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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Fine. I'll call it "dashed expectations." (Nevermind that it 80% of the country has no hope of reaching its expectations, and 20% easily get to theirs by luck of birth near the top, these crowds are very unequal.)

You seem to think that I do not believe in equality, or something like that. You are preaching to the choir. I believe in global warming, too, but that does not mean that it caused populism and Trump.

The advocates of neoliberalism still refuse to admit this. They remain committed to coming up with any alternative narrative. They blame the current populism entirely on bigotry, xenophobia, differential in education, etc. They never concede the elephant in the corner: Trump was a very rational vote for a lot of people who are not doing well in the current economy.

For your "losers," I think that's loopy. How does Trump "rationally" advance their interests?

I don't see how you divorce the two. Income is just the measuring stick used to determine whether a Trump voter is getting what he thinks he deserves.

Dude, you are the pocket Marxist here, the one who keeps saying "inequality" as if everything else just follows naturally from brute economic conditions. I never said economic conditions don't matter. I said that you need *more* to explain where populism and Trump came from.

I think Trump voters are losers in the sense that they cannot go further up the ladder than where they are, or are actually losing ground. They're perhaps doing ok compared to those at the very bottom, but they're spinning their wheels. The live in places with limited opportunity, or don't have the skills that provide for bright futures.

Where they are and where they see themselves going are two different things. People who voted for Trump, on average, are *more* affluent than people who voted against him. You have a hard time explaining that, and indeed keep constructing explanations that suggest the opposite. What you need is an explanation about how people who are better off than a lot of people nonetheless feel so aggrieved that they turn to populism.

2008 was not a normal "economic condition." And inequality has not always been where it is today. It is roughly on par with what it was in the 20s, just before the Depression.

We were stagnating in 1992. Then we had the internet. The tech boom collapsed in 2000. We replaced it with a housing bubble. That collapsed spectacularly in 2008. And we've found nothing to replace it with save a stock market run-up.

So, the last two bubbles, housing and tech, delivered more broadly for the public. The 2008 recovery, unlike those, has not. It has delivered nicely to those who had assets (stocks most notably) before the crisis. Those who did not have not enjoyed the same recovery.

If you are going to play Marxist Dude here, you shouldn't pretend that we haven't had a long economic expansion since 2008. Because we have. Yes, I understand that not everyone has done well. But you (again) are not reckoning with the fact that Trump voters tend to be better off than others. Among other things, the problem with what you are saying is that it doesn't explain why people who are doing better than average are voting for Trump but people experiencing *more* inequality and doing worse are not.

There remains a nagging sense of unfairness about the bailout that I think sits at the base of this populist response.

Why does that speak to Trump voters and not to others?

I'm inclined to agree with this, but it's more on gut than anything else.

You could try living in both places, but just taking my word for it is easier.

Then I said, and this is key, The more money you have, the more likely you are to vote Republican.

Huh? That's not what I saw in 2016 at all. Most of the wealthy were voting for Hillary to protect their portfolios. Even Republicans were saying, "I'm holding my nose and doing so because his election will kill the market."

You had a non-random sample, dude. You seem to have it backwards.

I'd rephrase this as, There are more poor Democrat voters generally, and therefore, more poor Democrats than poor Republicans.

For individuals, there is a direct relationship between income and likelihood to vote Republican. For states, the opposite is true.

But if you prefer dashed expectations, I'm happy to work with that.

I don't care what label you use, but you seem blissfully unaware that inequality and dashed expectations are two different things.

Suppose that you are doing 70 mph in a 55 mph zone, and you get pulled over. You say to the office, hey, I was slowing down. Does he give a sh*t? No. Because the issue is your speed, not your acceleration.

As I noted many posts ago, Trump voters see people at the top making out like Croesius and people at the bottom receiving things like the ACA (which Trump voters seem to think is somehow screwing up their health care). They feel unequal to the top in terms of opportunity and unequal to the bottom in terms of attention and transfers.

As I noted, this sounds right to me. But you are really talking about their feelings, not about objective inequality.

I think that's just the traditional racial politics. Minorities don't get behind Rs. It'd be really interesting if Trump had run as a D. If he had not used racist dog whistles, not courted the bigot vote, and been friendly toward minorities, his message - "you're getting screwed in a rigged game" - would have garnered a lot of support among Ds. Bernie is proof of that.

So is your view that populism is rational, and minorities are not rational because they won't support a R populist?

This is bizarre reasoning. I think the fraction of people who wish to remain poor, not work, and loaf about is ridiculously small. My view is that almost all people who are not working are not working because the economy has rendered them unable to find work. They're obsolete, unskilled, run into terrible luck, etc.

OK.

Maybe a ladder is the best analogy. Trump voters seem to think they can't get up the ladder. I think many of them believe you can still do so by simply working hard. They don't seem to understand that working smart is what's really required. And they really don't grasp what dad said in those truly honest moments - "It's mostly about who you know." I think a lot of Trump voters are people who actually believed the narrative about the American Dream. This may be a large part of their feeling entitled.

OK. Again -- not a story about "inequality" -- a story about people who find themselves on the middle of the ladder, unable to climb, and choose elect someone who will punch people below them.

Left wing populism isn't a problem now, but it will be in the near future. After trying right wing populism via Trump, the next pendulum swing is left wing populism.

Well, thank you for acknowledging that populism (in this country) is right-wing now.

I think the fundamental reason why you are wrong in your prediction here is that populism reflects a frustration with mainstream politics. Conservatives are much more frustrated with the GOP than the left is with Democrats. So do not hold your breath waiting for left-wing populism.

But this shows why pointing to inequality doesn't explain populism.

[E]veryone owns part of this mess. Which is why picking one group to blame is both intellectually dishonest and counterproductive. You're never fixing anything. Your just elevating one group of blameworthy folks' bad ideas over another's.

This is twaddle. You can do better.

If numerous causes were at work, all numerous causes should be flagged as such. We can discuss who owns more or less blame, but if you're to blame -- and we're all to blame for this new populism's emergence -- we must admit that. You cannot run healthy societies on lies, and ignoring any group's liability while focusing on another's is a form of lying. It crafts a false story about what happened.

You are saying, "I blame everyone equally because the only alternative is to absolve people." That's stupid. Tell an accurate story that puts blame where it belongs. You don't have a real explanation until you can distinguish between what different people did, and why it matters.

The economic factors at work are the fascinating part. You downplay those in favor of a psychological explanation. I think the two are essential to the analysis in equal amounts. The psychology at work is largely a manifestation of the economic pressures.

This is the nub of it, and you contradict yourself in the space of two sentences. If the psychology is just a manifestation of economic factors, then it doesn't explain anything. That's a simple Marxist explanation. If psychology matters as an explanation, that means that it can drive a different result than the economics would suggest. You have to make up your mind about whether you think it's all about the economics (and inequality), or whether something else is going on.

Three things have made this moment different. The aberrational US dominance and middle class gains in the US following WWII, 2008 (emphasis on the bailout), and the Internet. I don't need to explain the interplay between the three, and the uniqueness of the last one, to show how this is a much different world. Sometimes, "this time it is different."

I absolutely agree that the world is different, but you are still not explaining why it matters to your explanation.