(I’m hoping to start a discussion on governance, not on this election per se, which is why I’m putting this in GD.)
The fact that >40% of the voting public will vote for a shaved baboon who says the things they want to hear has got to open your eyes. Perhaps I’m being a Pollyanna, but I can’t believe that it’s purely driven by hate.
So if you peel away the Tea Party/Trumpist racism and xenophobia, what is the takeaway from the Trump phenomenon? How could it inform the objectives of the next administration?
Is it a desire for secure borders? More assertive stance on ISIS? Rebuilding American manufacturing? What would you do that would be constitutional, practical, and wouldn’t crash the economy or shatter our strategic alliances?
What sort of ape can we call Mrs. Clinton or the Obamas?
But to answer your question. I think it has to do with inability to compete globally for the bottom 40% of Americans. Our bottom 40% are not more economically valuable than China’s bottom 99.2%.
Obviously the main impetus for this sort of push is that people feel like the political establishment, such that it is, is not serving the American people any further. Bernie Sanders was a more well-intentioned manifestation of this same movement. We feel powerless over our government as those in power only serve their powerful masters. Young people today are the first generation in American history who won’t have the economic opportunity their parents did. They’ll work harder, longer, and have less to show for it throughout their lives. Our establishment is incestuous and corrupt, and people think an outsider is needed to address the issue. To some degree this was the case for Obama too - he promised change and he was far less establishment than Clinton. People expected him to be more of an outsider than he was, and when he settled in and became part of the establishment, people became disappointed and doubled down and thought we needed an even more anti-establishment/strong willed candidate to get it done, hence the prominence of Sanders and Trump.
In that way, Trump was actually a huge score for the establishment. It’s basically a sick joke. “Oh, you want your anti-establishment? Here you go! Haha! Go ahead, vote for this buffoon over the most establishment candidate ever, we dare you!” - I’m curious to see if in the next election this results in a disinterested anti-establishment movement (“fuck it, that was the best we could do and it was a disaster”) or one that sees the failure of the anti-establishment movement to be fueled by corruption from the establishment, which will be fueled by Trump claiming things were rigged against him.
You seem to be focused on Trump, but I think that the Sanders movement had many of the same populist elements, though obviously from the other side. The root, for me, is fear…people are afraid of the changes in our economy and the uncertainty that many of them feel. The whole immigration thing is, mainly (I think) due to that fear…fear that the blue collar jobs (which have been dwindling in the US for decades) are threatened by furriners comin’ in a takin’ them from good, hard workin’ merikins! Wrapped up in all of this is the seemingly endless racial issues we have, with crime going up in some places and the focus on police interaction with the public, especially minorities.
I honestly don’t think much of this will carry over to the next election. Clinton will rise or fall on her own decisions, as well as how the economy fares, and I think most of the hot button issues in this election will be seen for the usual bread and circuses they are and forgotten in the ramp up to the next election cycle of Clinton verse whoever the Republicans run next time.
[QUOTE=Rick Kitchen]
The above are excerpts from the Nazi Party platform. Replace the word citizens, nation and Americans with Germans and Reich.
[/QUOTE]
As with Brexit, that a frighteningly large proportion of the electorate exhibit angry self-righteous stupidity to a point where they are willing to stand in public, light Molotov Cocktails en masse and throw them vertically.
I’m trying to come up with a better GD-worthy answer, but I really can’t think of one - there were always fringe wackos, but a large proportion of the electorate really just seems to be getting more and more bizarre and self-destructive in its proclivities. I would feel less puzzled if the Trump voters were actually voting in simple self-interest.
Fear and anger, and in a lot of cases, bigotry. To illustrate… out of the Trump supporters that I know to one degree or another, here are their reasoning:
One is focused on the single issue of believing Trump will improve the economy. Her husband killed himself in the last year and left her dealing with a run-down family business that she knows nothing about. He idolized money, and since there is a cultural gap for her, she thinks this is the way to fulfill his dream and come out better off. Add in that she’s not very sympathetic to other outsiders, and there you go.
A pair of sisters. One is a single-issue voter who wants to bypass the candidate who is “pro-abortion.” That one is really sad because otherwise she’d never dream of voting for such a trainwreck.
The other is an idiot. She glibly believes anything spoon fed to her if it suits her agenda, be it from the pulpit to Fox News to the Reader’s Digest. She’s pissed off that there is gay marriage and transgender rights and people that are concerned about “illegals.” She wants America to go back to being great the way it was when John Wayne ruled the roost, you could smack your kids in public to make them mind and no one needed mamby pamby excuses like PTSD or Autism. She too is a bucketful of almost every ism that there is.
A married couple of a certain age who hates the fact that they live in a trailer and he still has to work at a manual labor job to help them get by, while others are getting a free ride. I’m assuming she just follows him because he says so.
A former classmate, bless their heart, who wasn’t the brightest bulb back then and who doesn’t not understand just exactly how Trump would be able make Mexico pay for that wall. But as a reactionary, he can do it!
Assorted others, mostly men, who just will not vote for that lying bitch. They stand on that, even though the whole thing makes no sense to them, against Trump’s racism like it’s no thing, because again… no WOMAN!! God didn’t want that and we shouldn’t either. A 1950s USA would be so much better than this galldurn liberal crap. That’s why we got men in dresses now, dontcha know.
