Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
It's not either/or, and he is absolutely a symptom. Symptom of what, is the question.
1. Definitionally, redistribution is taking money away from you and me to give to your "losers," so it actually *is* giving up something.
2. Expanding safety nets in a way that actually expands the safety nets for "losers" doesn't just *feel* like doing something, it is doing something.
3. On regulation, that's not what I think or what I've said, but if you need to pretend it is so that you can say something stupid and think you are responding to me, knock yourself out.
I think the issue here is that your "losers" are well enough off that they don't benefit from things we think of as redistribution or the safety net (e.g., SSDI), and they don't think of the things they benefit from (home mortgage deduction, defense spending, subsidizing roads over mass transit) as redistribution or a safety net. They see a government that talks about helping people who aren't well off, but isn't helping them, and they want some of that too. They feel entitled to this, so they feel aggrieved.
Instead of pretending that redistribution, the safety net and regulation don't do anything, your better argument is that what the government does in those areas doesn't do much for the concerns of your "losers." That's the issue, right?
No. I wasn't advocating for anything. I was saying that your explanation of Trump & populism as a symptom of inequality doesn't work, because you see lots of places where there is worse inequality and no populism. Your model is underdetermined. I was trying to point to other things that lead to populism (and Trump).
Because you missed the point, I'm just going to omit a lot of what you said next, until you got to....
I'm mostly with you here. Although I think you are missing something important, which is that Trump voters' incomes look better when you compare them to the averages where they live, rather than the country as a whole. Coastal cities and suburbs are doing better, have higher incomes, and do not strongly support Trump. Hardcore Trump voters tend to come from exurbs and rural areas where the average income is lower.
We have an economy that is doing very well for cities with well trained workers. People in the hinterlands feel left out, and worry about their future. You are describing facets of that, but the slogan you keep using, "inequality," is not the right word for what you are trying to describe, in part because the people who feel inequality the most -- the poorest -- don't tend to be Trump fans. His supporters are people in the middle. If you want to explain populism, you need to grapple with that, instead of repeating that populism is a disease, etc.
No, you didn't.
No.
The working poor and the middle class are two different things, and when you use them as synonyms, you unintentionally show that you have some concept of the lower class as being poor people who don't work. Presumably they just laze around, eating Cheetos all day and being poor, and then at night they go off to commit crimes. Seriously, there's this implicit status consciousness to what you say that implies that what defines the people you care about is that they are more deserving than the faceless poor below them. You talk about inequality, but it's very important to the kind of people you talk about that they are more equal than the poor, who don't deserve help. They care about equality for themselves but not for others, which actually is more like a form of inequality than a reaction to it.
If you really think this, how do you explain that Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and the GOP lost it even worse in 2018? Either there are a lot of people winning in the current economy (in which case it's not winner take all) or there is a lot of false consciousness in blue places.
If I ever say those things, we can talk about them here. Until then, why don't we just stick to what I *am* saying.
Rest assured that I have not said that.
It's a bromide because it says nothing. If it's everyone's fault, it's no one's fault. If you really want to find fault with someone, you need to narrow it down a little.
And please think a little more critically about what you are saying. The economy has been global for a *long* time, and there have always been losers as a result. I just read the Lords of Finance, about the economy in the 1920s (good book, very well written). The UK pegged the pound to gold too high, and as a result industries in the UK got crushed by foreign competitors. Ninety years ago, shipbuilders in Liverpool were losers in the global economy. Foreign capital rushed into the NYSE, and companies like GM and RCA saw massive valuation increases -- which is to say, they raised capital from international investors and used it to hire people in places like Detroit. Those GM workers were winners in the international economy. The economy is always changing, creating new winners and losers. But the populism we have seen in the last ten years is different from the decade before. I'm not saying the global economy has nothing to do with it -- quite the opposite. I'm saying that bromides like "globalization" don't explain much.
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