No, that's not it. I'm writing this from rural America in deep Trump territory, and people here are already struggling and have been for years. From their perspective they've been left out of the benefits of the global economy—the big cities and the coasts might be better off, but the middle of the country wants to go back to when they had opportunities and jobs for working class Americans.
They're almost certainly wrong about the medicine, but their diagnosis isn't far off: globalization has not helped them as much as it's hurt them. Cheaper goods don't make up for dying towns.
Edit: Downvoting people who actually understand Trump voters and try to vocalize their needs and perspectives just silences the voices that could be used to shape a better platform for the Democrats next time. You won't win elections by fighting a straw man invented by your echo chamber.
Saw an interesting article on zero-sum thinking as contingent on the idea that the pie stays fixed, thus ruling out the possibility of "lose a little now, but the pie grows overall so your share grows more to compensate" (the basis for friendly trade relations, basically).
What I realized was that, for people who've been "left out of the benefits of the global economy", that picture makes total sense--the pie didn't grow, and in fact probably shrank for them. Thus, zero-sum thinking makes perfect rational sense. It's an accurate worldview, and anyone trumpeting "the pie will grow, you just need to give up a little more (in increased taxes or jobs shipped elsewhere)" in spite of the evidence that IT HASN'T, must be either a fool or outright lying to them.
Anyways, for the first time I felt myself understanding a little bit how these voters may feel.
It's actually a bit worse than that, from their perspective. What if they see it as someone telling them "sure, the pie will shrink for you, but for me and mine it will grow and I'll get a bigger share of it and you should take one for the team so I can prosper"...
Who would go for that? If it were merely about the pie shrinking, maybe that's just inevitable, and reasonable people would have to concede that it must shrink. They feel as if there is an element of fraud in the proposals that are made. Rather than miscalculation, rather than misfortune.
Their pie shrunk, because they have nothing of value to offer. And instead of buckling down and figuring out how to provide value and making things better for themselves, they have decided to ruin everything for everyone (themselves included!) Coal mining is dying, and it isn’t coming back, not because of some liberal agenda, but because renewable energy is a better business model. Car manufacturing has been automated and/or shipped overseas, because no one wants pay a premium for a shitty car, just because it was made by Americans.
But, instead of focusing on spinning up solar panel production factories or cutting edge automation in automobile manufacturing or funding world class universities to reskill people in things the modern world needs, they’d rather double down on their protectionist agenda while blaming the liberals, despite it being 100% their own fault. Fucking over the liberals might make them feel smug, but the conservative position is worse, because now there isn’t the remote possibility that they can get government funding for all these “socialist agenda items”, never mind that it would actually help them.
I’m not saying you’re defending their position, but I am saying that they need to get over themselves, because that’s the only way things get better for them. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying things don’t suck for them. I’m sorry for them that life is hard, and things change. It would certainly be nice if we could just do the things we’re used to and like forever without needing to adapt. But shit changes, and being mean to trans people or whatever just isn’t going to make their lives better, it’s only going to make every one else’s worse too. We rely on each other. We have no choice not to. So instead of being antisocial, they need to grow up and join the rest of us in the society we’re trying to have.
>Their pie shrunk, because they have nothing of value to offer.
They were a member of a club, and that club was rich and they deserved to enjoy the results of that. But then other people tricked them into letting a bunch of other people in the club, and selling off the club's assets at the same time, until their share was diluted to nothing. Then the same people who pulled this trick come to them and say "you have nothing of value, you deserve to starve". And some of those people pretend to be the other side "just implement marxism, so you can have your fair share of nearly nothing".
>or funding world class universities to reskill people in things the modern world needs,
Those universities have nothing to do with that. Go talk to those people, they don't want to "become vocational schools". Not when there's so much grift money to be made bringing in foreigners on student visas.
>but I am saying that they need to get over themselves, because that’s the only way things get better for them.
Nothing gets better from here on out. This is terminal decline, and the two (or more factions) who are at war here couldn't even stop it if they cooperated for some reason.
