It shouldn’t be surprising that Obama and his wife verbalize bizarre views (to ordinary Americans). These views are rooted in their ideology, which should be familiar to any student of politics. Obama’s recent comments in Pennsylvania about the backward people of small towns is easily explained by the Marxist term false consciousness.
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. ~politico.com
False consciousness is the Marxist attempt to explain why middle class ‘proletariats’ don’t automatically take up arms against their capitalists oppressors as formulated by marxist theory that they should. It’s rather embarrassing to the whole cult brainwashing process of marxists to have to explain why the perfect kindling for their revolution actually oppose and resist their ideology. False consciousness is their effort to persuade themselves that it can’t be because marxism might be repelent to average Americans. No, these poor deluded souls have been tricked, hoodwinked, and otherwise bamboozled into acting against their own interests. They are, in fact, too stupid, or too weak to understand that they should be marxists.
False consciousness is the Marxist thesis that material and institutional processes in capitalist society are misleading to the proletariat, and to other classes. These processes betray the true relations of forces between those classes, and the real state of affairs regarding the development of pre-socialist society (relative to the secular development of human society in general).
This is essentially a result of ideological control which the proletariat either do not know they are under or disregard with a view to their own POUM (probability/possibility of upward mobility)[1]. POUM (not to be confused with POUM) or something like it is required in economics with its presumption of rational agency; otherwise wage laborers would be the conscious supporters of social relations antithetical to their own interests, violating that presumption. ~wikipedia.org
This is essentially what Obama is expressing here. The poor people of small town Pensylvania just don’t know what’s good for them. They have chosen to grasp at the false consciousness fed to them by their evil republican/conservative rascist capitalist oppressors.