2016 Presidential Horse Race

[connor_in]

We've all wanted Americans to come together and we may have it. People in both parties trying to make sure Trump doesn't get elected.

 

[Buster Bluth]

2. You can't criticize suburbians for living a "subsidized" existence when the suburbians are the ones paying all the taxes.

I sure as shit can. How do you think suburbs were created? I've said it a hundred times on here, the suburbanites did not pay the upfront cost of the enormous highways on which they commuted. In other words, the whole subsidized the periphery while bogus federal government policy bled the cities dry. The entire suburban lifestyle would simply not be possible without the federal government throwing its subsidies behind it to initially it to get it rolling. Today subsidies, which do indeed flow the other way, are a mere band-aid on a problem that was caused by artificial manipulation on the part of the federal government. As a libertarian, you should look at the government's history here with disgust.

There is also the cessation of annexation in post-World War II suburbs. In the 19th century, natural suburbanization was almost always annexed by the city, so the tax base stayed in the city. With the creation of the highways we allowed ourselves to plop arbitrary political boundaries down and keep all of that tax base. Separate schools, separate everything, completely cut off from the city which in the 19th century they would have contributed to in greater ways. That's really the kicker that created a suburban vs urban dynamic.

But perhaps more importantly for white Americans, who became said suburbanites, they received enormous government support all along the way in a way that black Americans simply did not.

I seem to recall reading in history how millions of European immigrants would sail across the sea for fantastically cheap farmland in which to prosper. Blacks did get that government deal, they got slavery and segregation. In our history of tertiary education the government established dozens of public universities to educate said farmers and teach them the newest science and technologies with which to prosper, free of charge. Blacks didn't get that government deal, nor did they receive the artificially cheap loans for new farm equipment. Where was the government investment in their future in post-slavery America? Where are the FHA/HOLC support so they can move to the suburbs too? Where is the GI Bill built so enormous numbers of black kids can get their economic boost for the second half of the twentieth century? Pathetically, the government support in the second half of the twentieth century actually made things worse, as any worthy libertarian would agree with...that's what happens when the federal government tries to fix a problem that it created in the first place.

4. Inner cities aren't the only areas that have been "abandoned" in the way you describe. Rural areas have felt the same thing. Urban problems are just more obvious because they're located in close physical proximity to wealth and media power.

Same thing huh? Show me some examples of rural redlining.

I am laughing over here at the picture of comparing abandonment in urban settings...

...and rural settings. By the very definition of "rural," there isn't much to abandon.

But the biggest difference is one is artificial and one is natural. When people left rural America they went to the cities because that's where the jobs were, that's where the opportunity was. The history of leaving behind rural life for urban life goes back to prehistoric times (and ramped up with the industrial revolution), and happens everywhere. The history of abandoning our major cities is one of government manipulation (literally pushing growth into formerly rural settings) and is uniquely American, which was my initial premise...

 

[kmoose]

I sure as shit can. How do you think suburbs were created?

So you blame the current group of suburbanites for the policies that existed ~70+ years ago?


So we can just go ahead and blame every black kid on the street today for crack cocaine, right? What's good for the goose and all?

 

[Buster Bluth]

So you blame the current group of suburbanites for the policies that existed ~70+ years ago?

Oh we definitely still subsidize our sprawl with all sorta of federal policies. I didn't bring them up because it's useless, we were discussing a uniquely American phenomenon and I elaborated on how it happened.

And when did I blame suburbanites for anything? Understanding what happened is a completely different ballgame from suggesting a particular solution. I assigned no blame other than to the federal government.

However it is an easy argument to make that the openly racist federal policies were on such a scale that its effects, ie its inertia, continues today.

So we can just go ahead and blame every black kid on the street today for crack cocaine, right? What's good for the goose and all?

wat

 

[kmoose]

Oh we definitely still subsidize our sprawl with all sorta of federal policies. I didn't bring them up because it's useless, we were discussing a uniquely American phenomenon and I elaborated on how it happened.