>I’m sorry for them that life is hard,
Not really. But even if you could shed a genuine tear for them, I think it's going to be short-lived when you discover that you're in much the same boat as they.
>and join the rest of us in the society we’re trying to have.
The society you're trying to have is dying. The first rule of societies is that they absolutely must make more generations of people who will then (and soon) become that society. The society you're trying to have thought you could all upload your brains into robot bodies or something and forgot that. And now it's dying, and nothing can save it. These people aren't trying to "be mean to trans people", they were hoping the kindergarten teacher wouldn't groom them into becoming infertile. They were hoping for grandchildren, against all odds.
Though it's (a) smaller share of GDP compared to the 'good old days' of the 1950-60s, and (b) does not need as many workers because of automation. This is true in a lot of industries: various seaports have never imported/exports more goods, but have fewer dockworkers than decades ago because of containerization and giant cranes.
Though one problem is of 'concentrated loss': if a town/area was dependent on one factory (or industry), then it could be especially heavily hit because of that single point of failure.
And so… they vote for the cheaper goods and killing their towns more?
> the voices that could be used to shape a better platform for the Democrats next time.
The Democratic platform has been around providing succour and training to rural areas for several election cycles, Clinton’s campaign included 30 billions in infrastructure, training, and redevelopment, as well as healthcare and pension safeguard for coal counties.
And how has that been working out for those communities? Democrats have been in office for 5 of the last 9 administrations. Wealth inequality is as high as ever during that time period. Whether it’s because their platform isn’t actually meant to benefit them, or because of incompetence by the party in implementing it, Democrats haven’t proven to be any better to them than Republicans.
How is it benefited these communities? They can get health insurance now, and Biden kicked off a manufacturing boom (as long as DOGE doesn't kill it). Sure, that's not enough to immediately fix everything, but it's steps in the right direction.
The Democratic platform has been particularly tone deaf and ineffective for rural areas dependent on resource extraction industries. Federal grants won't fix the fundamental economic problems. When Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden told unemployed coal miners to learn how to code that didn't go over very well.
> Federal grants won't fix the fundamental economic problems.
The economic problems are that once a location reliant on extractive industries gets too expensive (and / or gets automated leading to orders of magnitude cuts to the necessary workforce) it's not coming back, the companies either fold or leave. Europe has coal countries which folded a century ago. Once your coal is too far to be cheaply extractible, even if new tech made extracting it viable once again it almost certainly would not need anywhere near the same level of crewing. And reactivating an old mine is probably not worth the cost over upgrading mines which are still active.
So your only "fixes" are to flee the area or move to a new industry. And to do the latter, you need a way to kickstart the change. That's the goal of federal grants.
The recovery of extractive areas is difficult, and may not even be possible if too dependent. And it certainly does not happen by clinging to the extractive industry which left you behind.
Don't you see how that platform is more patronizing than "I'll bring the jobs back home"? It's far more appealing to hear that your jobs were taken by cheap Chinese labor than to hear that your skills are out of date and you need training.
It doesn't actually matter in this case who is right—as I said, they're wrong about the medicine—what matters is who understands the human beings who vote better. And Trump understood these people better than any member of the establishment in either party, which is why he was able to hijack one and defeat the other.
Inventing stories about how half the country just wants the other half to hurt won't help win the midterms and the next presidency. We have to get past that and actually look at what Trump voters truly believe, then speak to them as real people, not strawmen.
I may be old fashioned, but it actually does matter who is right. Because reality is a thing.
Being a leader means understanding the reality of a situation, developing a strategy, and understanding where people are so you can get them on board and all work together to improve things.
It does not mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power for yourself while making their situation even worse.
It does not mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power for yourself while making their situation even worse.
It does mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power to do whatever you wanted to do. Their prejudices are the real part of reality.
This is such an important point, and why I believe the Dems constantly "get owned".
