This may not be Stranger Things, but I think we’re living in the Upside Down. Only Eleven can save us now! Nothing we think we know about America makes sense anymore and this election proved it. Do we even know what “Democrat” and “Republican” signifies anymore? At least in the northeast, it used to be that Republicans (broadly speaking) were rich people. Democrats (broadly speaking) were poor and working class people. Guess what happened this year? In Connecticut, Hillary carried much of filthy rich Fairfield County while Trump carried filthy Torrington and Enfield. Are Republicans losing the rich? Are Democrats losing the working class? And if so, do our conventional working definitions of D and R even have meaning anymore?
Republicans on social media love to boast that they were the party to end slavery while evil, hypocritical Democrats fought to keep those whips lashing. This is true—but not true. Democrats and Republicans have switched places. At one time, the Republicans were the progressives, Democrats the conservatives. Republicans always carried the north, Democrats always carried the south. Is it possible we’re in the beginning stages of yet another flip?
Let’s talk about the 1888 election! Don’t get too excited. I stumbled upon this because, like the 2016 election, the Electoral College winner lost the popular vote. William Harrison defeated the incumbent President Grover Cleveland. And like this year, trade was arguably the biggest issue of the campaign. Just as free trade opposing Trump beat (mostly) free trade supporting Clinton, free trade opposing Harrison beat free trade supporting Cleveland. And then as well as now, the issue was the protection of American jobs. Outsourcing wasn’t yet a thing in 1888 (couldn’t E-mail the factory foreman in Shenzhen) but they thought if you didn't impose tariffs on imports, consumers will have every incentive to buy foreign goods and that will hurt the American industrial worker. Today the problem is that without tariffs, you create every incentive for the companies themselves to physically move the entire factory overseas and just import goods back here without having to worry about a tariff. Yes, the benefit goes to the consumer: if the goods are cheaper to make and there’s no added tariff, the savings is passed to the consumer and they are cheaper to buy. But what if they are actually more expensive in the end—because the potential buyer is now out of a job.
But here's what is interesting: free trade opposing Harrison was also a champion of Native Americans and he passed our nation’s first anti-trust law to limit corporate monopolies….he was a progressive. Free trade loving Cleveland was a conservative.
Flash forward 128 years. Who was the progressive? Clearly Hillary, right? The conservative? Clearly Donald “Women Should Be Punished For Having An Abortion” Trump, right? Except it was Trump who took the traditionally progressive stance on trade and Hillary who took the traditionally conservative stance. So are we sure we even know who is progressive and conservative anymore? It was the Democrat Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA in 1994, it was Republican George W. Bush who signed the free trade deal with China, it was Democrat Obama who has been pushing for the free trade expanding TPP. In 1888 as well as 2016, the conventional wisdom has been that free trade hurts the American worker, but for decades neither the “working man’s party” of Democrats nor the more traditionally business/management friendly Republicans have practiced a trade policy aimed at protecting the American blue collar worker at all costs.
And this……cleared a path for both the unexpected success of Bernie Sanders in the primaries and the even less expected election of Donald Trump. If you’re a blue collar worker and you feel you’ve been forgotten and left for dead, it’s probably because you’ve been forgotten and left for dead. D’s and R’s alike told you to lose their number. You're living in the world of Stranger Things, but you're not even Will. Where's Winona Ryder to hysterically blow holes through the wall looking to find you? No, you're Barb, my friend. "Barb's missing? Barb Who? Meh, win some, you lose some".
In short, Democrats can blame Joe Six Pack Trump loving guys in rural Pennsylvania all they want, but they should probably blame themselves for the mess we now face: a racist, sexist reality TV host as President. But our President-Elect may have bad hair, but he’s no dummy. He saw that there was a wide segment of the country Democrats had let slip through their hands and he cast himself as their champion and savior. He called them the "forgotten people", his opponent called them a "basket of deplorables". Because the unwashed politically incorrect masses offended her (in some cases justifyably, I mean have you seen Twitter?) she had her Mitt Romeny "47 percent" moment. But like the showman and salesman he is, Trump saw a product almost everyone had stopped selling. But he knew there was still an untapped demand for it, so he started selling it himself; and unlike Trump Steaks, this product moved off the shelf like hotcakes. So what if the seller a blue collar paradise regained is an Ivy League billionaire real estate mogul from New York City? Out of work Gary from Gary, Indiana will take whatever he can get.