And when did I blame suburbanites for anything? Understanding what happened is a completely different ballgame from suggesting a particular solution. I assigned no blame other than to the federal government.

However it is an easy argument to make that the openly racist federal policies were on such a scale that its effects, ie its inertia, continues today.



wat

I guess if we are getting technical, you said you sure as hell could criticize suburbanites, which is not quite the same as blaming them, but it's pretty close.

It might be an easy argument to make, if your mind is already made up that that's the way it is.......... but to convince someone who isn't so sure is not as easy......

 

[Buster Bluth]

I guess if we are getting technical, you said you sure as hell could criticize suburbanites, which is not quite the same as blaming them, but it's pretty close.

Okay that is fair

 

[wizards8507]

A few points Buster.

1. You're certainly much more knowledgeable about the history of "white flight" than I am. However, I feel like you draw causal relationships across time and across groups that are inappropriate. However we got to where we are today, we're here. I don't think it makes any sense to link a white person in 2016 without a single racist bone in his body to racist policies from decades ago. Maybe you're not making that argument, but others who share your historical perspective often do. There's a sense of group responsibility that all white people are to be held responsible for the actions of racist white people throughout history.

2. I think you're overstating the migration from cities to suburbia as it applies to the country as a whole. I'm sure there are huge statistics you can point to in certain big cities, but it's a small percentage of cities that followed the particular pattern of urbanization and suburbanization all in the time frame we're talking about. For example, New England communities have been clustered around small industrial cities and towns since the time of the revolution. The lone urban center, Boston, saw an exodus of Jews in the 1970s but the white Catholics stayed. Other parts of the country hadn't even urbanized in any significant way by that time, so there were no urban neighborhoods to flee. Thus, I see the problems you've identified as major in certain neighborhoods and certain cities, but virtually nonexistent elsewhere.

 

[drayer54]

We've all wanted Americans to come together and we may have it. People in both parties trying to make sure Trump doesn't get elected.

The problem with the anti-trump thing is Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton. No win scenario.

 

[connor_in]

The problem with the anti-trump thing is Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton. No win scenario.

My statement was the glass is half full scenario. Your scenario is the glass is half full...of kerosene.

No, I really agree with you as I am not really a fan of anyone in the race, but I was just being snarky

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The Week's Michael Brendan Dougherty just published an article titled "How the Republican Party blew its best shot at defeating Hillary Clinton":

Last week, the former presidential nominee of the Republican Party, Mitt Romney, gave a nationally televised speech denouncing the current Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. Trump responded by saying that Mitt Romney would have gotten down on his knees for Trump's endorsement four year earlier. By that same afternoon, many anti-Trump Republicans had sold themselves on an electoral strategy of splintering the Republican field and going for an all-out fight with Trump at the convention. And then, later that night in a televised debate, Donald Trump promised to be the kind of leader that inspires American servicemen to commit war crimes and rebutted a criticism by Marco Rubio by reassuring the crowd about the size of his penis.

Yes, the Republican debate is just so damn noisy, unsettling, and distracting that Republicans and most of the press have taken their eyes off Hillary Clinton. All the stories about her speeches at Goldman Sachs have dropped from view. So too the mentions of her deep infelicity with the media ("We were dead broke!"). And gone are the embarrassing stories about how Clinton charities act as a kind of global grifting and cronyism operation, enriching the Clintons and allowing corporate and foreign interests to buy their attention and ministrations.

Did you even know, dear reader, that the U.S. bombed portions of Libya in the middle of February this year? The Obama administration is trying to contain the continuing disaster created by the Clinton-led intervention in Libya five years ago. Republicans, however, are plunged into their own civil war over The Donald, and have no time to point out that President Obama is still cleaning up after the mess Secretary Clinton made of his foreign policy. The Libyan state has crumbled, ISIS has moved in, gobbling up untold materiel from the ruins of the Gadhafi regime, neighboring countries like Mali have been severely destabilized, and the refugee crisis in Europe has been exacerbated by Libyan disorder.