Frankly, everyone has prejudices, some stronger than others, but the Dems made it part of their ethos that if you even acknowledge having some of these prejudices that you're a bigot. But their fatal flaw is the Dems convinced themselves that very few people harbor these beliefs.
Very real strategic case in point: I think it sucks that this is our current reality, but the American populace at large has now shown multiple times that they are not willing to elect a woman from the managerial class as President. It's not just Dems (e.g. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris) but Republican women have also been rejected multiple times (e.g. Nikki Haley, Carly Fiorina). I am not in any way saying being female is the only reason these candidates were rejected (indeed, I think one flaw on the Democratic side is that they pushed this "they just hate women" narrative too strongly), but in a ~50/50 electorate, a few percentage points makes all the difference.
So the problem for the Dems is they want to appeal to this "higher nature", but, again, as much as I may personally not like to believe this, I strongly think that if they put forth another woman at the top of the ticket in the near future that they will lose, again.
Before you can be a leader people have to follow you, and in democracies people have to vote for you. And the unfortunate reality is that reality doesn't matter for elections, only the perception of reality matters.
So if you want to be a leader, you have to start by understanding people and, yes, pandering to them. There's a reason why too many of our powerful politicians have been essentially indistinguishable from sociopaths.
Yes, the question is what end are they devoting their sociopathic skills toward? And isn’t it the most “patronizing” thing of all to believe that people are too stupid to see that when they vote?
So far Trump 2.0 has done exactly what he promised he would, and his supporters are quite happy. If his actions don't lead to the outcomes he promised that may change, as long as someone else who understands the needs can offer an alternative.
I think we did that experiment in November, and it doesn’t support your assertion that people suddenly turn into rational performance evaluators after the election (or in this case an entire first term).
In any case, this time around the likelihood is Trump will be long dead (of natural causes, I mean) before the impact of this election is realized. The change happening right now is generational in scale. The voters’ children will be reading this chapter in their history book and asking what on earth they were thinking.
> I may be old fashioned, but it actually does matter who is right. Because reality is a thing.
Is that a position you hold consistently? Is there anything you believe that you wouldn’t be swayed on when presented evidence to the contrary of your belief?
I ask, because there is an awful lot of mainstream Republican and (here’s the controversial bit) Democrat thought that simply has no basis in reality.
All humans do that. The question is, do you want elect someone who seems to be better at perceiving reality according to evidence than yourself, or worse?
Well, then you have to fall back on whether one of them is at least better at it than the other, and it’s hard to believe that would be a difficult decision at the moment.
Unless the election already has an obvious winner so your vote doesn’t matter, that’s just silly. Write an editorial if you’re unhappy with the choice, but don’t throw away your vote and just roll the dice as if you’re indifferent to the two alternatives. (And if you really were indifferent to the alternatives this time around, I don’t know what to say.)
I’ve been typing these comments on my phone. But, in any case, I don’t parse “democrat” as an epithet. You are looking for things to be offended about.
"I'll bring the jobs back home" seems vastly more patronizing to me. That's just telling people they're stuck with their lot and shouldn't try to improve their situation because daddy GOP will take care of them.
The reality is most people are stuck with their lot, and that’s the point. These people understand the reality a lot better than the people making promises of retraining.
>It's far more appealing to hear that your jobs were taken by cheap Chinese labor than to hear that your skills are out of date and you need training.
Training for what? What if our population of working age people is far larger than our economy's ability to absorb whatever sort of service worker you imagine they should be training to become? Given a fixed total population, there's only room for x masseuses or y graphic artists. If we have n unemployed people needing training, and that number is higher than x and y combined (for any sort of x and y), telling them to retrain doesn't solve their problem. Some are going to lose out. The truth of the matter is that by offshoring manufacturing, we created an economy where there is a surplus of ultimately unemployable people.
