TRUMP

 

 

It is a media cliche that Donald Trump is the Bernie Sanders of the left and Bernie Sanders the Donald Trump on the right. They are angry at different things. But the essence of both candidacies is their anger.
But that does an injustice to Bernie Sanders and it profoundly misunderstands the Trump phenomenon.

Trump shouts out anger. He does not hesitate to insult anyone. He has a foul mouth. He is all about Trump. Bernie, on the other hand, has a clear program. He is not just angry he is arguing for definite economic change, for a reorientation of the political system from being a system that caters to the rich to one that provides participation and attention to all Americans.

What is striking about Trump is not the Donald himself but the significant number of people who support him vociferously, often cruelly when they support his aggressive rhetoric against Muslims, against women, against all kinds of people.

Trump's supporters clearly are animated by vast angers and that is, of course, a real worry. Who the president is of our country does make a real difference. People disagree sharply about Obama's policies, for instance, the nuclear treaty with Iran, or the changed relationships with Cuba. But these and other initiatives are very likely not to have been undertaken had Romney, or even Hillary Clinton, been president in these last four years.

The choice of president makes a difference for all of us. It is an important choice.

Everyone knows that it is a bad policy to make important choices primarily on the basis of strong emotion. Many people believe that "being so in love" is a good reason for getting married. As a result the divorce rate is around 50%. (That is the common wisdom. Some people think that number is exaggerated. As a matter of fact it seems very difficult to come up with any very reliable numbers on divorce.)

Businesses that merge, businesses that split up into separate organizations, investors that move money from one investment to another, cities that tear down neighborhoods in order to build a road-a myriad decisions every day are best made on the basis of available information about the present and the future. The decisions are more likely to be good decisions when the evidence is being considered carefully, calmly and with a major effort to set one's emotions set aside.

The same is true of the choice of president. American presidents are very much involved in matters of war and peace. Many of us may die prematurely if we make a poor choice of president based on emotions rather than on rational consideration of what we know about the  candidates.

But Trump supporters are not involved in thinking as calmly as they can about what is good for the country. That is not impugning their ability to make rational choices and to think clearly about their situation and that of their fellow citizens. On the contrary, it makes perfect sense for them to be utterly irrational in their adulation of their favorite reality TV actor.

Statistics have recently been cited of a high rate of drug overdoses among white men in their 30s, 40s and 50s. These are people who were told, when they were younger, that they would be better off than their parents. But that has turned out to be false. Getting work has been difficult. Getting good work has been very difficult. All the while they were being good persons, working, hard paying their bills. But that has not been a successful strategy for them. They are always short of money and their work sucks.

These people feel they have been lied to. The political system has not paid attention to them. Politicians constantly talk about job creation, but it is mostly talk. Welfare goes, they think, to people who are lazy. Welfare, in fact, goes to the rich and the large corporations. No one speaks for working people. No one is seriously concerned about their plight and their disillusionment.
There are a significant number of Americans for whom our system is not working. They are by no means all persons of color. 

The white working class that feels ignored has given up on that system. When they cheer for Donald Trump, they are not participating in the electoral campaign to select the next president because as far as they can see, it makes absolutely no difference who gets elected to any office. Whoever it is, in their perspective, will not pay any attention to them. So they might just as well express their alienation by cheering for a big clown who is very entertaining because he plays to their secret, and not so secret prejudices.

I obviously cannot prove that most Trump supporters are not participating in the electoral process but, instead, are expressing their disgust with the political system which, they feel, has completely overlooked them. But I think it is a hypothesis worth  considering.

If this analysis is at all reliable, we can see that the neglect of what we today call "the middle class" is not only a gross injustice but it has serious consequences for our political system.

To the extent that significant portions of the population feel that the political system is not responsive to their significant needs, they conclude that political participation makes no difference. So they do not participate in the political system. They participate in public entertainments. The unfortunate fact is, however, that what is entertaining to them, may get us stuck with a totally incompetent president.

No democratic system that neglects significant portions of the population will remain democratic because the people left out refuse to participate. Hence only half the people in the US will vote for president and many, many fewer will vote in more local elections. It makes no difference for them. Why lose half a day of work to participate in a ritual whose results are of no interest to you.

The support that Trump continues to garner so far from showing how healthy our democracy is, manifests once again the precariousness of a political system, where going to mass rallies is fun and has nothing to do with politics. It is at most a protest against the failures of this political system.

Ashamed of being working class?

The other day I was driving behind a truck with a bumper sticker that read “Carpenters: Rebuilding the Middle Class.”

'Since when are carpenters middle class?' I asked myself.

The bumper sticker exemplifies a weird change in our language that reflects a deeper change in how we work and how we think about work.

When you listen to Pres. Obama and other politicians, there are four classes in the US: the super rich, such as Mitt Romney, the rich exemplified perhaps by Newt Gingrich or Obama himself, the vast “middle class” and “the poor.” There is no more working class; it has completely disappeared. It seems as if it has become a bit of an insult to call someone “working class.” Politicians avoid that language because they do not want to hurt anyone's feelings.

How could that be? Working people used to be manual workers, many of them very skilled, who built skyscrapers and houses, ran railroads and built our cars, who baked our bread and cut up carcasses for meat. They worked hard and steadily; if lucky they belonged to a union. They might own a small house and a yard that they maintained meticulously with their own labor. They had children to whom they tried to transmit some of their skills as well as an ethic of respecting the work done by themselves and others, of valuing their moral integrity, and their membership in a democratic society. They knew they were the salt of the earth and they were proud of it.

The old way of thinking about our society was by reference to what sort of work you did: the working class did manual work, much of it skilled. Small business owners, teachers, lawyers and doctors were in the middle class. Big bankers and big business owners, investors, were in the upper class. But today when we talk about the super rich, the rich, the middle class, the poor we are talking about income. Since many working class jobs paid enough, but barely, many working class jobs have lost their luster in a world that cares not about your skills or the good work you do year in, year out, but cares only about how much money you make. Now, when we think only in money terms, it seems embarrassing to be working class.

What has happened to make us ashamed of doing manual labor? The answer is simple: we have outsourced the working class. As of January of this year 9 out of 10 employed in he US worked in services. Production workers are 10% of the US workforce. What used to be the US working class has been turned into the Chinese, the Taiwanese, the Thai, the Indian, Brazilian, Indonesian working class. What is left is mostly service work.

Service work is of different sorts: there are doctors, nurses and many kinds of medical technicians, there are teachers, there are people getting information from the public, giving advice and information—all of them jobs that require aptitude, skill, experience and dedication. Anyone should be proud of doing that work.

But the bulk of service work is short term requiring little skill. They are jobs easily learned: being a “sales associate” at Radio Shack, shuffling papers in an insurance company, cutting up vegetables in a restaurant kitchen. Working class jobs used to be life time careers. It took a good while to get very good at them and then you stuck to them because it was good work. Many of today's jobs are dull pretty soon. They do not require a particular commitment; there is not a lot to learn. The jobs are often unstable so people move from one job to another every few years. What you do has lost importance. How much you earn is all that matters. Working people have lost an important source of pride and satisfaction.

Exporting all the good working class jobs abroad may have made a lot of money for capitalists. It has only impoverished the lives of working people by depriving them of their fromer sources of pride. Hence we see much more depression, more addiction, more violence in families and without, more cynicism, prejudice, and just plain nuttiness.

Bringing good work back to the US is not just a matter of increasing income or growing the job market. It has to do with making life better for many Americans.