"There was one arsenal that we thought had 20,000 shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles, SA-7s, that basically just disappeared into the maw of the Middle East and North Africa," said former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. While many of these may have been spirited to Syria, what if a dozen of them are fired at commercial airplanes over Europe one afternoon? Shouldn't Republicans already be pressing the case that Clinton had no good reason to believe that the rebel groups could secure weapons like these and govern Libya after the fall of Gadhafi?

Shouldn't Republicans have lit up at the characterization of Clinton's decision-making offered by Ann-Marie Slaughter, who said that "when the choice is between action and inaction, and you've got risks in either direction, which you often do, she'd rather be caught trying." That Clinton would rather be "caught trying" is one of the most damning things that can be said about a presidential nominee.

Republicans could have had a lot of fun in this election cycle, pointing out how Hillary Clinton is now constantly rewriting the history of her husband's administration on topics like same-sex marriage or financial reform. Republicans could be setting her up for fights with the intersectional left on gender politics. For a moment it looked like audience members at New Hampshire town halls were going to flambé her on the incredibly shabby treatment meted out to her husband's paramours and those who claimed he had sexually assaulted them.

Hillary Clinton is still an astonishingly weak campaigner and candidate for president. And the supposedly "deepest field" in the history of Republican nominating contests should have produced a nominee capable of transitioning toward the case against Clinton by the middle of this month. In 2008, John McCain faced a Democratic nominee in Barack Obama who excited people's hopes for the country, who had a short political record, and ran on high idealism. It was a near impossible task to defeat him given the record of George W. Bush. But this time Republicans had the chance to run against a nominee who can be easily covered in the muck of two Democratic administrations, someone who gives off the stench of high-handed corruption and unprincipled ambition.

And it's being thrown away. The fight within the Republican Party has been clarifying and even healthy in some ways, alerting the party's elites to a base of core supporters who were deeply unmoved by the Romney-Ryan platform of 2012. But the bleeding acrimony and outlandish juvenility of the Republican primary has managed to do for Clinton what she was incapable of accomplishing on her own: making her look presidential.

 

[connor_in]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Hillary: I hate guns, I love black people & I don't have a penis.<br><br>Trump: I have a big penis.<br><br>Sanders: Everybody gets a free penis.</p>— Sweet Meteor O'Death (@smod2016) <a href="https://twitter.com/smod2016/status/706699908007358464">March 7, 2016</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[wizards8507]

When Political Parties Splinter | FiveThirtyEight

 

[wizards8507]

At Secretive Meeting, Tech CEOs And Top Republicans Commiserate, Plot To Stop Trump

 

[EddytoNow]

The Abbott and Costello line "It's a fine mess you've gotten us into this time" sums up the Republican primary season. The self-annointed "protectors of the Constitution" are looking for a way to subvert the will of the people? Is that possible? Whatever happened to their favorite line "Elections Have Consequences"?

I'm waiting to see if they approve the Supreme Court Justice(s) nominated by Hillary Clinton. If they wait a whole year because (as they say) the people should decide in the November election, will they approve the nominee(s) of President Hillary Clinton after the people have expressed their preference with their vote.

 

[wizards8507]

The Abbott and Costello line "It's a fine mess you've gotten us into this time" sums up the Republican primary season. The self-annointed "protectors of the Constitution" are looking for a way to subvert the will of the people? Is that possible? Whatever happened to their favorite line "Elections Have Consequences"?

I'm waiting to see if they approve the Supreme Court Justice(s) nominated by Hillary Clinton. If they wait a whole year because (as they say) the people should decide in the November election, will they approve the nominee(s) of President Hillary Clinton after the people have expressed their preference with their vote.

Karl Rove and his cronies are not protectors of the constitution and never have been. That's what has everyone so fed up with the establishment. The sick irony is that the rebellion within the party has turned to Donald Trump of all people to fix it. It's like someone who hates Notre Dame because it's too religious and then sends their kid to BYU.

