From Rod Dreher, here:
[Trump] has said publicly that he will make protecting religious liberty a priority. Does he mean it? I have no idea, and you don’t either. He is no religious conservative. But he is a populist who doesn’t care what the donor class thinks, because he is not indebted to them. It is reasonable to think that religious liberty stands a better chance with Trump in the White House than any other Republican. Mind you, that’s the soft bigotry of low expectations, but that just goes to show you how weak the position of us religious and social conservatives has become within the Republican Party. ...
For people in our socioeconomic demographic, greater immigration meant more and better restaurants, and better lawn and garden care.
Our kids weren’t having their schools overrun by children who couldn’t speak the language; they went to private school, or to public schools in parts of town immigrants couldn’t afford.
We weren’t having the hospitals we used overrun by illegal immigrants needing care; we didn’t have to use the public hospital.
Our neighborhoods weren’t changing in front of our eyes. And so on.
The immigration issue was a chance for us to show our compassion — sometimes our explicitly Christian compassion — without it costing us anything tangible. The kind of white people my class looked down on and thought of as racist rabble were the kind of white people who had to bear a lot of the brunt of our politics and what we called compassion. ... [T]hey are not wrong to judge that many in our class looks [sic] down on them, and doesn’t [sic] share their interests. The kinds of social things they might like to conserve don’t really matter to people of my class. We can’t see it, we never could see it, and some of us are still bound and determined not to see it, until they make us see it.
Our kids weren’t having their schools overrun by children who couldn’t speak the language; they went to private school, or to public schools in parts of town immigrants couldn’t afford.
We weren’t having the hospitals we used overrun by illegal immigrants needing care; we didn’t have to use the public hospital.
Our neighborhoods weren’t changing in front of our eyes. And so on.
The immigration issue was a chance for us to show our compassion — sometimes our explicitly Christian compassion — without it costing us anything tangible. The kind of white people my class looked down on and thought of as racist rabble were the kind of white people who had to bear a lot of the brunt of our politics and what we called compassion. ... [T]hey are not wrong to judge that many in our class looks [sic] down on them, and doesn’t [sic] share their interests. The kinds of social things they might like to conserve don’t really matter to people of my class. We can’t see it, we never could see it, and some of us are still bound and determined not to see it, until they make us see it.
