I disagree with the distinction you’re making. People are acting in many ways irrationally and divorced from the reality of their experience. However, that doesn’t absolve the real problems neoliberalism caused from blame. If globalization creates a situation where lots of rural blue collar folks are losing work and thereby losing much of their identity, then it can still be responsible for the huge swath of voters who still identify with those blue collar workers to align with their plight.
I’m neither black or a woman, but the need for police reform and the overturning of Roe v Wade has tremendously hardened my support for Democrats. Lots of people who align with white, rural culture but are suburban, well-off and often not white are still going to act tribally out of empathy for those people, whether they truly believe they are “next in line” for economic calamity or not.
Further, the low income people in the cities who are largely minorities are voting blue because they have other issues, like police brutality and racist policies coming from the right. Them not voting with Trump does not imply that they aren’t also suffering from the ills of neoliberalism. That simply wasn’t the biggest issue for them. And if you’re a disnchanted POC suffering from globalization and you blame Democrats…you probably aren’t voting for Trump either, you’re staying home.
I simply don’t think this is a topic which can be simply deduced by looking at voter break downs. Neoliberalism can have caused MAGA Trumpism even if Trumps voters come from all stripes, it created the grievance that MAGA hats have latched onto. And they’ve channeled the anger over globalization at everyone. The hate China, they hate Europe, they hate Mexicans, they hate liberals, they hate POCs, they are angry and are lashing out at everyone. Rich people voting for Trump doesn’t make that dynamic a false narrative, it’s simply more complicated.
Again: what I’m saying is that their social identity, and the impression they have of whether others have respect for it, is grounded less in their finances than in other factors. And the statistics seem to bear me out.
And it’s hardened a lot of other people’s support for Republicans; or at least, for the politicians who are calling themselves Republicans these days.
True. Because they’re not primarily motivated by economics – they’re motivated by what they see as a lack of respect for a way of life that they feel like they grew up in. Whether or not they actually did – or anybody actually did.
And that way of life had nothing to do with economic neoliberalism, and not much to do with economics at all.
I simply don’t think this is a topic which can be simply deduced by looking only at economics.
My point is that you’re making a distinction without difference. Social insecurity, class warfare, economic insecurity are all different words that amount to the same thing. What does it mean to be blue collar? Do you have to be in construction or manufacturing? Do you have to be white? Do you have to hate people who live in cities? Do you have to be a man? Do you have to earn less than $50k a year? Do you have to be uneducated? Do you have to wear boots?
Many in this thread have essentially said “Trump wasn’t caused by neoliberalism, he was caused by latent racism.” As if there can only be one reason, and as if one can’t exacerbate the other.
Neoliberalism changed this country. It caused the redistribution of manufacturing jobs which contributed to a much starker socioeconomic “us vs them” divide. It offshored a lot of jobs which stressed everyone out and sent people looking for people to blame (justly and unjustly).
Voter distributions don’t clearly illustrate the effects of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism effected far more than just household finances. Neoliberalism appears to have had a lot of unexpected social consequences that one wouldn’t immediately connect to free trade and corporatism.
MAGA wasn’t caused by only economics. It wasn’t only caused by neoliberalism. But I think it’s reductive to suggest it had nothing to do with it.
Didn’t say it had nothing to do with it. Have said at least twice that economics was part of the issue for some people. Have been saying repeatedly it wasn’t caused by it, as in, that wasn’t the sole or even the major factor; other factors were and are more important.
I’m not at all sure that this conversation is going anywhere useful. I think you just aren’t seeing what I’m saying; and I’ve said it a number of times over in different forms, and will probably not keep trying to think of yet another way to say it.
You’ve been a bit obsessed with the “how Trump voters voted” as if that the primary subject of the OP.
Clearly, you’ve made up you mind what narrative you are invested in which is fine, but I don’t see why you’re acting frustrated that people are trying to answer a somewhat different question amongst the many posed in the OP.