 

[Legacy]

Cruz wants a Justice who follows the Constitution strictly. But he has said Supreme Court Justices should be elected by the people. WTF?

What's the count with every superdelegate in the states so far voting for Cruz?

 

[connor_in]

Cruz wants a Justice who follows the Constitution strictly. But he has said Supreme Court Justices should be elected by the people. WTF?

What's the count with every superdelegate in the states so far voting for Cruz?

I don't think the R's have superdelegates. I thought it was just the D's

 

[connor_in]

The Abbott and Costello line "It's a fine mess you've gotten us into this time" sums up the Republican primary season. The self-annointed "protectors of the Constitution" are looking for a way to subvert the will of the people? Is that possible? Whatever happened to their favorite line "Elections Have Consequences"?

I'm waiting to see if they approve the Supreme Court Justice(s) nominated by Hillary Clinton. If they wait a whole year because (as they say) the people should decide in the November election, will they approve the nominee(s) of President Hillary Clinton after the people have expressed their preference with their vote.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AjplZXgodhs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[NorthDakota]

Cruz wants a Justice who follows the Constitution strictly. But he has said Supreme Court Justices should be elected by the people. WTF?

What's the count with every superdelegate in the states so far voting for Cruz?

Since the upcoming election could lead to a Republican in the white house...it would result in the people essentially electing a justice. I get what he is saying.

 

[EddytoNow]

Karl Rove and his cronies are not protectors of the constitution and never have been. That's what has everyone so fed up with the establishment. The sick irony is that the rebellion within the party has turned to Donald Trump of all people to fix it. It's like someone who hates Notre Dame because it's too religious and then sends their kid to BYU.

I find myself agreeing with Wizards on this one. Sometimes I'm guilty of leaving out the qualifiers like "some" or "many" and lump all Republicans together. But it does seem like at least some Republicans have (in Lindsay Graham's words) gone "bat-shit crazy" and are willing to support Trump. The Democrats have their loonies too, and I hope the day never comes when one of them sits as President in the White House. Both parties should be looking for a way to work together to derail Trump before he actually gets elected.

 

[EddytoNow]

I'm off in a couple of hours to do my part by casting a vote for Bernie Sanders in the Michigan primary. Not the ideal candidate, but better than the alternatives being offered by either party.

 

[wizards8507]

Cruz wants a Justice who follows the Constitution strictly. But he has said Supreme Court Justices should be elected by the people. WTF?

As a senator, Cruz proposed a Constitutional amendment that would make justices subject to electoral review. I don't agree with the proposal, but it's at least consistent. I prefer Mark Levin's "Liberty Amendments."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Liberty_Amendments

I'm off in a couple of hours to do my part by casting a vote for Bernie Sanders in the Michigan primary. Not the ideal candidate, but better than the alternatives being offered by either party.

Bernie can't win. Vote GOP and take out Trump.

 

[BleedBlueGold]

As a senator, Cruz proposed a Constitutional amendment that would make justices subject to electoral review. I don't agree with the proposal, but it's at least consistent. I prefer Mark Levin's "Liberty Amendments."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Liberty_Amendments


Bernie can't win. Vote GOP and take out Trump.

Based on what?

Quinnipiac February 2016: "Clinton garnered 44% to Sanders' 42%"

Am I saying Bernie WILL win? No, of course not. But I'm not willing to write him off just yet.

 

[wizards8507]

Based on what?

Quinnipiac February 2016: "Clinton garnered 44% to Sanders' 42%"

Am I saying Bernie WILL win? No, of course not. But I'm not willing to write him off just yet.

Based on the corrupt DNC and their superdelegates.

 

[connor_in]

You may want to let things play out with the FBI and the granting of immunity to that State Dept subordinate.

 

[IrishLax]

If Clinton truly has the super delegates on lock how she claims she does, then there is more of a chance of Rubio/Cruz/Kasich beating Trump than there is of Sanders beating Clinton. It's almost mathematically impossible for him to win at this point if she has that built in 20% buffer.