So, that’s what I’ve seen. Fear / hatred if change. Anger at perceived slights to their beliefs / faith. And loads and loads of racism / sexism / homophobia / whatever. They just don’t want to know anymore about how the rest of the world survives. They only care about their monkey sphere and how Trump will save them from everything bad and wrong in the world.
How that could be co-opted, I have no idea. Or if it should.
[For reference, I live in east Texas. I’m church mouse poor, but there’s plenty of wealth all over the area. Consider that for what it’s worth.]
I think you need to look at WHY each item on Trump’s agenda is there. How it came to be there.
Examples: “Secure borders.”
This is not actually a concern for most Americans, and hasn’t been such for over a century. The reason why many Americans THINK they care about secure borders, is because both parties, in one way and another have been using illegal workers from the south sneaking in, as a distraction from the fact that NONE OF THEM WANTS TO ACTUALLY FIX THE PROBLEMS related to this. Trump made great strides in popularity, simply because he is the first person to claim to be a Republican, who actually proposes to spend money on addressing it.
“More assertive stance on ISIS.” A propaganda trick by the Republicans. ISIS is being dealt with just fine. But the GOP wants everyone to think otherwise, so they pretend they could do much more, though as usual, they formally propose absolutely NOTHING.
“Rebuilding American manufacturing”
Another VERY hard thing to do, which both major parties have conflicting interests in attempting seriously. Republicans like the decline in manufacturing, because they dislike Unions, in turn because they are convinced that unions will always vote Democrat. They wont say so out loud, of course.
" What would you do that would be constitutional, practical, and wouldn’t crash the economy or shatter our strategic alliances?"
Oh, my. There are so many things which have to be done, and done all together in order to actually move on these concerns.
The biggest concern I see, is that the version of capitalism that has gained complete hegemony over America since about 1978, is suicidal. It’s based on trying to fix everything by paying less for labor.
What needs to be generally recognized, is that a strong and growing capitalist economy is always built on a wealthy CUSTOMER CLASS, not on wealthy OWNERS/INVESTORS. Hence neither the Democratic Government Priming concept nor the Republican Supply Side concept works.
As long as the great majority of American CUSTOMERS can’t afford to buy what we produce, American manufacturing will continue to fail.
Either wages must rise, and rise for reasons OTHER than raising minimum wage limits, or the cost of living must fall tremendously.
In addition, a LOT of corporate laws have to change. Not the ones the Republicans want changed. The ability to get rich here, without producing any domestic wealth needs to be reversed. Things perhaps, like requiring any company no matter who owns it, that wants to sell products or services in the United States, be required to directly pay for the infrastructure that is required in order for them to do so. The United States provides a world-wide navy, protecting shipping, as well as providing satellite guidance systems, weather reporting and so on which cheap foreign-made products rely on, in order to be shipped here in giant container ships on the cheap. They should all have to pay taxes here in order to cover those extensive costs. They have ti travel over American funded roads, in order to get their products to market here they should have to contribute to that cost as well.
Stop basing taxation on where the Corporate Headquarters is, and base it on where the MARKET is and companies will no longer have a reason to play games with selling to foreign interests.
Populism is ultimately a strategy, not an ideology so it’s not surprising an effective strategy would be utilized by people all over the ideological spectrum.
While a lot of Trump’s support is attributable to plain old racism and nativism, it’s clear that much of the discomfort, fear, and anger at the dramatic socioeconomic shifts America has been undergoing in the past 30 years are justified given the disappearance of millions of well-paying blue-collar jobs, stagnating wages/incomes, and deindustrialization of large sections of the country. The question is who can offer a better answer then Trump to these problems? I think Clinton does have a good answer to all these problems and she needs to run on that more,
As I’ve said before, this is the problem with bourgeois liberal analysis of politics which obsess over personalities and media portrayals (even as they paradoxically attack politicians for not keeping policy trivia straight) rather then focusing on the underlying socioeconomic trends and ideological duels. The crisis of the white working-class isn’t going to disappear anytime soon-not in a period where their death rates are rising, opioid epidemics are sweeping the country, and people are increasingly socially atomized.
It seems to me that poverty is a big driver for at least two of your examples, which in turn suggests that broad-based left-wing populism might push at least 1 and 3.
Igor, I agree with much of your post, but the excerpts I quoted contain factual errors. Didn’t the 1880’s have both a booming economy and high poverty? And while the Democrats aren’t very liberal, I don’t understand your objections. What is your objection to minimum wage hikes? I agree that strengthening labor unions would also be important, but that’s hard for government to bring about, especially with the GOP so opposed.
Thus, on this matter I think the Emperor Qin’s view is more correct:
But Clinton is seen as part of the problem. She is the nominee of the elites, the System which has failed so many Americans.
There’s something else: Trump is deliberately using very simple words to get his message across. Like any good salesman, he’s targeting his audience. Clinton doesn’t do that.
I see as many parallels between Trump and Hitler and the Nazis as I see between Sanders and Mao and/or Stalin and the Communists, which is to say…you see it if you are looking for and cherry picking a pattern, sort of like how you see a face in the clouds or Mary or Jesus on a piece of toast.