Tom Jacobs at the Pacific Standard finds himself surprised at the way voters conflated prosperity and morality, which eased their way to vote for Donald Trump:
The findings suggest the Trump campaign’s emphasis on the candidate’s success in business—which has subsequently been shown to be based largely on smoke and mirrors—increased the perception that he was a highly moral man, which in turn increased their likelihood to vote for him.
If Jacobs (and others) would exit their bubble, they would have anticipated this much sooner. But he’s not alone in surprise. When I joined the Pentecostal church in the early 1980’s that I’m still a part of, I was surprised the way that people assumed that, if you were prosperous, you were moral. And that was in a church that was still, for the most part, skittish about raw, straight up prosperity teaching a la Bob Tilton (whose church I attended in the late 1970’s) or Kenneth Copeland. The main beneficiaries at the time were the high income/net worth people in the church, who leveraged people’s attitudes to gain “street cred” in the church and the influence that went with it.
My experience growing up in Palm Beach, coupled with “traditional” (depends on the tradition, really) Christian teaching on the subject, taught me that the opposite was more often the case. It also taught me that standing up to the great of this world in church was doable, something that never got off the ground in this “go along to get along” culture.
It wasn’t always this way in Southern culture, and with God’s help I’ll elaborate on that in a future post. But as the left ascends in the moneyed classes of our society, they would do well to stop and consider that the attitude of “the rich are moral” has largely prevented the kind of social upheaval that growing income inequality promotes. If that attitude ever flips, we’ll have problems that make the #GiletsJaunes in France look like an outing in the park.
Positive Infinity 