A message of training isn't just bullshit, it's transparent bullshit. Most people have an intuition that this is the case, after all. As for midterms, both the Republican and Democratic parties have a different strategy. They will simply import voters who will vote for them. H1Bs for the GOP, and the remainder of the naturalization pipeline for the Ds. It's slow, but they're willing to put in the longterm effort.
Training for construction and manufacturing jobs. A lot of HN users don't seem to realize this but the USA is re-industrializing at an accelerating rate as the globalized system breaks down. The electric grid is growing fast due to higher demand including generation, transmission, and storage. The chemicals and plastics industries are booming due to cheap natural gas from fracking. Ocean shipping routes are getting slower, more hazardous, and more expensive. China's labor cost advantage is eroding due to demographic collapse and horrendous central planning policies (the USA has its own challenges in those areas but overall we're in better shape).
Yes I too have read the Peter Zeihan worldview but let me present the alternative worldview just to provide another viewpoint: The Chinese are amazingly industrious and won't take this challenge lying down.
The Musk supporters feel that universal automation is coming fast and I bet the Chinese being as industrious as they are will seize upon that to make up for their demographic issues. They are already he world leaders at renewables and nuclear and regardless, their ability to ramp up carbon based fuel sources is second to none.
Meanwhile the US appears to have an okay demographic pyramid(especially compared to their peers) but birth rates are declining and all the ingredients to increasing birthrate are not in the upswing (good incomes, cheap real estate, stable governance). Now you are killing off the US's golden goose (immigration) it seems like you are repeating the mistakes of China.
>Training for construction and manufacturing jobs.
Hillary famously said "those jobs aren't coming back". I do not know if she was incorrect in that, but I suspect she might have been right. I don't see a viable path to that happening, and I've yet to hear anyone else describe such.
Again, it doesn't really matter if you like them or think they're mature in their attitudes and approach, they've now proven that you can't win elections without them. Figure out how to appeal to them or watch us descend into decades of Trumpism.
... but appealing to them would mean descending into decades of Trumpism, because that's what they want.
They don't want to be appealed to, nor do they intend to compromise. They want to tear down everything I value, burn it to the ground, piss on the ashes and put me up against the wall. I know this because they've told me precisely that, and have been telling me that for nearly a decade. They've been very vocal and clear about what they want, and it isn't to be understood, or to meet anyone halfway.
I'm tired of being told that I need to capitulate and surrender and understand why I deserve the bullet. Fuck that, and fuck them.
See, this is exactly why I felt the need to speak up. Trumpism isn't what they want, it's just the closest thing to what they want that's been offered. And if you let Trump be the only person who speaks to them for the next 10 years, you might actually find they they begin to believe that it is in fact the real thing.
The economic woes come first, and it's still not too late for a left-leaning populist to take charge of the Democrats and give the people what they need while protecting minorities and LGBT folks. The only way we get to the social justice disaster that people are predicting is if we all collectively throw up our hands and write off 50% of the voters as a lost cause.
The trouble with this argument is that if what they want is to keep the coal mines running, no one can give them that. If it’s a disqualifying event to tell them that fact and offer to help, then it seems like we’re on a dead-end road. The election goes to the people who lie about it to gain power and still do nothing about it, or make it worse.
E.g., the party who actually succeeded in doing something about health insurance just lost to the party who did everything in their power to stop it, and who immediately decided to decimate Medicaid when they took over. So you can give the people what they need and still get punished for it.
We've been hearing what they are asking for and what they are saying. The push back that Romney and McCain got from their own voters because they wouldn't attack Obama as a foreign Muslim. What will it take for people to believe that people who state "He's not hurting the people he's supposed to be hurting" actually want to hurt people. We don't want the same things with different paths to get there. We have fundamentally different values.
I like how Trump is not what they want only when there is a need to deflect the blame. But when someone needs to deflect blame from Trump, then he is doing exactly what his voters want.
And somehow, when left and democrats are doing something bad, left and democrats are to be blamed. And when conservatives or right do something bad ... left and democrats are to be blamed.
