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Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
There's a lot of truth here but also a serious failure to reckon with how we got here and who is responsible. Where you describe government policies, you are taking about issues where Democrats have always been better than Republicans. Republicans have no plan to create blue-collar jobs. Democrats have at least tried to do things to help the global economy's losers -- Republicans oppose those things. If Democrats weren't as good for homeowners as you could hope, Republicans consistently sold them out for Wall St.
There's are political failures here and policy failures, and they are tied. The policy failures are that neoliberals were more scared of Republicans than they were of the left, and their policies may have been better in the aggregate than what Republicans were proposing but were still pretty weak sauce. When Bill Clinton ran for the first time, he was a refreshing change from Walter Mondale. When Hillary Clinton ran for the last time, her policies seemed pretty stale, and did not excited anyone.
But the other problem with the policies is that they were ineffective because Republicans blocked them. International trade crates benefits for the whole country but if the GOP prevents the government from spreading those benefits around, and if Democrats aren't very clear that that's what they're doing, then being better than the Republicans doesn't matter politically.
I don't think many voters switched from Democrat to Republican because they were impressed by Trump's proposals. A few suckers think he's bring their jobs back, and a few more are right because he's going to do things like protect the domestic steel industry at everyone else's expense, but mostly he has played on their resentments and given them a way to express disapproval.
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There is a name for the politics of offering attractive, simplistic, unrealistic solutions to economic victims -- it's called populism. It's not new. Instead of suggesting that "we all" have done things, you might give some hard thought to who has done what, and who wins and loses from what is going on.