 

[FightingIrishLover7]

Just imagine how bad Hillary would be doing if Bernie were 10 years younger, and not trying to destroy corporate America.

With all the corporate support Hillary has, it's literally embarrassing to watch how terrible she is. Such an awful candidate, and person.

 

[pkt77242]

Based on the corrupt DNC and their superdelegates.

I disagree on the superdelegates (and agree about the DNC and well the RNC as well). The superdelegates will go with the candidate who wins the primaries. The reason that Sanders won't be the nominee is that he can't get black people to vote for him. Clinton won't need the DNC or superdelegates if that continues.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The Guardian's Thomas Frank just published an article titled "Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's Why":

Let us now address the greatest American mystery at the moment: what motivates the supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump?

I call it a “mystery” because the working-class white people who make up the bulk of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers for the candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers. On their opinion pages, these publications take care to represent demographic categories of nearly every kind, but “blue-collar” is one they persistently overlook. The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe that when New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wanted to “engage” a Trump supporter last week, he made one up, along with this imaginary person’s responses to his questions.

When members of the professional class wish to understand the working-class Other, they traditionally consult experts on the subject. And when these authorities are asked to explain the Trump movement, they always seem to zero in on one main accusation: bigotry. Only racism, they tell us, is capable of powering a movement like Trump’s, which is blowing through the inherited structure of the Republican party like a tornado through a cluster of McMansions.

Trump himself provides rather excellent evidence for this finding. The man is an insult clown who has systematically gone down the list of American ethnic groups and offended them each in turn. He wants to deport millions upon millions of undocumented immigrants. He wants to bar Muslims from visiting the United States. He admires various foreign strongmen and dictators, and has even retweeted a quote from Mussolini. This gold-plated buffoon has in turn drawn the enthusiastic endorsement of leading racists from across the spectrum of intolerance, a gorgeous mosaic of haters, each of them quivering excitedly at the prospect of getting a real, honest-to-god bigot in the White House.

All this stuff is so insane, so wildly outrageous, that the commentariat has deemed it to be the entirety of the Trump campaign. Trump appears to be a racist, so racism must be what motivates his armies of followers. And so, on Saturday, New York Times columnist Timothy Egan blamed none other than “the people” for Trump’s racism: “Donald Trump’s supporters know exactly what he stands for: hatred of immigrants, racial superiority, a sneering disregard of the basic civility that binds a society.”

Stories marveling at the stupidity of Trump voters are published nearly every day. Articles that accuse Trump’s followers of being bigots have appeared by the hundreds, if not the thousands. Conservatives have written them; liberals have written them; impartial professionals have written them. The headline of a recent Huffington Post column announced, bluntly, that “Trump Won Super Tuesday Because America is Racist.” A New York Times reporter proved that Trump’s followers were bigots by coordinating a map of Trump support with a map of racist Google searches. Everyone knows it: Trump’s followers’ passions are nothing more than the ignorant blurtings of the white American id, driven to madness by the presence of a black man in the White House. The Trump movement is a one-note phenomenon, a vast surge of race-hate. Its partisans are not only incomprehensible, they are not really worth comprehending.

* * *
Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called left-wing.

Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about ... trade.

It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.

Trump embellished this vision with another favorite left-wing idea: under his leadership, the government would “start competitive bidding in the drug industry.” (“We don’t competitively bid!” he marveled – another true fact, a legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush administration.) Trump extended the critique to the military-industrial complex, describing how the government is forced to buy lousy but expensive airplanes thanks to the power of industry lobbyists.

Thus did he hint at his curious selling proposition: because he is personally so wealthy, a fact about which he loves to boast, Trump himself is unaffected by business lobbyists and donations. And because he is free from the corrupting power of modern campaign finance, famous deal-maker Trump can make deals on our behalf that are “good” instead of “bad.” The chance that he will actually do so, of course, is small. He appears to be a hypocrite on this issue as well as so many other things. But at least Trump is saying this stuff.

