth and spake it.
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