(np) Why millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump

[John Bailey]

This sounds right. Just had dinner with a politics guy (ex-media
adviser for an ex-Prime Minister here) and quizzed him on Trump. From
what he understands Trump has succeeded because the old Republican
guard has assumed their base has been unified on things such as free
trade, but when you look at farmers who are worse off because of the
global market of course they're angry. Americans should drive American
tractors. That may not pay off economically, in the long run, but it
makes a certain kind of sense if you project a world from your own
circumstances, so to speak.

And his real advantage is that he has the $$$ to poll. Ask different
demographics what they want, and then promise the more general
population that. Or, as is apparently the more common practice in US
polling, ask people what they dislike about the opposition and then
literally parrot their most common complaints during media
appearances.

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 10:20 PM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> 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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