All this surprised me because, for all the articles about Trump I had read in recent months, I didn’t recall trade coming up very often. Trump is supposed to be on a one-note crusade for whiteness. Could it be that all this trade stuff is a key to understanding the Trump phenomenon?

* * *
Trade is an issue that polarizes Americans by socio-economic status. To the professional class, which encompasses the vast majority of our media figures, economists, Washington officials and Democratic power brokers, what they call “free trade” is something so obviously good and noble it doesn’t require explanation or inquiry or even thought. Republican and Democratic leaders alike agree on this, and no amount of facts can move them from their Econ 101 dream.

To the remaining 80 or 90% of America, trade means something very different. There’s a video going around on the internet these days that shows a room full of workers at a Carrier air conditioning plant in Indiana being told by an officer of the company that the factory is being moved to Monterrey, Mexico and that they’re all going to lose their jobs.

As I watched it, I thought of all the arguments over trade that we’ve had in this country since the early 1990s, all the sweet words from our economists about the scientifically proven benevolence of free trade, all the ways in which our newspapers mock people who say that treaties like the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement allow companies to move jobs to Mexico.

Well, here is a video of a company moving its jobs to Mexico, courtesy of Nafta. This is what it looks like. The Carrier executive talks in that familiar and highly professional HR language about the need to “stay competitive” and “the extremely price-sensitive marketplace.” A worker shouts “Fuck you!” at the executive. The executive asks people to please be quiet so he can “share” his “information”. His information about all of them losing their jobs.

* * *
Now, I have no special reason to doubt the suspicion that Donald Trump is a racist. Either he is one, or (as the comedian John Oliver puts it) he is pretending to be one, which amounts to the same thing.

But there is another way to interpret the Trump phenomenon. A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington’s free-market consensus have brought the rest of America.

It is worth noting that Trump is making a point of assailing that Indiana air conditioning company from the video in his speeches. What this suggests is that he’s telling a tale as much about economic outrage as it is tale of racism on the march. Many of Trump’s followers are bigots, no doubt, but many more are probably excited by the prospect of a president who seems to mean it when he denounces our trade agreements and promises to bring the hammer down on the CEO that fired you and wrecked your town, unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Here is the most salient supporting fact: when people talk to white, working-class Trump supporters, instead of simply imagining what they might say, they find that what most concerns these people is the economy and their place in it. I am referring to a study just published by Working America, a political-action auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, which interviewed some 1,600 white working-class voters in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh in December and January.

Support for Donald Trump, the group found, ran strong among these people, even among self-identified Democrats, but not because they are all pining for a racist in the White House. Their favorite aspect of Trump was his “attitude,” the blunt and forthright way he talks. As far as issues are concerned, “immigration” placed third among the matters such voters care about, far behind their number one concern: “good jobs / the economy.”

“People are much more frightened than they are bigoted,” is how the findings were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America. The survey “confirmed what we heard all the time: people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids don’t have a future” and that “there still hasn’t been a recovery from the recession, that every family still suffers from it in one way or another.”

Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council in Fort Wayne, puts it even more bluntly when I asked him about working-class Trump fans. “These people aren’t racist, not any more than anybody else is,” he says of Trump supporters he knows. “When Trump talks about trade, we think about the Clinton administration, first with Nafta and then with [Permanent Normal Trade Relations] China, and here in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged jobs.”

“They look at that, and here’s Trump talking about trade, in a ham-handed way, but at least he’s representing emotionally. We’ve had all the political establishment standing behind every trade deal, and we endorsed some of these people, and then we’ve had to fight them to get them to represent us.”

Now, let us stop and smell the perversity. Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people’s concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a “creative class” that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn’t need to listen to them any longer.

What Lewandowski and Nussbaum are saying, then, should be obvious to anyone who’s dipped a toe outside the prosperous enclaves on the two coasts. Ill-considered trade deals and generous bank bailouts and guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average people, ever – these policies have taken their toll. As Trump says, “we have rebuilt China and yet our country is falling apart. Our infrastructure is falling apart. . . . Our airports are, like, Third World.”

