I would implore you to empathize with the American working class, who have seen their living standards continuously deteriorate over multiple generations.
I know the hackernews audience skews more affluent and wealthy, with demographics pulling from more developed coastal cities, but the vast majority of citizens do not exist in such living conditions. Focusing entirely on the development an prosperity of only a handful of our cities is what has created the perfect fertile soil for Xenophobia to grow. I dont see the rhetoric as the cause, just the motions of opportunists taking advantage of a situation that we are all at fault for. Despite all the freedom, peace, and prosperity, its so unevenly distributed that many citizens live in squalor rivaling some destitute underdeveloped nations.
The American working class doesn't like to acknowledge its own existence or assert its self-worth. There's no real self identity for that class in America.
In fact, a huge number of the people that are in that class would resent you for classifying them in this way. And the same is true for those in the upper middle class, or elites.
Secondly, trying to scope the xenophobia problem to just the working class is itself a bit of a misdirection. Plenty of that comes from the swaths of upper middle class white collar folks. And plenty of it comes from second gen immigrants who are eager to be counted among the natives.
The xenophobia _is_ the substitute American culture provides as a filler for the vacuum left by the lack of any sort of class identity. Everybody falls over themselves demonstrating how they can be "more American" in one way or the other. Who is a "real" American, what their qualities are, whether this particular thing or that particular thing is more or less American, etc. etc.
It's an alternate focus to direct all that shame the culture demands from the poor.
I think you’re making a lot of unjustified assumptions about the HN audience
And about me.
I wasn’t addressing you but the comment replying to you.
So was I!