> The economic woes come first
No they do not. Trump does not make economy better, you know it, they know it, I know it. It is not about removing fraud or corruption, Trump is fraudster and they know it, you know it and Trump himself knows it.
It was a stream of lies and hate that won and people voted for. It has nothing to do with economic policies that could help these people or not. Pretending to yourself that some rational policy can counteract it is how you loose.
Trumpism is what they wanted. It's what they voted for. They made it their identity, religion and basis for their worldview.
Not one of them could name a single policy position Kamala Harris or Joe Biden had. Part of the reason for that is the dismal and pathetic ability of the Democrats to actually sell themselves, because they assumed just not being Trump would be enough. It should have been, but it wasn't, because Americans are the worst. But the other part is that Trumpists wouldn't have listened, nor would they have cared, regardless of what was offered. They were never going to listen to a "left-leaning populist." These people thought Hillary Clinton was a baby-eating Marxist. They set up a gallows on the Capitol. They saw the price of eggs was too high and the videogames were too woke and decided they wanted to watch the world burn. That's it.
I want social justice. I want UBI. I want socialized healthcare and education. I want a liberal, secular, social democratic society with robust labor laws, a boring and stable government, and a strong social safety net. I want to spend more of my tax dollars on infrastructure and fewer on murdering brown people for God and the almighty petrodollar. I want feminism and black liberation and gay and trans rights. I want land back. I want fully automated luxury space communism. I want science and scholarship. And a lot more Americans align with my views than the popular narrative would have you believe. We even won the popular vote in 2016, not that it matters. All of these things would help Trumpists more than Trump's own policies. Not that it matters. Hillary Clinton said a mean thing about them one time and the screaming in their head has never stopped. She was absolutely correct, though, and the right could have taken the chance to clean their own house instead of trauma-bonding with the worst elements in their ranks. Not that it matters.
But I can't have that. Obviously not from the Republicans, but neither from the Democrats. I can have whatever Snow Crash Handmaid's Tale cyberpunk dystopian nightmare the orange gibbon and his ketamine-tweaking puppetmaster cook up, and 20 years from now I guess can just die in a ditch of hunger and dysentery because JimmyDingleberry or whomever in Musk's cult of groyper fuckbois deleted Social Security and because vaccines were declared fake and gay in the Soyjak purge of 2030.
These are not rational people, and this is not a rational government. I'm not going to give them the dignity of pretending otherwise.
What you say meshes with my understanding. The crux is how do we even pull up from this? It has essentially been the Republican playbook for the past few decades - the politicians enact backdoored policies that make things even worse, while personally looting and maintaining support with identity politics. Trump's main differences are the lack of usual political decorum, the level to which he's doing it, and how much his actions are openly benefiting foreign powers.
The tough nut to crack is that it is impossible to talk with red tribe voters about any of this! You can sit there and listen, of course. But as soon as you say anything that still addresses their frustration and pain, but yet diverges from their overly-simplistic party chorus, you're now part of the "other" that is eagerly responsible for their problems and will just be reflexively argued with.
And the situation has gotten so bad that lighter touch individual-freedom-respecting solutions (that they could possibly agree with in theory) aren't likely to even work now. For example twenty years ago, stopping the profligate government spending and handouts to banks could have stopped rural economies from continuing to get hollowed out. Allowing deflation in consumer goods would have allowed main street to experience some of the gains from offshoring. Re-setting the definition of full time employment to 40 hours per household per week would have slowed down the financial grindstone.
Instead these days we're basically down to direct government stimulus to create new jobs - directly at odds with the medicine they think they need. Or even worse, completely uninspiring answers like UBI.
What's QED exactly? The comment I'm replying to is saying that
> It doesn't actually matter in this case who is right
because the only thing that's important is whose claim is attractive to the population being pandered to, and that
> I'll bring the jobs back home
is amazing despite being completely nonsensical.
And the're probably right, mind. A lot of the responses seem to agree, just couching it in nicer terms (if barely). I guess putting it in plain terms is not acceptable. As is usually the case.
