We are all Slave now.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

But the list is incomplete. Add to it:

Lost blue collar jobs
Condescension by mainstream media creating resentment in middle America
Ignoring the lost jobs and societal collapse among the blue collar Trump demographic
Media narratives stating everything is great while 65% of the country can't muster $1000 in savings for an emergency
Refusing to be honest with the losers in the global economy (offering them bullshit salves like retraining for 55 year olds who've lost factory jobs)
Bailing out Wall Street and leaving homeowners to fend for themselves
Refusing to even talk about automation's impact on low skill workers

The list could go on forever. But it comes down to a simple proposition: We ignored the Trump voters. In some regards, that's warranted. The bigots should be ignored. And the affluent Trump voters are just greedheads. But a lot of Trump voters were people harmed by our economic policies on trade. We lied to them, we pretended they did not exist, and we figured somehow, eventually, they'd either fade away or assimilate into the new economy.

We were wrong. They came back to bite the country in the ass. And now it's too late to be honest with them. We can't tell them there is no fix for them -- that they are victims of a new economy and 'thur jubs ain't comin' back. No, now a con man has given them the false hope that those jobs can come back, that they can go back to 1956, and that they have a right to be angry and use their anger on perceived enemies (immigrants, minorities, etc.).

You want to bitch about third party voters enabling Trump? Well, here's who enabled Trump: You, me, and everyone else who ignored the economic carnage taking place in his base. A base far larger than the third party voters of the last election. And a base without which Trump could never have won the office.

I hear white conservatives bitch about BLM like it's a new thing ("Obama caused it!"). The only response to that is, "No. It's a thing that's been brewing forever. And it finally boiled over." Same applies to the Trumpkins.

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.