Even worse than neglect, some elites treated the white working class with contempt; at best, they patronized them. “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania,” then-senator Obama said to a group of wealthy meritocrats in San Francisco, “and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they
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