(np) Why millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

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.

 > ... 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.

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 American 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 ... <


http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support


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