I don’t disagree, but those jobs aren’t coming back. How to accommodate displaced workers is a complex subject and requires commitments all around. It is made more complex when one party is fundamentally against the very idea of reaching out a helping hand, and so what the party that actually does want to do to help is limited.
If I were in that position, I would vote for the party that wants to help me and my family move forward, and would try to be a part of the conversation as to what that means. However, many in that position voted for the party that really didn’t give a shit, so much so that they would straight up lie about getting them their jobs back.
Another criticism of global free trade is that the happy prediction that trade-based prosperity would rein in communist and post-communist regimes’ less savory aspects is now highly doubtful as of February 2022. As long as it was considered purely a matter of internal corruption (and haven’t free-traders always been able to work with despots?) the Putin kleptocracy was purely Russia’s problem- until Putin’s revanchist Russian imperialism reared its head. And China is viewed with similar suspicion; one severe provocation by the PRC over Taiwan or the South China Sea could lead to a breakdown of free trade.
If you’ve read about the history of the Pacific theater in WW2, you might recall a lot of bitter jokes about “all that steel” that had been previously sold to Japan now returning in the form of shells and bombs. A similar disillusion with free trade today is not inconceivable.
You are assuming that people are highly informed voters who elect candidates on a purely rational basis. Even if this were the case, people in rural communities which have been devastated by offshoring and foreign labor, or facilities shut down through obsolescence and fiscal non-viability, have every reason to find campaign promises from establishment candidates to be suspect even if they are being directly addressed instead of ignored and overlooked.
That is a pretty gross oversimplification of the current situation in Russia situation. Presidents Bush, Clinton, and Bush all deserve a measure of culpability in tacitly facilitating the rise of Vladimir Putin but that wasn’t a free trade issue. Free trade, and specifically involvement in the European Union, was a dramatic advantage in the post-Soviet period for the Warsaw Pact nations Eastern Europe, albeit not without its own negative consequences.
I wasn’t thinking of the former Warsaw Pact nations because their communism was so obviously and artificially imposed from without that they scarcely count. Like calling the women whom a survivalist kidnapped and held shackled in a cabin in the woods his “wives”- the moment they were free they begged to differ.
I don’t think it’s that they did forget about blue-collar workers and rural folks. I think it’s that many people were convinced by Republicans telling them that “politicians like Hillary” had nothing for them, and didn’t listen to what Hillary Clinton, among others, were actually offering.
Large numbers of people, in a wide variety of non-urban living situations, have fought desperately through all those centuries to be able to stay in those situations. They didn’t think all those different ways of living were “horrific”. Can those ways of living be made horrific, when people are driven off their land or the resources of that land contaminated and/or stolen? Sure. But urban living really isn’t flat out better for everybody. It suits some better, yes; but it drives others into destruction.
We need to have multiple ways of living available and healthy; not to keep saying, in whatever form, There Is Only One Good Way To Live.
The attractions of city living go back to the beginnings of cities themselves. This is true in every civilization around the world for all of recorded history. People by the hundreds of millions, probably billions, have made the choice for themselves in every civilization around the world for all of recorded history. Some people surely felt forced to make the choice, force being ubiquitous in all aspects of human society from the dawn of time. That all or even most of the billions who have moved to cities in all of recorded history have felt forced is beyond rational belief.
I’ve got no objection to that part. Of course many people are attracted to city living.
It’s the part about claiming that non-urban living is essentially horrific, worse than living in the worst urban slums, that I’m objecting to.
True. It also brings disadvantages that low density communities do not. And low density communities bring advantages that city living does not. For some people, the advantages of city living outweigh its disadvantages, and the disadvantages of low density outweigh its advantages. For others, it’s the other way around. People strongly suited to either may find the other “horrific”.
– it occurs to me that this doesn’t have much to do with neoliberalism. Will try to shut up on the subject now.
I too will leave the subject but not before pointing out that my actual quote…
… referred to living in rural poverty and varying degrees of badness. I don’t understand how this got twisted into a universal condemnation of all rural and farm settings being horrific or even poverty-stricken.
