RED, WHITE & BLUES: When in doubt, blame the middle-aged white guys. As fall guys go, they are always reliable. How, for example, to explain the sustained popularity of Fiesta? Back in the ’80s, sociologists succinctly summed it up as “a bunch of middle-aged white guys dressing up as Mexicans to dance on the graves of dead Indians.” That, no doubt, is a gross oversimplification. But what’s the explanation for Donald Trump? Round up the Middle-Aged White Guys, a k a MAWGs. Even more specifically, lock up all the gray white guys who never went to college.
Easily dismissed as heterosexists, homophobes, and haters, these MAWGs are the ultimate political patsies. As they transition from their midlife crises to the howling winters of toxic discontentment, these guys seized upon Trump — the ultimate male hysteric — as their final “Big Waaah!” (It’s worth noting that Santa Barbara’s very own News-Press is one of only four newspapers nationwide to endorse the guy.) Certainly the numbers bear this out; Trump’s most loyal die-hard true believers are middle-aged white guys who didn’t go to college, and they make up 37 percent of the middle-aged white guy demographic. It’s a tidy explanation. But as they say in detective novels, maybe too tidy.
When the elites and effetes get through blaming the victims, they’d be well advised to check out the research just compiled by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, detailing how life expectancies for MAWGs — ages 45-55 — are actually dropping. American MAWGs are the only ones for which that’s true in eight so-called advanced affluent industrialized nations, including the U.S.A.