Not really true. That’s when it was split off into a separate department, but it had existed as part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for long before that.
Of course they listened. But ‘we the people,’ in aggregate, are pretty fucking stupid and perception > reality aka Feels > Reals. Also, it’s been a long road back from the Great Recession and not all regions were feeling the love equally.
It doesn’t excuse their behavior in the least, just explaining the darkest timeline Weltanschauung.
Most of all, the clear winner was [spoiler]
NOBODY
46.9% Voted for Nobody.
Nobody can fix their problems, Nobody wants to help them. Nobody cares!
NOBODY TELLS THE TRUTH
[/spoiler]
I’m sold, quimper. Nobody for President!
Hey, I’m on your side.
The democratic message was not that these coal and blue collar manufacturing jobs were going to come back.
The democratic message was that without those jobs, we could still find ways for those people to thrive in the economy, but it would take some level of effort.
Automation and offshoring do reduce the number of manufacturing jobs available, especially per unit of goods produced, but it also opens up a number of other jobs in service industries. Jobs that could pay better, have better benefits and working conditions, and would really only require minimal retraining to do.
It seems as though for every manufacturing job we’ve lost, we’ve gained 2 or 3 service jobs. This is a good thing, and only harms those who will not consider a different career. I fear that to “bring back” those jobs, would cost 2-3 or more service jobs for each manufacturing job produced.
As I noted in a concurrent thread,
I suspect a large part of the white working class’s current crushing cognitive dissonance is a desire to avoid realizing how soundly they have been played and how roundly they have been screwed by the Republican Party. They were, almost literally, suicidally loyal to conservative politicians who kept promising to help them “take their country back” from the liberal boogymen who were allegedly causing all their problems. They kept turning more and more of their governance over to Republicans, and their problems kept not getting fixed.
White working-class rural voters were constantly urged to focus on social-conservative issues like abortion and gay rights and Christian religious dominance, which strengthened their feelings of identification with the politicians they supported but didn’t do a damn thing to fix their actual problems.
What they are presently IMHO almost unable to continue not realizing is that the “godly” and “patriotic” and “job creating” Republican establishment leaders that they stuck with through thick and thin never cared a hoot about how they were doing. Republican Party leadership is in the game for political power and financial advantage for the wealthy and business interests. Prosperity for Americans overall is a very, very secondary goal for them.
Another looming realization is that liberals/Democrats, deeply flawed as their leadership has undeniably been, nonetheless care a lot more and do a lot more for working-class voters than the Republicans they’ve backed so loyally.
So there’s one hell of a stressful epiphany awaiting a lot of working-class Republican voters. I can understand their feeling angry and lost in the run-up to it.
And if our schools were better, he would know that.