Was Bill Clinton cruel and heartless to abandon workers by signing NAFTA? I’m not sure if it was that simple. I remember Bill Clinton’s theme song in ’92 was Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop Thinkin’ About Tomorrow. Industry? Factories? Textile mills? Coal mines? Was this the future? Clinton didn’t wanna stop thinking about tomorrow, Obama wanted hope and change. These guys were looking forward and trying to create a brighter future than could ever be found in a dark, dingy, filth belching refinery. Good bye and good riddance to all that. If they were blinded, it was by the sun in their eyes: the morning sun of the brighter, better future that was supposedly dawning in America.
But when does that future get here? And what is that future exactly? Our country began as an agrarian society in which the vast majority were farmers. Then we industrialized and many worked in factories. Now we’ve let many of those factories go to make way for the new economy. But what is the new economy exactly? Ask the average American and I don’t think they know. Everyone understands a farm, everyone understands a factory, but what is this new amazing thing? “Service economy”. What does that even mean? Is it a world where everyone works in an office? And if that’s the case, can we ever really supply enough jobs for everyone? Already computers and automation have reduced the need for many office tasks. Are we all going to become app developers and virtual reality headset salesmen?
If free trade advocates on both sides can’t answer this question in a way that Americans can understand and believe in, they have a big problem. We are willing to follow you into the future, but are we sure we even have MapQuest turned on here? And where do we program our destination exactly? I don’t think any of the free trade / "adios manufacturing" politicians have been able to clearly articulate this and that’s why we’re here. It's why Trump was able to gain so much traction by saying, “F the future. Follow me and I’ll bring back the good old days! Non-GMO food? I prefer Big Macs! Not objectifying women? I run beauty pageants! Oh, and I’ll bring those factories back from China too. I’ll make American great again”. Was this race about Democrats vs. Republicans, a man vs. a woman, or was this a referendum on the future? And did the future lose? The New World Order is collecting dust on the shelves, people want the Old World Order back. No more selling the miracle of CD’s, people want vinyl. “Like boats agains the current, we are ceaselessly borne back into the past”.
And the worse part…..I don’t know the answer to the riddle of the future either. And I have a blog!! Do you? Could Trump be right? Maybe this magical new economy is an illusion after all and our only hope is to try to recapture the old manufacturing base or face permanent problems with unemployement / underemployment. Jobs are always an issue and they are probably only going to become a bigger issue if the trend continues: a steadily rising population and a steadily decrease in available jobs. Job loss due to outsourcing to Mexico and China, sure. But also technology. “Oh you used to be a bank teller? They have an ATM for that now. Oh you used to work in a printing press? Sorry, it’s all on iPads now. Oh, you used to work as a cashier? There’s a self-checkout line for that now. Oh, you used to drive a cab? There’s a self-driving car for that now…..”.
Was allowing the outsourcing of jobs then something we actually couldn’t afford to do? Were we blinded by the light of a future that we hadn’t even sufficiently defined and mapped out? I don’t know and I don’t think a lot of people know and I think that’s why Donald Trump is our President. When people are more scared than hopeful about the future, a past peddler will win.