It also refers to the use of structural adjustment via the IMF-WB, needed to pry open economies of weaker countries.
It’s weakening because more countries of the Global South are moving away from the dollar.
This has consequences for the U.S. because it’s affected by the Triffin dilemma, where it needs others to use the dollar so that it can continue heavy borrowing and spending:
Part of that spending goes to the military, which is needed to engage in neoconservatism, or the use of the military and onerous foreign policies to make sure that countries remain weak and dependent on the U.S. That has a very long history:
EVERYTHING has to do with economics because economics has to do with everything. Broadly speaking economics is the study of how societies allocate resources which ultimately reflects what is important to them. It’s not simply Wall Street or the banking & financial services industry. People may not be motivated by or even interested in economic policy, but they are certainly motivated by their paychecks (or lack thereof).
Neoliberalism (as I understand it) is defined by “market-oriented reform policies such as eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy”. IOW, basically a different name for laissez-faire or 80s Reaganomics.
Which in simple terms, seems to me like an overwhelming belief in the “free market” and prioritizing “making money” above all other social, political, and economic considerations. Which is to say, people aren’t willing to put money towards schools, pollution, infrastructure, or other necessary societal expenditures unless they can be shown to benefit corporate interests in some way. While I do believe government is inherently wasteful and mostly inept at most things, it does serve a purpose to both serve as a hedge against the excesses of big business and to provide services that can’t or shouldn’t be subject to the free market (ie law enforcement or the fire department).
As to working class and rural families who “see a lack of respect for a way of life that they feel like they grew up in”, they are right. At least with regards to people who make policy. They are simply viewed as interchangeable carbon blobs, desirable as consumers of cheap imported goods and unwanted as a labor expense. These are people who are proud of the work they performed - making or growing or delivering things people actually used. And from their perspective, they see their livelihood disappearing and no one cares. In the meantime, the media bemoans thousand of Silicon Valley engineers loosing their $300k a year jobs making algorithms for social media companies, millions of dollars is being earmarked by Liberals to give to urban poor for doing nothing, and the world is celebrating technological achievements that are likely to make it harder for them to find work in the future…
That is what Trump tapped into when he ran on a largely anti-neoliberal platform. Once he got elected, it seems there is some debate as to whether Trump was actually a neoliberal or something else altogether.
Well, yeah. This is also true of everything else; it’s nothing special about economics. Everything is related to everything else.
Insisting on seeing everything only through the economic lens is a restricted point of view. People aren’t throwing a fit about whether their kids saw a picture of a marble penis, or whether somebody covers their head with a scarf instead of a bonnet, because they think it will save them or make them money. You can claim that’s all economics because it can influence how people spend their money, but that’s not the underlying impulse for what’s going on, so trying to explain it that way is missing a whole lot.
And they’re not worked up about being offered training for jobs putting up solar panels in exchange for jobs as coal miners because, or at least soley because, they think the pay will be worse or more erratic. It’s because they want respect for being coal miners; and they don’t want to be told that the work they’re proud of has actually been doing harm. (And probably, in some cases, because the news they’re seeing isn’t telling them about retraining, and/or because they don’t believe the retraining will actually be available and paid for, and/or because they expect the new jobs to require moving away from their homes and families – and/or because they expect the new jobs to require working as equals, or even as subordinates, with people they don’t want to consider as equal. Some of those factors are financial, some of them aren’t.)
Well we are having a discussion on neoliberalism, which is a political and economic phenomenon.
Yes, there is a cultural aspect to it. America has this large conservative segment of society that rejects anything artistic, educational, scientific, social, or otherwise contradicts their particular narrow view of what “Real America” should look like.
Where the economics comes in is not so much where people spend their money but whether they even have money to spend. People without jobs or prospects of jobs tend to get angry and pissed off. And the wealthy neoliberal right has taken advantage of this to sow resentment towards Democrats (many of who have also embraced neoliberal policies) and progressives in general. In effect, providing rationale for further enacting neoliberal policies that benefit corporations and the wealthy at the expense of the very people who support them.