I think you’re right that politicians didn’t forget about swing-state blue collar workers and rural populations. “Hillary Clinton’s failure to visit the key battleground state of Wisconsin in 2016 has become a popular metaphor for the alleged strategic inadequacies of her presidential campaign. Critics who cite this fact, however, make two important assumptions: that campaign visits are effective, in general, and that they were effective for Clinton in 2016”. cite. If this is off-topic, my apologies.
There is some degree of conflation with two concepts - economic and job policy and racial and immigrant resentment. I mean that in this way - many of the arguments in favor of Trump revolved around the notion that peoples’ jobs were at stake, particularly from immigrants. But I want to ask those people who rail against immigration because immigrants are coming after their jobs, Just how many times did you apply to be a busboy at a restaurant and were turned down for a Latino? How often have you tried to get a job on a lawn crew, only to be told that an immigrant had first dibbs? How many of those people have lost their jobs as day workers and janitors and house cleaners? Talk about a straw man argument!
Rhetoric aside, what can any competent administration actually do about the immigration situation? As alternate extreme impossibilities one can imagine either putting minefields across the entirety of the US-Mexico border, or else dropping all immigration laws for a totally libertarian open border. What we’re left with in the actual non-fantasy real world is exactly the sort of muddle that’s been the de facto US policy for decades.
Or hire enough workers, and build enough properly designed holding centers, to clear backlog and properly screen a surge of new applicants; checking for actively infectious diseases and providing care and quarantine as necessary, checking for trafficking, checking for a history of non-defensive violence or genuine terrorist connections; and otherwise letting in, with work permits and a potential path to citizenship, anyone with a valid refugee claim and/or with a confirmed job waiting for them and/or with family willing and able to guarantee their support.
ETA: probably not currently politically possible, unfortunately. But one can certainly imagine things that could be done that don’t fall into your suggested extremes.
Speaking of which, stimulus spending to head off the Great Recession sounds more Keynesian than neoliberal to me. Too big to fail is like, the opposite of neoliberal, as I understand it. Not to mention additional rounds of stimulus spending during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
So I would say the end of the era was over a decade ago, at least in the U.S. I’m not making a connection between old economic policy and the election of President Trump.
The thread has meandered a bit since your post, but I have a theory that I’m going to try (and likely fail) to explain.
The data you cite pretty clearly states that the Trump/Clinton and Trump/Biden divides don’t really break on economic lines. And you and others are citing this to refute the argument that neoliberalism and its impacts on labor and rising economic insecurity caused Trump. My instinct is that this misses something essential.
I think there’s a large disconnect between people’s actual finances and their perception of their position economically. We know that a huge proportion of those voters are voting directly against their own interests. What those interests are varied, but it’s a recurrent theme. I think you can reframe that a bit to say that Trump voters have a twisted perception of what their actual circumstance is.
While a lot of Trump voters are privileged, white, generally affluent people. The believe, deep in their hearts, that they are the losers in this post-global economy. The reasons they think this varies, it’s of course fueled by the lies and grievance coming from right-wing media, but nonetheless they feel like victims of those neoliberal policies. If this is true, then you can still accurately say that neoliberalism caused Trump. If the voters think that the evils of globalization are coming for them, even if imagined, and Trump and his accomplices told them they were right, there’s still a clear cause and effect relationship.
You’re right that people who are reasonably economically secure, and some who are quite rich, can feel economically insecure anyway.
But you’re apparently ignoring both that people who actually were economically insecure voted far more heavily for Clinton than for Trump; and also the distinct actual imbalances according to race, gender, and religion.
I did say that economics was at least part of the issue for some. But I still hold that the primary issue wasn’t economic insecurity, perceived or actual, but instead perceived social insecurity; most of which has little or nothing to do with neoliberalism.
And globalism itself probably has less to do with neoliberalism than it does with modern transportation. Different political philosophies might have reduced it some, or ameliorated its effects; but globalization with all of its downsides isn’t caused by neoliberalism, it’s caused by its having become possible to ship apple juice across the planet to groceries in upstate New York more cheaply than to get it to those groceries from orchards five miles away. (Apparently cheaper, anyway, due to a lot of externalization of costs – but that externalization of using up natural resources has been common to multiple sorts of economic and political policies for centuries.)