The words “neoliberal” and “neoconservative” are tossed around often—and these days almost always in negative terms. Usually these ideas seem to be depicted as shadowy, conspiratorial, and evil. But my theory is this: at their foundation both are actually rooted in blind optimism more than evil. It’s an optimism which is believed so thoroughly that adherents to this mode of thinking are willing to charge head first into things—often without a clear plan for what will come next because their optimism soars above any ground level need for a concrete outline or plan. They build the house before building the foundation. With neoconservatives this often applies to foreign policy: the idea of a Pax Americana that we can create through military invasions, removing of foreign leaders, etc. that will re-make these nations in our own image as beacons of democracy and freedom. I think this is what drove the Iraq invasion: the blind faith that we could turn Iraq into a peaceful Muslim democracy and bring peace to America and the middle east. Instead we increased Sunni vs. Shia hatred and paved the way for Isis. Neoliberalism seems to largely involve the blind faith in a new and better globalized economy not driven by the dirty work of farms and factories. (And nationalism). But instead of a prosperous nation of well compensated information age workers, we seem to have a lot of anger and Donald Trump. Hope and faith and optimism are great—but they can never be substituted for a plan. Maybe 2016 America shows the unfortunate consequences of declaring “mission accomplished” when you didn’t even fully understand the real mission yourself.
My hope? The Democrats get a grip, do some inventory and realize they need to change. A party which is vulnerable to Wikileaks love letters to Goldman Sachs…..this can't happen anymore. The Democrats have lost their populist ways and given people too many reasons to believe they have become the elitist party. Again, why did Democrats carry rich Fairfield County but lose struggling Enfield? Yes, the crassness of Trump may have offended the refined tastes of Greenwich residents and yes an underlying blue collar sexism might have turned Enfield's nose against a pantsuit President. But we probably have to look beyond the individual traits of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. There are real reasons for working people to think the Democrats don’t speak for them anymore. And when you look at the national county by country electoral map, you see how narrow their margin for error really is. Almost all of the country is red, not blue. It’s only the population density of the blue, urban, mostly bicoastal areas that gives Democrats any chance at all. Populism, not elitism, is the only hope to widen the base. There are more poor working people than hedge fund managers.
But being a populist isn't so easy. It means checking one's values at the door sometimes. According to an article I read in The Atlantic, Democrats began to stop fighting for unions so strenuously and eventually stopped fighting to even retain unionized blue collar jobs in America largely because new, college educated Democrats in the 70's started looking at union members and saw.....a basket of deplorables. New Democrats were not "break up the banks, help the farmer" Woody Guthrie fans, they were anti-war, pro feminist, pro gay, pro minority. The realized many working class whites....were really none of the above. They were often racists. This caused Democrats to kind of drift away from them. But maybe in hindsight they should have graded them on a curve instead of viewing them from their ivory tower. As long as they weren't going around actually lynching African Americans, should they have recognized that they still were a relatively powerless group who needed them to protect them by keeping them unionized and keeping companies from abandoning them for cheaper labor. They didn't and that may very well be the reason they are struggling so much today and feel so angry.....and decided Trump was better than the Democratic Party. A candidate who himself acts deplorable makes them feel less unworthy than a holier than thou politically correct party who maybe didn't have their back for a few decades because they didn't live up to their sense of decorum and progressive values.
Or……these things will just flip and Republicans will become the new Democrats and vice versa. What if--and this is a big if--Trump actually prioritizes those struggling folks in the Rust Belt and actually succeeds in brining jobs back form overseas? That will mean the Democrats have lost them forever. Or at least indefinitely. Will they then feel that in order to survive, they have to insure they hold onto those rich Fairfield County folks who just voted for them? The ones who used to vote Republican? Rather than scale back their Goldman Sachs coziness, will they then grab a sleeping bag and cozy up to them even more? If that happens, the constituents and the role of the two parties may reverse for the second time in American history.
But….I doubt it. Trump talked a a big game, but when it comes to his policies? Looks like your standard issue Republican playbook: tax cuts, cuts in government services, “bombing the shit out of them”: things that will help his rich cronies but will actually hurt the southern, heartland, and Rust Belt people he promised to rescue from Obama’s supposed reign of terror over their lives. Only Democrats are really in a position to align a populist rhetoric with policies that will actually help those who are struggling: tax credits to the work working poor instead of tax cuts for the rich, raising the minimum wage, widening health insurance for the uninsured, etc. Right now we have a completely bizarre system where the President-Elect is with the downtrodden common man in name but probably not in practice but Democrats are perhaps with them in practice more than in name.