I know I responded to you once already, but the other thing I wonder is if globalization is really the issue here. There's also an inherent productivity gap between densely and sparsely populated areas. Had industrial jobs not moved to China, they would have moved to the cities.
When people do build factories, which they still do, they build them in or around the cities, not in the country, despite having to pay more for land, labor, and regulatory compliance. If they do locate in the country, they choose a town that has a university and a hospital.
That's not really as true any more. The plastics and chemicals industry is growing rapidly in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and those factories tend to be sited based on easy access to natural gas supplies rather than proximity to cities.
There are committed bigots in the Republican voter base. They’re suburban and rural-rich.
The rural poor Republican voters largely are, at least hypothetically (if you can get through their media bubbles) reachable by the right economic message. They’re not in it for the racism or what have you. That’s the suburban republicans.
Oh you hit the nail on the head! I know these people! I live in their town! A lot of MAGA is not poor, they are actually upper middle class(If I recall correctly one of the Jan 6 people even arrived to do her revolt using a private jet? I might be misremembering that)
I can't ever understand why they have so much hate and bile in them? I'm guessing its just fear of losing what they do have? I don't really know.
Redneck has labor roots, people like Michael Moore explain this in his documentary Fahrenheit 11/9. People have forgotten this history. The term "redneck" has multiple origins, but one significant historical source comes from coal miners in West Virginia during the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. Union coal miners wore red bandanas around their necks as a symbol of solidarity and collective action during their struggle against mine owners who exploited their labor. This protest, known as the Battle of Blair Mountain, was one of the largest labor uprisings in U.S. history, and the red bandanas they wore earned them the nickname "rednecks."
This is happening in other countries as well. It is often the internal periphery (former GDR, rural France etc., poorer parts of the EU) that votes for anti-system parties out of bitterness.
The liberal elites are paying for their inability to keep the societal compact somewhat alive. If too many people don't have jobs and can't find a dentist, they will start a "voter disobedience".
Of course the second order effects will be huge, but it is, in a sense, necessary development. A democratic country has to be able to keep a majority of its people reasonably satisfied and well-off.
This seems to me more like simplistic attempt to quickly find the reason.
In my poorer corner of Europe we vote for these "anti-system" parties for more than decade. One could argue that they actually are the system. And somehow when in the US every other time "anti-system" sentiment gains the rule (often without popular majority) people see it as deep trend while when other side wins then no-one is saying that "people like globalists". Because I think that it is not really the cause in both cases.
I think it was already 20 years ago when a French sociologist whose name I have forgotten showed that the share of vote for the Front National clearly correlated with various negative economic variables, including "distance from the closest still functional railway station".
FYI I don't believe in "THE REASON" or "THE CAUSE" and I am wary of people who reduce complex issues such as voting patterns to one single root cause, but to deny that economic hardship is a significant factor in anti-system vote seems to be wishful thinking to me.
Show me a relatively rich neighbourhood or voting district (say, over 130 per cent of average national GDP) with above average anti-system vote share, anywhere in Europe. I don't think you will find it. People who have a lot to lose don't rock the boat.
That's a very very partial picture of it. There's a lot of hate about social change, people are terrified of trans people and that has been effectively turned into a culture war issue.
Also your economic story doesn't hold water. The Biden administration successfully placed tons of factories all over the country with tax incentives for clean energy, but those factories could never trumpet what they were doing because hate for Democrats and for Biden and for clean energy is stronger than any desire for jobs. Similarly the destruction of the CHIPS act and its unpopularity in rural areas also shows that the economic opportunity aspect is just an excuse for the cultural hate that has been worked up.
The best way to understand a Trump supporter that I have come to is a person that hates Democrats more than anything, and will do anything possible to bully them, including the economic destruction of the country. I have a lot of family like this, and for years I thought they were just joking or exaggerating about their hate, but the past year has shown me that they were earnest. It's not the 1990s anymore, this is a visceral culture war above all else.
