I almost never watch MSNBC or CNN, but I had to yesterday, and this morning, to see the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth following Grover Cleveland 2.0’s electoral win. Joe Scarborough and his fellow travelers were talking, mostly in amazement, at the multi-racial working-class coalition that former and future President Donald Trump put together in winning not just an electoral college but popular vote majority.
Naturally, most of the ‘panelists’ were in the nice MSNBC studio, but one was remote, from home.
And what a nice home it is! A home library, with a green marble surround fireplace, and fire going, plus carpets, deep windows, a nice sofa plus chairs around it for gatherings, and my immediate thought was how we were being lectured by the elites on who and what the working class are.
But there was half of a point made, in which Mr Scarborough said that the Democratic Party was run by the Washington elites. What he doesn’t get, and the left may not ever be able to understand, is that, right now, the Republican Party is a populist party, run by GOP voters themselves. The Democrats combitch that Republican Party leaders are in some sort of fealty to Mr Trump, but that isn’t the case at all. What the party leaders are doing is trying to catch up with the voters, and not all of them do that very well. Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney and their like all think that the educated elites should be running the party, and the voters go along with their wishes. Perhaps it was that way, when the Bush family were ascendant, but not anymore.
The Republican Party leadership were aghast in 2015, when Donald Trump began his first campaign. He just wasn’t going along with the program, and he was financing his primary campaign himself. People like Scott Walker and Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina were trying to play nice, but Mr Trump was not: he was his bombastic self, and the Republican Party primary voters chose him.
Of course, he was going to get stomped by Hillary Clinton in the general election, so yeah, the GOP would lose that election, but everything would be back to normal after he was gone.
Oops!
Today’s Democrats still don’t understand. They’ve spent the past couple of years telling us how the economy was booming, unemployment was low, and everything was peaches but the cream. And they were shocked, shocked! that the peons didn’t see things that way. Yes, inflation is now, at least supposedly, lower than the rate of wage increases, but that didn’t account for the heavy inflation during President Biden’s first two years, which left Americans far behind, and they haven’t caught up.
Jeff Stein of The Washington Post tweeted:
Roughly *67%* of voters rated the economy as “not so good/poor,” per Washington Post exit polls A shockingly poor number amid a hot labor market, booming stocks, much lower inflation, growing GDP But widespread voter dissatisfaction w/ the economy been clear for years
I was reminded of Heather Long’s article, back when she was with CNN, on September 6, 2016, reporting that Americans didn’t really seem to believe that unemployment was down around 5%, seeing it as a lot higher.
The U.S. unemployment rate is only 4.9%, but 57% of Americans believe it’s a lot higher than that, according to a new survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.
The general public has “extremely little factual knowledge” about the job market and labor force, Rutgers found.
It’s another example of how experts on Wall Street and in Washington see the economy differently than the regular Joe. Many of the nation’s top economic experts say that America is “near full employment.” The unemployment rate has actually been at or below 5% for almost a year — millions of people have found jobs in what is the best period of hiring since the late 1990s.
But regular people appear to have their doubts about how healthy America’s employment picture is. Nearly a third of those survey by Rutgers believe unemployment is actually at 9%, or higher.
As it happened, that “9% or higher” was pretty much in line with the U-6 unemployment number, people who have jobs, but which were only part time, because that’s all they could find.
Back to Mr Stein, I ask: What hot labor market? Yeah, you can get a job at Starbucks or McDonald’s anytime, but manufacturing jobs are now few and far between. You can get a job in construction, though you might have to commute, if you have skills and a strong back and are willing to do something really radical like actually work.
Booming stocks? Yeah, that’s true, too, and that means that people’s 401(k)s and other retirement accounts are doing well, for the roughly half of the population which have them, but for the vast majority of Americans, surging retirement plans don’t put food on the table this evening.
From The New York Times:
by David Brooks | Wednesday, November 6, 2024
We have entered a new political era. For the past 40 years or so, we lived in the information age. Those of us in the educated class decided, with some justification, that the postindustrial economy would be built by people like ourselves, so we tailored social policies to meet our needs.
Our education policy pushed people toward the course we followed — four-year colleges so that they would be qualified for the “jobs of the future.” Meanwhile, vocational training withered. We embraced a free trade policy that moved industrial jobs to low-cost countries overseas so that we could focus our energies on knowledge economy enterprises run by people with advanced degrees. The financial and consulting sector mushroomed while manufacturing employment shriveled.
Geography was deemed unimportant — if capital and high-skill labor wanted to cluster in Austin, San Francisco and Washington, it didn’t really matter what happened to all those other communities left behind. Immigration policies gave highly educated people access to low-wage labor while less-skilled workers faced new competition. We shifted toward green technologies favored by people who work in pixels, and we disfavored people in manufacturing and transportation whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels.
That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect. People who climbed the academic ladder were feted with accolades, while those who didn’t were rendered invisible. The situation was particularly hard on boys. By high school two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class are girls, while about two-thirds of the students in the bottom decile are boys. Schools are not set up for male success; that has lifelong personal, and now national, consequences.
Yeah, perhaps Mr Brooks understands, but he was raised in intellectual privilege, with a father who taught English literature at New York University and a mother who pursued 19th British history at Ivy League Columbia University. When he was 12, the family moved to the wealthy Philadelphia Main Line. Does he really understand?
The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it. Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. I guess it’s hard to focus on class inequality when you went to a college with a multibillion-dollar endowment and do environmental greenwashing and diversity seminars for a major corporation. Donald Trump is a monstrous narcissist, but there’s something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself.
Here’s where Mr Brooks comes close, but just doesn’t quite get it. Yes, Mr Trump is a billionaire, and born the son of a millionaire. He, too, received an Ivy League education, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. But somehow, some way, Mr Trump actually understands the working class, in ways that the Democratic Party elite just do not. The left may think it all hucksterism, but if Mr Trump’s understanding of the working class is fake, he’s good enough at it to make it real enough to be believed.
Ronald Reagan once said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” The Democrats used to be the party of the working class, the party of labor unions. But, as Mr Brooks tells us, the Democrats, led by their hard left wing, abandoned working Americans, to go for all of the crazy social policy stuff. The labor union leaders are still mostly hard-core Democrat supporters, but the union members are increasingly abandoning what their leadership tell them.
I will admit to some serious election fatigue. It is virtually incomprehensible to me that more than 10% of the electorate could vote for the Communist from California, but then I think back to an early Political Science class at the University of Kentucky, back in the days of quill pens and inkwells, in which the now late Professor Malcolm Jewell pointed out something very basic: in any at all competitive race, both the Republican and Democratic candidates are each guaranteed 40% of the vote; the fight is only over the 20% in the middle.