People have the power. The donor class can walk you to the door, but only the people can open it for you.
Republicans on social media love to boast that they were the party to end slavery while evil, hypocritical Democrats fought to keep those whips lashing. This is true—but not true. Democrats and Republicans have switched places. At one time, the Republicans were the progressives, Democrats the conservatives. Republicans always carried the north, Democrats always carried the south. Is it possible we’re in the beginning stages of yet another flip?
Let’s talk about the 1888 election! Don’t get too excited. I stumbled upon this because, like the 2016 election, the Electoral College winner lost the popular vote. William Harrison defeated the incumbent President Grover Cleveland. And like this year, trade was arguably the biggest issue of the campaign. Just as free trade opposing Trump beat (mostly) free trade supporting Clinton, free trade opposing Harrison beat free trade supporting Cleveland. And then as well as now, the issue was the protection of American jobs. Outsourcing wasn’t yet a thing in 1888 (couldn’t E-mail the factory foreman in Shenzhen) but they thought if you didn't impose tariffs on imports, consumers will have every incentive to buy foreign goods and that will hurt the American industrial worker. Today the problem is that without tariffs, you create every incentive for the companies themselves to physically move the entire factory overseas and just import goods back here without having to worry about a tariff. Yes, the benefit goes to the consumer: if the goods are cheaper to make and there’s no added tariff, the savings is passed to the consumer and they are cheaper to buy. But what if they are actually more expensive in the end—because the potential buyer is now out of a job.
But here's what is interesting: free trade opposing Harrison was also a champion of Native Americans and he passed our nation’s first anti-trust law to limit corporate monopolies….he was a progressive. Free trade loving Cleveland was a conservative.
Flash forward 128 years. Who was the progressive? Clearly Hillary, right? The conservative? Clearly Donald “Women Should Be Punished For Having An Abortion” Trump, right? Except it was Trump who took the traditionally progressive stance on trade and Hillary who took the traditionally conservative stance. So are we sure we even know who is progressive and conservative anymore? It was the Democrat Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA in 1994, it was Republican George W. Bush who signed the free trade deal with China, it was Democrat Obama who has been pushing for the free trade expanding TPP. In 1888 as well as 2016, the conventional wisdom has been that free trade hurts the American worker, but for decades neither the “working man’s party” of Democrats nor the more traditionally business/management friendly Republicans have practiced a trade policy aimed at protecting the American blue collar worker at all costs.
And this……cleared a path for both the unexpected success of Bernie Sanders in the primaries and the even less expected election of Donald Trump. If you’re a blue collar worker and you feel you’ve been forgotten and left for dead, it’s probably because you’ve been forgotten and left for dead. D’s and R’s alike told you to lose their number. You're living in the world of Stranger Things, but you're not even Will. Where's Winona Ryder to hysterically blow holes through the wall looking to find you? No, you're Barb, my friend. "Barb's missing? Barb Who? Meh, win some, you lose some".
In short, Democrats can blame Joe Six Pack Trump loving guys in rural Pennsylvania all they want, but they should probably blame themselves for the mess we now face: a racist, sexist reality TV host as President. But our President-Elect may have bad hair, but he’s no dummy. He saw that there was a wide segment of the country Democrats had let slip through their hands and he cast himself as their champion and savior. He called them the "forgotten people", his opponent called them a "basket of deplorables". Because the unwashed politically incorrect masses offended her (in some cases justifyably, I mean have you seen Twitter?) she had her Mitt Romeny "47 percent" moment. But like the showman and salesman he is, Trump saw a product almost everyone had stopped selling. But he knew there was still an untapped demand for it, so he started selling it himself; and unlike Trump Steaks, this product moved off the shelf like hotcakes. So what if the seller a blue collar paradise regained is an Ivy League billionaire real estate mogul from New York City? Out of work Gary from Gary, Indiana will take whatever he can get.