Trump’s words articulate the populist backlash against liberalism that has been building slowly for decades and may very well occupy the White House itself, whereupon the entire world will be required to take seriously its demented ideas.

Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The Guardian's Thomas Frank just published an article titled "Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's Why":

Let us now address the greatest American mystery at the moment: what motivates the supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump?

I call it a “mystery” because the working-class white people who make up the bulk of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers for the candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers. On their opinion pages, these publications take care to represent demographic categories of nearly every kind, but “blue-collar” is one they persistently overlook. The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe that when New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wanted to “engage” a Trump supporter last week, he made one up, along with this imaginary person’s responses to his questions.

When members of the professional class wish to understand the working-class Other, they traditionally consult experts on the subject. And when these authorities are asked to explain the Trump movement, they always seem to zero in on one main accusation: bigotry. Only racism, they tell us, is capable of powering a movement like Trump’s, which is blowing through the inherited structure of the Republican party like a tornado through a cluster of McMansions.

Trump himself provides rather excellent evidence for this finding. The man is an insult clown who has systematically gone down the list of American ethnic groups and offended them each in turn. He wants to deport millions upon millions of undocumented immigrants. He wants to bar Muslims from visiting the United States. He admires various foreign strongmen and dictators, and has even retweeted a quote from Mussolini. This gold-plated buffoon has in turn drawn the enthusiastic endorsement of leading racists from across the spectrum of intolerance, a gorgeous mosaic of haters, each of them quivering excitedly at the prospect of getting a real, honest-to-god bigot in the White House.

All this stuff is so insane, so wildly outrageous, that the commentariat has deemed it to be the entirety of the Trump campaign. Trump appears to be a racist, so racism must be what motivates his armies of followers. And so, on Saturday, New York Times columnist Timothy Egan blamed none other than “the people” for Trump’s racism: “Donald Trump’s supporters know exactly what he stands for: hatred of immigrants, racial superiority, a sneering disregard of the basic civility that binds a society.”

Stories marveling at the stupidity of Trump voters are published nearly every day. Articles that accuse Trump’s followers of being bigots have appeared by the hundreds, if not the thousands. Conservatives have written them; liberals have written them; impartial professionals have written them. The headline of a recent Huffington Post column announced, bluntly, that “Trump Won Super Tuesday Because America is Racist.” A New York Times reporter proved that Trump’s followers were bigots by coordinating a map of Trump support with a map of racist Google searches. Everyone knows it: Trump’s followers’ passions are nothing more than the ignorant blurtings of the white American id, driven to madness by the presence of a black man in the White House. The Trump movement is a one-note phenomenon, a vast surge of race-hate. Its partisans are not only incomprehensible, they are not really worth comprehending.

* * *
Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called left-wing.

Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about ... trade.

It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.

Trump embellished this vision with another favorite left-wing idea: under his leadership, the government would “start competitive bidding in the drug industry.” (“We don’t competitively bid!” he marveled – another true fact, a legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush administration.) Trump extended the critique to the military-industrial complex, describing how the government is forced to buy lousy but expensive airplanes thanks to the power of industry lobbyists.

Thus did he hint at his curious selling proposition: because he is personally so wealthy, a fact about which he loves to boast, Trump himself is unaffected by business lobbyists and donations. And because he is free from the corrupting power of modern campaign finance, famous deal-maker Trump can make deals on our behalf that are “good” instead of “bad.” The chance that he will actually do so, of course, is small. He appears to be a hypocrite on this issue as well as so many other things. But at least Trump is saying this stuff.

All this surprised me because, for all the articles about Trump I had read in recent months, I didn’t recall trade coming up very often. Trump is supposed to be on a one-note crusade for whiteness. Could it be that all this trade stuff is a key to understanding the Trump phenomenon?