For no reason. Trans people aren't doing anything but trying to live their lives but the concept of being trans disrupts their view of the world. People fear what they don't understand and because they don't understand the real reasons for their struggles, everything they don't understand can be conflated by a confident liar saying they are related.
Possibly the most succinct summary has been sitting in pop culture for a quarter century but how it could apply to real life never clicked with most people: "Fear is the path to the dark side"
> The Biden administration successfully placed tons of factories all over the country with tax incentives for clean energy, but those factories could never trumpet what they were doing because hate for Democrats and for Biden and for clean energy is stronger than any desire for jobs
Nothing has changed here. It's doesn't matter what they've claimed they're doing, there are still no jobs here and working class Americans feel abandoned.
The vast majority of Trump voters around here voted for him because of the economy. The trans stuff was seen as evidence that the Democrats were so wrapped up in first world problems held by a tiny minority that they didn't even notice that the majority of the country was actively struggling to make ends meet. It's not about the trans people, it's about the narrative that Trump shaped about how that related to these people's economic lives.
IMO - the trans stuff feels like a moral panic, like on the same level as the Satanic Panic of the 80's - or the violence in video games panic, or any number of other things - I'm just waiting for the storm to blow over.
All of this is made much worse by social media too, which fans the flames hotter than it ever could have been before.
I'm not American, but the issue I saw time and time again from Americans getting interviewed by various news organizations was inflation, specifically food prices. So many people said that food was cheaper when Trump was president, so they want him and his food prices back. This is of course totally disregarding that the rest of the world also had massive inflation, and most of it comes from increased oil prices because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and governments printing money to use for Covid stimulus. The tariffs probably didn't help either, but I don't know how many of those Biden kept so I don't know if any side can be blamed there. I doubt all these new tariffs will help though.
I actually saw a couple people saying that they've received a check from Trump during Covid, and mentioned that as a clear reason to vote for him. I thought it sounded dumb when I saw that he insisted on having his name on the stimulus checks, but apparently it worked. I also saw some people, southern women and big city black men, saying that they definitely didn't want a female president. That was probably part of why Hillary lost, and making the same play this time wasn't very wise from the democrats, although I would probably blame Biden for not dropping out earlier and leaving them very little choice.
Maybe its more relative prices have gone up. Europeans were already used to paying more so paying even more is part of the norm. However things have been really cheap in the US for a long time. Taking the inflation as a whole(ie. not just looking at egg prices) this is likely the beginning of a long term permanent inflation that is coming due to things like China possibly aging out of manufacturing and the replacements being more expensive. People think they can turn back the clock so they try. Eventually they will be forced to get used to the new reality.
In the last 30 years, which other nominee for president by one of the two parties that matter has made addressing the struggles of working class America the center of their platform?
No, they're the byproduct of a failed educational system and culture of unearned entitlement. They expect others to save them from drug addiction while doing every possible to prevent help. And they only have this power because of the Senate represents land instead of people.
I applaud you for trying, but HN doesn't want reason or understanding w.r.t trump or his voters. Way easier to label everyone/everything as fascist nazis and stick your head in the sand.
Thanks. I know. I'm here every few weeks with a fresh attempt. It went over better before the inauguration, but now that Trump is actually implementing the policies that he campaigned on it's a bit harder for people to stomach the idea that his voters are anything other than orcs.
I'll probably give it a rest here for a few more weeks.
Nah, there are plenty of us here, we've just mostly gone underground in the face of the mindless hate and anger that's been dominant the last month or two. Echo chambers are self-reinforcing that way.
>No, that's not it. I'm writing this from rural America in deep Trump territory, and people here are already struggling and have been for years. From their perspective they've been left out of the benefits of the global economy—the big cities and the coasts might be better off, but the middle of the country wants to go back to when they had opportunities and jobs for working class Americans.
