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While the mere moralizing against Trump makes most media reports
unreadable to me, I found this text by Thomas Frank rather helpful
to understand what's going on in terms of societal structures.<br>
<p><small>> ... 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 powerbrokers, 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. </small></p>
<small> </small>
<p><small>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.</small></p>
<small> </small>
<p><small>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 American Free
Trade Agreement allow companies to move jobs to Mexico. </small></p>
<small> </small>
<p><small>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 marketplaceâ€. A worker shouts “Fuck
you!†at the executive. The executive asks people to please be
quiet so he can “share†his “informationâ€. His information about
all of them losing their jobs.</small></p>
<small> </small>
<h2><small>* * *</small></h2>
<small> </small>
<p><small>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.</small></p>
<small> </small>
<p><small>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.</small></p>
<small> </small>
<p><small>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.</small></p>
<small> </small>
<p><small>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. </small></p>
<small> </small>
<p><small>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 “attitudeâ€, 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
economyâ€.</small></p>
<small> </small>
<p><small>“People are much more frightened than they are bigoted,â€
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.â€</small></p>
<small> </small>
<p><small>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.â€</small></p>
<small> </small>
<p><small>“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.â€</small></p>
<small> </small>
<p><small>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 ... <<br>
</small></p>
<p><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support">http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support</a><br>
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