Common Ground

Self-pity is the unifying trait of white working class Trump voters.  Krugman recently suggested anti-intellectualism.  That seemed almost right, but not exactly on target because anti-intellectualism is more mindset than a core emotion.  Self-pitiers blame all misfortune on a hostile world.  Store clerks are rude.  Teachers are out to get my kid.  Bosses pick on me.  Fifty cars on the road are speeding, but the cop stopped me because he needed to get a white guy to avoid looking prejudiced and why wasn't he going after real criminals like murderers and rapists.  And on and on.  When everyone else is at fault, problems don't get solved.  They just get repeated.

The self-pity gene also codes for high fear of non-existent threats.  Obama will take away my guns.  Sharia law is being let loose across the land.  Global warming is a conspiracy that will force me to forfeit my V8's and pickups.  Poor, poor self-pitying victims squint at the world from behind closed curtains, waiting for the next injustice to reinforce their paranoid narcissistic world view.

A family I knew well suffered multigenerational self-pity.  Nature and nurture had dug a very deep hole. Six of six siblings were severely dyslexic. Education was torture.  One of the boys was dragged down the street every weekday morning as he screamed, "No school!  No school!"  The parents, self-pitiers both, did not know how to get the help that the schools are required to provide. Instead they snarled about a teacher who suggested testing the youngest child for learning disabilities. "All they want to do is put a label on the kid.  Why don't they realize that every kid is different?"

Tolstoy be damned.  The family, like millions of other people, followed the same self-pitying path of lousy jobs, alcohol, drugs, early pregnancies and low-birth-weight babies, and guns.  Pigeons oh so easily plucked by a master con man.