Was Bill Clinton cruel and heartless to abandon workers by signing NAFTA? I’m not sure if it was that simple. I remember Bill Clinton’s theme song in ’92 was Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop Thinkin’ About Tomorrow. Industry? Factories? Textile mills? Coal mines? Was this the future? Clinton didn’t wanna stop thinking about tomorrow, Obama wanted hope and change. These guys were looking forward and trying to create a brighter future than could ever be found in a dark, dingy, filth belching refinery. Good bye and good riddance to all that. If they were blinded, it was by the sun in their eyes: the morning sun of the brighter, better future that was supposedly dawning in America.
But when does that future get here? And what is that future exactly? Our country began as an agrarian society in which the vast majority were farmers. Then we industrialized and many worked in factories. Now we’ve let many of those factories go to make way for the new economy. But what is the new economy exactly? Ask the average American and I don’t think they know. Everyone understands a farm, everyone understands a factory, but what is this new amazing thing? “Service economy”. What does that even mean? Is it a world where everyone works in an office? And if that’s the case, can we ever really supply enough jobs for everyone? Already computers and automation have reduced the need for many office tasks. Are we all going to become app developers and virtual reality headset salesmen?
If free trade advocates on both sides can’t answer this question in a way that Americans can understand and believe in, they have a big problem. We are willing to follow you into the future, but are we sure we even have MapQuest turned on here? And where do we program our destination exactly? I don’t think any of the free trade / "adios manufacturing" politicians have been able to clearly articulate this and that’s why we’re here. It's why Trump was able to gain so much traction by saying, “F the future. Follow me and I’ll bring back the good old days! Non-GMO food? I prefer Big Macs! Not objectifying women? I run beauty pageants! Oh, and I’ll bring those factories back from China too. I’ll make American great again”. Was this race about Democrats vs. Republicans, a man vs. a woman, or was this a referendum on the future? And did the future lose? The New World Order is collecting dust on the shelves, people want the Old World Order back. No more selling the miracle of CD’s, people want vinyl. “Like boats agains the current, we are ceaselessly borne back into the past”.
And the worse part…..I don’t know the answer to the riddle of the future either. And I have a blog!! Do you? Could Trump be right? Maybe this magical new economy is an illusion after all and our only hope is to try to recapture the old manufacturing base or face permanent problems with unemployement / underemployment. Jobs are always an issue and they are probably only going to become a bigger issue if the trend continues: a steadily rising population and a steadily decrease in available jobs. Job loss due to outsourcing to Mexico and China, sure. But also technology. “Oh you used to be a bank teller? They have an ATM for that now. Oh you used to work in a printing press? Sorry, it’s all on iPads now. Oh, you used to work as a cashier? There’s a self-checkout line for that now. Oh, you used to drive a cab? There’s a self-driving car for that now…..”.
Was allowing the outsourcing of jobs then something we actually couldn’t afford to do? Were we blinded by the light of a future that we hadn’t even sufficiently defined and mapped out? I don’t know and I don’t think a lot of people know and I think that’s why Donald Trump is our President. When people are more scared than hopeful about the future, a past peddler will win.
The words “neoliberal” and “neoconservative” are tossed around often—and these days almost always in negative terms. Usually these ideas seem to be depicted as shadowy, conspiratorial, and evil. But my theory is this: at their foundation both are actually rooted in blind optimism more than evil. It’s an optimism which is believed so thoroughly that adherents to this mode of thinking are willing to charge head first into things—often without a clear plan for what will come next because their optimism soars above any ground level need for a concrete outline or plan. They build the house before building the foundation. With neoconservatives this often applies to foreign policy: the idea of a Pax Americana that we can create through military invasions, removing of foreign leaders, etc. that will re-make these nations in our own image as beacons of democracy and freedom. I think this is what drove the Iraq invasion: the blind faith that we could turn Iraq into a peaceful Muslim democracy and bring peace to America and the middle east. Instead we increased Sunni vs. Shia hatred and paved the way for Isis. Neoliberalism seems to largely involve the blind faith in a new and better globalized economy not driven by the dirty work of farms and factories. (And nationalism). But instead of a prosperous nation of well compensated information age workers, we seem to have a lot of anger and Donald Trump. Hope and faith and optimism are great—but they can never be substituted for a plan. Maybe 2016 America shows the unfortunate consequences of declaring “mission accomplished” when you didn’t even fully understand the real mission yourself.