People without jobs or prospects of jobs are going to be people with <50,000 annual income. And those people, as was cited a hell of a long time ago in this thread (post #11) and has been referred to since, voted for Clinton instead of Trump, by 52% to 41%.
Well…they seem angry about something, whatever they earn.
My anecdotal observations is that voting doesn’t neatly fall along economic lines. But as you pointed out, there does seem to be evidence that the older and richer and whiter you are, the more likely you were to have voted for Trump. Which is what I would expect.
What throws me off is when I travel to more conservative rural areas and see all the Trump signs in people’s yards.
That’s all well and good but why is Trump—a guy who is definitely not “the average guy” and who has actually made his bones by scamming and defrauding contractors, wage employees, and the suckers who signed up to learn his investing secrets from Trump [Not A] University—even getting 41% of the vote? How is Trump—an employer who has fought labor unions at his own properties at every turn—receiving any support from any labor union whatsoever?
The middle class contingent voted for Trump because he is promising to protect them from all of the “bad hombres” who are going to come in and burn the entire system down. The lower class contingent voted for Trump because he vowed to come in himself and burn the entire system down. The very wealthy who supported Trump did so as a hedge against Liz Warren and her ilk who might actually singe the hedges of their curated gardens without actually burning anything down. Everybody is acting in what they believe to be their own interest even though Trump doesn’t do anything for anyone unless it benefits him, and then he’ll turn around and renig or sue on the principle that he doesn’t really win unless someone else is losing.
Parse that through your symbolic logic processor, and stand by with a fire extinguisher.
The people polled in your cite did not actually vote for president, they voted for electors in distinct state elections who in turn voted for president. As such gross statistics on the national electorate might be misleading. For example, a vote for Trump in Wyoming was worth over two and a half times a vote for Clinton in California.
Votes for Clinton from California, per person who voted for Clinton’s ticket in California’s 2016 general election:
\text{approx. } \frac{1}{159,160} \text{th of a vote}
And of course, a vote for the Trump ticket in California and a vote for the Clinton ticket in Wyoming are worth exactly nothing due to the laws of those states.
~Max
ETA: Specifically, it can be true that blue-collar or low-income votes gave us President Trump despite the majority of blue-collar or low-income individuals voting for the Clinton ticket. For the same reason, it is actually true that President Trump won the 2016 election despite the majority of people voting for a Clinton ticket.
Are the people in those particular areas a) mostly white and b) mostly conservative Protestants?
Because, as I pointed out in previous cites (post #27), that’s where there actually were large differences in Trump’s favor. So not puzzling at all, if so.
Beats me.
But I suspect, as I’ve mentioned before, that most of that 41% are following news sites that don’t tell them that stuff; but that do tell them that the Democrats are all essentially evil elitists who will do them harm, and who must be stopped at any cost.
And apparently, for a lot of people, he’s got positive charisma and they want to believe him. I don’t understand that one either – for me, he’s got, so strongly that I get it even over a video screen, what I call negative charisma: I want to get the hell away from him (or preferably have him gotten the hell away from me) as fast as possible. But I’ve noticed before that people who have positive charisma for many often – not always – have negative charisma for me.
But it’s even more so that votes of white people and conservative Protestants – who tend to be the majority in those same states, and who actually did vote heavily for Trump – gave us President Trump.
And, as blue-collar low-income people didn’t majority vote for Trump, it seems to me entirely unreasonable to blame Trump on them, while ignoring the factors that actually did make the difference.
I can’t speak as to what groups and what extent; CNN’s 2016 exit polls formed the basis of the story you linked upthread, and CNN usually gives toplines by state, but it just doesn’t load for me. For a definitive answer you would probably need access to crosstabs anyways.
That being said, I also don’t make a connection between a neoliberal movement among blue-collar workers in the late 20th century and President Trump in the 21st century.
