Letters to the Editor: Liberal elites, answer the question: Do you hate Trump supporters?
To the editor: The title of Todd Gitlin's op-ed article — "Trump conservatives think they are loathed by 'elites.' Are they?" — is misleading. The whole piece is about what "Trump-leaning conservatives" think, not liberal elites.
Gitlin writes nothing about Hillary Clinton saying in 2016, "You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables." That may have cost her the 80,000 votes in three states by which she lost the electoral college.
He says nothing about the opinions of his colleagues at colleges and universities about the undereducated working class. (For the record, I have a master's degree from Purdue University.) He dismisses the possibility that "Hollywood, 'liberal media,' 'fake news' and liberals generally denigrate conservatives as racist, sexist, ignorant rubes."
It seems, given the title for the piece, Gitlin should have taken some time to demonstrate that the "elites" do not loathe the right. My guess is that it was too big a lift.
Allan Baker, Morongo Valley, Calif.
..
To the editor: Gitlin reflects on some Trump supporters reacting to losing what they perceive as their God-given ownership of this country. I have often wondered whether this country ever truly was white and Christian.
Certainly, newspaper pictures of movie audiences (think the early 3-D movies in the 1950s) were all of white folks, but that's because the Black moviegoers were up in the balcony. They were invisible.
Did the census always manage to count everyone? If you lived in a shanty by the railroad tracks, did anyone bother? Of course, no one bothered counting the Native Americans on all those reservations.
Just as we have painted the history of this country in soft pastels of glory and rights achieved, to the exclusion of every nonwhite population that we as a nation have abused, so too I think we are painting the America of the 1950s in soft pastels of happy white Christian families around the Sunday dinner table. This isn't to disparage those families, but only to point out that it is only the nostalgic perception of what life was like back then.
White Protestants aren't losing their numbers so much as their ownership of this country. They need to get over it.
Diane Cohen, Tarzana
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