My hope? The Democrats get a grip, do some inventory and realize they need to change. A party which is vulnerable to Wikileaks love letters to Goldman Sachs…..this can't happen anymore. The Democrats have lost their populist ways and given people too many reasons to believe they have become the elitist party. Again, why did Democrats carry rich Fairfield County but lose struggling Enfield? Yes, the crassness of Trump may have offended the refined tastes of Greenwich residents and yes an underlying blue collar sexism might have turned Enfield's nose against a pantsuit President. But we probably have to look beyond the individual traits of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. There are real reasons for working people to think the Democrats don’t speak for them anymore. And when you look at the national county by country electoral map, you see how narrow their margin for error really is. Almost all of the country is red, not blue. It’s only the population density of the blue, urban, mostly bicoastal areas that gives Democrats any chance at all. Populism, not elitism, is the only hope to widen the base. There are more poor working people than hedge fund managers.
But being a populist isn't so easy. It means checking one's values at the door sometimes. According to an article I read in The Atlantic, Democrats began to stop fighting for unions so strenuously and eventually stopped fighting to even retain unionized blue collar jobs in America largely because new, college educated Democrats in the 70's started looking at union members and saw.....a basket of deplorables. New Democrats were not "break up the banks, help the farmer" Woody Guthrie fans, they were anti-war, pro feminist, pro gay, pro minority. The realized many working class whites....were really none of the above. They were often racists. This caused Democrats to kind of drift away from them. But maybe in hindsight they should have graded them on a curve instead of viewing them from their ivory tower. As long as they weren't going around actually lynching African Americans, should they have recognized that they still were a relatively powerless group who needed them to protect them by keeping them unionized and keeping companies from abandoning them for cheaper labor. They didn't and that may very well be the reason they are struggling so much today and feel so angry.....and decided Trump was better than the Democratic Party. A candidate who himself acts deplorable makes them feel less unworthy than a holier than thou politically correct party who maybe didn't have their back for a few decades because they didn't live up to their sense of decorum and progressive values.
Or……these things will just flip and Republicans will become the new Democrats and vice versa. What if--and this is a big if--Trump actually prioritizes those struggling folks in the Rust Belt and actually succeeds in brining jobs back form overseas? That will mean the Democrats have lost them forever. Or at least indefinitely. Will they then feel that in order to survive, they have to insure they hold onto those rich Fairfield County folks who just voted for them? The ones who used to vote Republican? Rather than scale back their Goldman Sachs coziness, will they then grab a sleeping bag and cozy up to them even more? If that happens, the constituents and the role of the two parties may reverse for the second time in American history.
But….I doubt it. Trump talked a a big game, but when it comes to his policies? Looks like your standard issue Republican playbook: tax cuts, cuts in government services, “bombing the shit out of them”: things that will help his rich cronies but will actually hurt the southern, heartland, and Rust Belt people he promised to rescue from Obama’s supposed reign of terror over their lives. Only Democrats are really in a position to align a populist rhetoric with policies that will actually help those who are struggling: tax credits to the work working poor instead of tax cuts for the rich, raising the minimum wage, widening health insurance for the uninsured, etc. Right now we have a completely bizarre system where the President-Elect is with the downtrodden common man in name but probably not in practice but Democrats are perhaps with them in practice more than in name.
People have the power. The donor class can walk you to the door, but only the people can open it for you.
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