Out: Pajama Boy Talking about ObamaCare at Thanksgiving dinner

In: Talking to Millennials about Donald Trump at Thanksgiving dinner

 

Mark Hemingway has a hilarious piece about talking to a Millennial about Donald Trump at Thanksgiving dinner. An uncle is addressing his niece "Caitlin," who lives in New York but has come home to Grand Rapids for the holiday. They used to have such a good relationship:

Then you went off to college and everything changed. No offense, but Mount Holyoke? You could have gotten your fill of women’s studies classes paying in-state tuition at Ann Arbor without graduating $150,000 in debt.

No, I never said you had to listen to me. I’m not an idiot. I have a good idea of what you must think about me. I’m the guy who wears short-sleeve T-shirts and runs a CPA practice out of a strip mall. When I was growing up, even I didn’t want to be me. But you know what? I like being me. And I wasn’t the one who started talking politics!

. . .

So what’s the implication here? If Donald Trump is racist, does that mean you think your family is racist for voting for the man? Is Kanye West racist now? You think I like the fact that a rich New York jagoff with verbal diarrhea is going to be president? I just voted for the guy, I didn’t sign on the dotted line in blood. If he starts throwing people in camps, I’ll be the first guy to form a militia. But until then, I can’t be bothered to keep up with all things that are racist these days.

I remember watching cable news a few years ago, and some guy was saying that people complaining Obama golfed too much were racist. Golf is racist! If we’re going to do this, why don’t you go Wikipedia the Fugitive Slave Act and then we can put Trump’s racism in the proper political context, okay?

I’m not delusional. I know black people in this country have had it pretty bad, and I think we need to do more to help them. But one way to help them would be to bring back some good jobs, and unlike Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump wasn’t paid millions of dollars by Wall Street fat cats to look the other way while they continue sucking the country dry.

Oh, great. So we’re sexist, too. . . .

Meanwhile, Hot Air has a link to the SNL skit on millennials living in a liberal Bubble after Trump (they lived in the Bubble before Trump, but it is funnier now).

I know, I know, SNL did the unintentionally self-satirizing opener of Kate McKinnon, dressed in Hillary white, playing "Hallelujah," in tribute to a fallen heroine. But the skit of millennials watching the election returns made up for it. Snippet:

My friend at Huff Po says she'll win by five points.

I don't know. My friend at Slate says she'll win by three.

Hot Air's Allahpundit comments on the "bubble" skit:

To cleanse the palate, this is the flip side of the already famous “Black Jeopardy” sketch that aired last month. That one was a sympathetic look at what blue-collar Trump supporters have in common culturally with the black working class. This one is a goof on what upscale white urban liberals — the sort of people who write for “Saturday Night Live” — don’t have in common with the rest of America.

. . .

Neither skit is savage, just as a caricature drawn by a cartoonist who’s watching himself in a mirror usually produces light mockery, not harsh criticism. But at least they’re branching out from the usual political targets you’d expect from a show like this, especially after an election that went badly for the left. One undeniable chastening effect of Trump’s win on younger liberals will be to get them to start thinking harder about class divisions after downscale whites in the Rust Belt turned out en masse to hand the presidency to the GOP.

You would think the left, of all people, wouldn’t need reminding about how class informs culture and culture informs political preferences, but the Clintons getting crushed among blue-collar whites is what it is. SNL would be smart to keep playing with this theme.

Great observation, but I find a soupcon of condescention towards the Rust Belt voter that is so prevalent in all the soul searching about how to reach "these people."

Maybe the Rust Belt voters didn't decide who to cast their votes on the basis of class prejudice but because of a collective realization that the country was in trouble. Just a thought.

Watching the cultural ramifications of the presidential election of 2016 will be fascinating.