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Trade is an issue that polarizes Americans by socio-economic status. To the professional class, which encompasses the vast majority of our media figures, economists, Washington officials and Democratic power brokers, what they call “free trade” is something so obviously good and noble it doesn’t require explanation or inquiry or even thought. Republican and Democratic leaders alike agree on this, and no amount of facts can move them from their Econ 101 dream.

To the remaining 80 or 90% of America, trade means something very different. There’s a video going around on the internet these days that shows a room full of workers at a Carrier air conditioning plant in Indiana being told by an officer of the company that the factory is being moved to Monterrey, Mexico and that they’re all going to lose their jobs.

As I watched it, I thought of all the arguments over trade that we’ve had in this country since the early 1990s, all the sweet words from our economists about the scientifically proven benevolence of free trade, all the ways in which our newspapers mock people who say that treaties like the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement allow companies to move jobs to Mexico.

Well, here is a video of a company moving its jobs to Mexico, courtesy of Nafta. This is what it looks like. The Carrier executive talks in that familiar and highly professional HR language about the need to “stay competitive” and “the extremely price-sensitive marketplace.” A worker shouts “Fuck you!” at the executive. The executive asks people to please be quiet so he can “share” his “information”. His information about all of them losing their jobs.

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Now, I have no special reason to doubt the suspicion that Donald Trump is a racist. Either he is one, or (as the comedian John Oliver puts it) he is pretending to be one, which amounts to the same thing.

But there is another way to interpret the Trump phenomenon. A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington’s free-market consensus have brought the rest of America.

It is worth noting that Trump is making a point of assailing that Indiana air conditioning company from the video in his speeches. What this suggests is that he’s telling a tale as much about economic outrage as it is tale of racism on the march. Many of Trump’s followers are bigots, no doubt, but many more are probably excited by the prospect of a president who seems to mean it when he denounces our trade agreements and promises to bring the hammer down on the CEO that fired you and wrecked your town, unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Here is the most salient supporting fact: when people talk to white, working-class Trump supporters, instead of simply imagining what they might say, they find that what most concerns these people is the economy and their place in it. I am referring to a study just published by Working America, a political-action auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, which interviewed some 1,600 white working-class voters in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh in December and January.

Support for Donald Trump, the group found, ran strong among these people, even among self-identified Democrats, but not because they are all pining for a racist in the White House. Their favorite aspect of Trump was his “attitude,” the blunt and forthright way he talks. As far as issues are concerned, “immigration” placed third among the matters such voters care about, far behind their number one concern: “good jobs / the economy.”

“People are much more frightened than they are bigoted,” is how the findings were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America. The survey “confirmed what we heard all the time: people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids don’t have a future” and that “there still hasn’t been a recovery from the recession, that every family still suffers from it in one way or another.”

Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council in Fort Wayne, puts it even more bluntly when I asked him about working-class Trump fans. “These people aren’t racist, not any more than anybody else is,” he says of Trump supporters he knows. “When Trump talks about trade, we think about the Clinton administration, first with Nafta and then with [Permanent Normal Trade Relations] China, and here in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged jobs.”

“They look at that, and here’s Trump talking about trade, in a ham-handed way, but at least he’s representing emotionally. We’ve had all the political establishment standing behind every trade deal, and we endorsed some of these people, and then we’ve had to fight them to get them to represent us.”

Now, let us stop and smell the perversity. Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people’s concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a “creative class” that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn’t need to listen to them any longer.

What Lewandowski and Nussbaum are saying, then, should be obvious to anyone who’s dipped a toe outside the prosperous enclaves on the two coasts. Ill-considered trade deals and generous bank bailouts and guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average people, ever – these policies have taken their toll. As Trump says, “we have rebuilt China and yet our country is falling apart. Our infrastructure is falling apart. . . . Our airports are, like, Third World.”

Trump’s words articulate the populist backlash against liberalism that has been building slowly for decades and may very well occupy the White House itself, whereupon the entire world will be required to take seriously its demented ideas.

Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.