When Barack Obama first ran for president, his most memorable campaign gaffe was to describe this dynamic. “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania,” he told a group of supporters in San Francisco in 2008, “and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment…as a way to explain their frustrations.” Sure, it was condescending, but it was also true. The
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