Steps missing
Robert Reich points out that the Clintonistas abandoned the working class. I agree with him about that, but I still don’t see how it translates to voting for Trump. He lays out a lot of true claims, but doesn’t explain the ===> Trump part.
Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don’t reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.
Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers without college degrees – the old working class – have fallen furthest. Most economic gains, meanwhile, have gone to [the] top. These gains have translated into political power to elicit bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes, favorable trade deals and increasing market power without interference by anti-monopoly enforcement – all of which have further reduced wages and pulled up profits.
Yes. I know. But how is that a reason to vote for Trump? Trump benefits from that system too, and he doesn’t share any of his gains with people who don’t.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in “swing” suburbs.
I know. But Trump doesn’t represent the working class either. The fact that he’s a racist pussy-grabbing abuser doesn’t make him working class or a champion of the working class. He’s a filthy rich racist pussy-grabbing abuser. He’s deeply vulgar, granted, but that doesn’t make him working class either.
Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising result of this combination – more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration – has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump’s authoritarian demagoguery, and his presidency.
I don’t see it. I don’t see what work “an opening” does there.
Agreed. This election is not about the economy.
The outcome is due to 1) What Van Jones called ‘whitelash,’ retribution for putting a black man in the White House and 2) Misogyny daring to try to replace him with a woman.
I know some very poor marginalized people who would never dream of voting for Trump and are terrified by this outcome. Most of those I know who did vote for him seem to be comparatively well off. However, they do seem to have quite a large empathy deficit.
It has everything to do with his supposed “outsider” status, which he was able to more credibly claim because of a lifetime of private enrichment and his lack of public service His voters didn’t see him as part of the “establishment,” but even if he wasn’t, he sure did benefit from it.
A lot of conservatives have a huge blindspot for the kind of damage big business can do. If a big business screws people over, it’s entitled to because the owners are great people who’ve accrued power by making heaps of money; this makes them honorable and their victims weak chumps. If the government screws over wealthy people, it’s class warfare, and an assault on economic freedom, etc., because the government doesn’t get its power by making money but by taxing its citizens (which many still complain is “theft.”)
I’m really sick of people conflating “working class” with “blue collar bigot.” Yes, the security of blue-collar jobs, both financially and in a physical sense, is not anywhere near where it used to be, and the narrow segment of the population who relied on those jobs is pissed. You know who else makes a pittance for difficult work? Retail employees. Food service employees. The people who even blue-collar workers think they have a right to look down on as burger flippers and service staff.
It’s like these articles are talking about a society that doesn’t actually exist.
Clinton won the low-income demographic group. I don’t think that indicates a sense of abandonment. It appears she lost white low-income people, but I haven’t seen that broken down yet.
I like Robert Reich. But on this, I believe he is wrong.
Yes, Clinton and Obama moved a little to the right. They had to, in order to get elected. And they made compromises with conservatives, to make it possible to achieve anything at all.
The greater problem is that the white working class abandoned the Democrats. They became the “Reagan Democrats” and repeatedly voted for Republicans. That’s what forced the Democrats to move a little to the right.
Many of the right working class were members of unions. And those unions were hotbeds of racism. That was ended with the civil rights legislation, and the white working class blamed the democrats.
Obamacare benefits the working class. That does not look like abandoning them. But the white working class reject it, because they see their racism as more important.
There’s one last chance to fix this: gain control of the Senate in 2018 (hopefully before the VRA gets repealed).
It’s an extremely slim chance though. After that the Dems will no longer be able to do anything f decades.
Neil @5 – and a lot of it is also the extreme focus on “social issues”. The craziness of the anti-abortion folks that the Republicans have been sucking up to for so long; the prayer in school folks, the white supremacists – and all this added onto a pro-business, anti-government stance that loved all government spending as long as it was subsidies to the already rich, and military expansion.
They get a long way with dissatisfied people by screaming “No new taxes”, “repeal the income tax”, etc. Most people have no clue what their taxes go to, and can’t be bothered to find out. So when the right wingers come along and tell them their taxes are going to allow people of color (not the phrase they use, of course) to sit around on their asses and have babies while buying steaks and cadillacs on the government dollar, these people listened, and voted.
The hatred in this country runs deep.
Cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. It’s a thing. Happens all the time. Shouldn’t surprise us.
You also cannot ignore the effects of the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. This is a group who has been getting increasingly filtered and bubbled “news” for the last 3 decades. People who were too young to vote when FOX News was just a gleam in Rupert Murdoch’s beady little eyes are now old enough to run for President themselves. They’ve spent their entire adult lives having their biases catered to, without any effective counter getting remotely equal time. And of course, the proto-Tea Party folks managed to get invested heavily on school boards, so many of them got to adulthood in the first place in an environment of learned ignorance, which is far more resilient than the simple lack of information.
Exactly, you can list reasons the working class might be unhappy with the Democrats until the world runs out of ink, and in every case those very same reasons should make them even more unhappy with Trump. It’s like like downing a bottle of whisky because lager gets you too drunk. I suspect there’s an extreme version of the Nirvana Fallacy at play here: “The best available option has flaws, therefore we might as well go for the worst.”
(Of course all of this assumes that the working class really did vote for Trump in droves, which seems dubious to say the least…)
Every Democratic administration since Carter has been sandbagged and obstructed by the most incompetent and dangerous wing of the Republican party. Only 4 years of the legislature NOT under Republican control.
Trump obviously stands for nothing but himself. The only ‘value’ he stands for is resentment. Which appears to be the one thing Americans really treasure. Voting for Trump, not voting at all, or casting ‘banging on the highchair’ protest votes. Aren’t all these united by the spirit of childishness and resentment?