(np) Why millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump

[Mark Kohut]

yes and a new analysis re Bernie is interesting: his showing in which
states--not only Michigan--tracks well with jobs lost to
'free trade"....."it's the economy, stupid"......"It's about work"---Alice
W.

(no attempt to 'balance' with jobs that might have been gained by free
trade) \

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 8:20 AM, kelber at mindspring.com <
kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> The anxieties about free trade and the deindustrialization of the US are
> exactly why Bernie Sanders won Michigan and is doing so well with the white
> working class ( who have been lured into voting Republican in previous
> elections). Trump also brings up these issues, and it's the basis of some,
> but not all or even most of his support. His huckstering of his products
> during speeches ( absolutely jaw-dropping in its vulgarity) shrewdly plays
> to his real fan base, bamboozling them with the simple premise: I made
> myself rich, and I can make you rich. Cheap, vulgar and effective snake oil
> for the frightened.
>
> To the extent that Sanders can lure the "jobs for Americans" and generally
> populist elements away from Trump, I think he'd be a more successful
> opponent for Trump in the general election.
>
> LK
>
> *Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID*
>
>
> John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
> >
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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