{"id":5857,"date":"2015-12-20T17:16:01","date_gmt":"2015-12-20T22:16:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=5857"},"modified":"2015-12-21T20:55:35","modified_gmt":"2015-12-22T01:55:35","slug":"time-to-take-the-donald-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=5857","title":{"rendered":"Time To Take The Donald Seriously?"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to the 15-day moving average<\/a> of poll results for the GOP presidential nomination found on Real Clear Politics, Donald Trump has been in the lead since July 19. Many pundits at first speculated that he would be another “flavor of the week” phenomenon such as Rick Santorum, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich were in the 2008 primary season. But OK, we’re now going on 5 months, and the first primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire are only a month and a half away. Trump’s RCP average just hit a new high at 34%, and one poll from last week (Monmouth) put him at 41%. An increasing number of political junkies have decided that we’d better take a closer look at what’s going on here and figure out whether something is changing among Republican voters (and possibly among the American population in general). I’m going to get on board with that trend and have a look myself.<\/p>\n

Two recent articles by journalist Thomas Edsall make a good start at analyzing the Trump phenomenon from a political science point of view. In the first article<\/a>, Edsall says that even though Trump’s future as a presidential candidate is uncertain (we don’t know yet if all those people who say they love him will really show up at the polling booths and party caucuses once the primaries begin), “we still need to understand the roots of his current success”. In order to get a start on that, Edsall cites a recent Pew Center research paper showing that “Trump’s backing from voters with a high school degree or less is twice as high as is it is from those with college degrees; the percentage of men lining up behind him is eight points higher than the percentage of women; voters from households making $40,000 or less are 12 points more likely to cast a Trump ballot than those from households making more than $75,000.” <\/p>\n

According to Edsall, “Trump appeals to the anger, discontent and sense of entrapment that plague contemporary voters . . . ” As with most, if not all GOP presidential candidates, Trump’s support comes primarily from Euro-Caucasians, i.e. white people; but Trump specializes in discontented, down-on-their-luck whites. “Trump makes white working-class voters, the core of his support, feel safe . . . ” In his second article<\/a>, Edsall states that “three current trends \u2014 voter anger over immigration, over offshoring and robotization, and over damage wrought by the economic meltdown of 2008 \u2014 [have] been crucial to Trump\u2019s success.” Yes, these do sound like the things that have been making a lot of white working-class people upset in recent times. <\/p>\n

Robert Reich came to a similar conclusion just a few days ago in an article<\/a> in the Huffington Post. Reich’s article is the most cogent and “on target” analysis of Trump’s support I’ve read thus far; unlike Edsall’s academic approach, it comes across as a wake up call. Reich warns that even if Trump eventually flops, the discontent that he managed to appeal to is not going away, and is going to become an increasingly powerful and potentially dangerous force in American politics in the near future. Reich’s article is entitled “The Revolt of the Anxious Class”; this is one of those rare titles that adds a lot of punch and substance to what the author tries to get across in the bulk of the article. The word “revolt” is powerful, and it is not being used lightly here by Reich; he means REAL REVOLT, stuff that could truly change our nation as we know it. (And not necessarily for the better.)<\/p>\n

I’m going to quote some parts of Reich’s article, maybe more than the “fair use” doctrine<\/a> would allow. But this article is so darn good, so on-target — it’s a MUST READ for anyone interested in current American political trends.<\/p>\n

. . . the middle class is shrinking . . . [the] odds of falling into poverty are frighteningly high, especially for the majority without college degrees . . . many are part of a burgeoning “on-demand” workforce — employed as needed, paid whatever they can get . . . the stress is taking a toll. For the first time in history, the lifespans of middle-class whites are dropping . . . they’re poisoning themselves with drugs and alcohol, or committing suicide . . . <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Reich here is citing a recent research paper on increasing mortality rates in recent years for non-college white adults, see http:\/\/www.pnas.org\/content\/112\/49\/15078.full.pdf<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Can government help? Those who support Obama, Clinton and Sanders would think so, but Reich’s anxious middle class thinks otherwise:<\/p>\n

Government can’t be counted on to protect them . . . government won’t protect their jobs from being outsourced to Asia or being taken by a worker here illegally . . . government can’t even protect them from evil people with guns or bombs. Which is why the anxious class is arming itself, buying guns at a record rate . . . they view government as not so much incompetent as not giving a damn. It’s working for the big guys and fat cats — the crony capitalists who bankroll candidates and get special favors in return.<\/p>\n

When I visited so-called “red” states this fall, I kept hearing angry complaints that government is run by Wall Street bankers who get bailed out . . . it was only a matter of time before the anxious class would revolt . . . They’d support a strongman who’d promise to protect them from all the chaos. Who’d save jobs from being shipped abroad, slam Wall Street, stick it to China, get rid of people here illegally, and block terrorists from getting into America. A strongman who’d make America great again — which really means make average working people safe again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reich then goes back to the real world, a world in which neither Donald Trump nor anyone else could accomplish what Trump promises to do, given the boundaries of the American constitutional system. But that fact doesn’t diminish the sense of hope that Trump brings to his anxious and dis-spirited followers: “Still, they think maybe he’s smart enough and tough enough to pull it off. He’s rich. He tells it like it is. Most are good people, not bigots or racists. They work hard and they have a strong sense of fairness. But their world has been slowly coming apart. And they’re scared and fed up. Now someone comes along who’s even more of a bully than those who for years have bullied them economically, politically, and even violently. The attraction is understandable, even though misguided.”<\/p>\n

Reich’s leaves us with a warning:<\/p>\n

If not Donald Trump, then it will be someone else posing as a strongman. If not this election cycle, it will be the next one. The revolt of the anxious class has just begun. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

OK, perhaps Reich is something of a drama queen here. He is a liberal labor economist<\/a>, after all, and probably takes Karl Marx more seriously than most of us do. We may not be on the verge of a mass uprising, of huge citizen rallies lit by bonfires. Still, this is certainly something to think about. <\/p>\n

In a way, Trump’s support is not all that different from Obama’s message in 2008 — Hope and Change. People, especially younger people, believed it and believe IN it. As it turned out, Obama hardly came close to doing what he made his followers dream of, i.e. an American transformed, an America coming together and leaving behind the bitter partisan political fighting. But as a skilled politician, Obama still got re-elected and (presumably) will successfully complete his second term as President in another year. So Obama did OK for himself, but America . . . not so much. Trump would be something of an inside-out Obama; perhaps the scientific concept of symmetry<\/a> also applies to politics. I rather doubt that Trumps’ “Hope and Change” for anxious whites is going to do any better than Obama’s Hope and Change for Millennials and minorities. I hope that we won’t find out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to the 15-day moving average of poll results for the GOP presidential nomination found on Real Clear Politics, Donald Trump has been in the lead since July 19. Many pundits at first speculated that he would be another “flavor of the week” phenomenon such as Rick Santorum, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich were in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5857"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5857"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5860,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5857\/revisions\/5860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}