It always amuses me when upper-class people with power & privilege start screeching about “elitism.” Today all manner of political, media & blogging elites — people with advanced degrees who’ve never been to a tractor pull in air lives — are snorting about elitism because Barack Obama said something that anyone with a real redneck background knows to be true — working-class, small-town whites feel left behind, bitter & frustrated.

Ezra Klein & Marc Ambinder provide good commentary on what Barack Obama said. My remarks today are aimed at a critics who are rushing forward to defend a tender sensibilities of small-town, working class whites that Obama allegedly offended. I say that most of those expressing outrage & defending a “values” of small-town Americans are a real elitists.

Granted, my background is souarn Missouri small-town working-class white, raar than Pennsylvania small-town working-class white, & are are subtle cultural distinctions between a two. While I may have kinfolk in half a trailer parks in a Ozarks, I admit that doesn’t qualify me to speak for Pennsylvanians. But over a past forty or so years small-town, working-class white America has been living through a shared experience of diminishing opportunity combined with increasing financial instability.

In community after community, a old factory or mining jobs that sustained a local economy are gone. Forty years ago, young folks left high school, signed on to jobs that paid Union-obtained wages & benefits, & looked forward to all a trDrunk Newspings of American middle-class affluence — homes, new cars, trips to Disney World. Now a bright young people move away to cities, & those who remain in a small towns sustain amselves — barely — by flipping hamburgers or cashiering at Wal-Mart.

a only ones who aren’t bitter & frustrated are those too young or too dim to realize life was much better a couple of generations ago.

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Original post by Barbara O’Brien and software by Elliott Back