But they haven't, they're just completely uninformed about what they're getting. If you think ANY of the rural farming communities could continue to exist without significant federal subsidies, you're crazy.
Ask a farmer whether globalization has helped him or not the next time China retaliates to a tarriff by refusing to import any US soybeans and you'll quickly discover that it has absolutely helped them.
Globalization is less the cause of their issue, it's deregulation. Consolidation of manufacturing has killed plants in those small towns. Consolidation of groceries[1] has made it impossible for small-town grocery stores to survive on their own. Both can be traced back to Reaganomics.
Are the Democrats at fault for not attempting to reverse any of that? Absolutely, but the answer isn't: we need someone who wants even more consolidation and to kill all international relations.
Grew up in the midwest and still have a lot of ties there. You left out the absolutely gargantuan amount of right wing crazy propaganda that has all of them hating democrats and "The Left" and "socialists" to death. The most religious literally believe the Democrats are evil and want to destroy America. They've been harping on that for 40 years.
There are always some fraction of nutjobs in any coalition, but in my part of the Midwest that is a tiny fraction of the voters. Most are just tired of change and tired of feeling left behind. To the extent that they're riled up by that rhetoric it's because it gives them a place to put their economic frustrations.
In my experience, the average Trump voter is far more accepting than the average leftist, who will refuse to even engage with you if you think differently than they do.
This has not been my experience growing up in a rural America. Sure leftists might try to cancel you online.
But I got my face punched multiple times for not preforming masculinity in a way that they found acceptable or for standing up for someone smaller and weaker.
How big a role did race and religion play? I'm genuinely curious because the mainstream media won't talk about it, perhaps out of a sense of political correctness. But it seems odd that they're framing the election as a referendum on economics, when the Trump campaign didn't even float a coherent economic agenda.
As I mentioned in another thread, the Republicans switched from "the immigrants are stealing your jobs" to "the immigrants are stealing your cats."
It played a role in giving people an outlet to attach their anger to, the same as it did in 1930s Germany. But the economics came first and are still dominant in the majority of Trump voters I speak with. The vocal minority pushing the racism and anti-LGBT stuff are not representative.
It's like you and I are reading from the same book! - If I just go off what I see online, most of the loudest anti-trans voices, and most of the racists, I'm more or less convinced have never met or gotten to know any trans people or any black people. It's a certain amount of willful ignorance on their part.
I don't think it's plausible, on the face of it, that the party would risk transparently directing the full force of its campaign message to an insignificant fringe. Maybe they know the composition of their voting base better than we, who are inclined to only see the best in people, do.
All my employees are Trump supporters and Trump got 75% of the vote in my county.
They want the 70s-80s economy back, but they don't want to support unions.
They think they deserve to receive government benefits. But others are moochers, and they don't deserve it.
They think Trump is deporting criminal / drug cartel illegal immigrants.
My state is red (State houses & governor have been conservatives for the last 30 years). Yet they blame all the issues on democrates. When my state signed the carry law, they thought Biden was the one who signed the law.
If you are in the deep trump territory, listen to conservative/religious radio stations. You will know how much hate they are spreading against liberal, trans, gays, and immigrants.
> If you are in the deep trump territory, listen to conservative/religious radio stations. You will know how much hate they are spreading against liberal, trans, gays, and immigrants.
You have to distinguish between the rhetoric being spread to hijack the economic woes and the actual root of the problem. All that stuff is designed to give people an outlet for their very real economic frustrations. It's not deep seated (yet), it's a tool to exploit them. The only reason why it's working is because these people have been ignored for too long by the establishment in both parties, and it's not too late to respond and adapt.
But what is Trump saying/doing that's addressing their concerns? Cutting taxes for the rich? Tariffs? Renaming the Gulf of Mexico? Killing trans/gay rights?
The closest is his anti immigrant rhetoric but my guess is that this will largely hurt farmers (although maybe they know better than I do).
> Downvoting people who actually understand Trump voters and try to vocalize their needs and perspectives just silences the voices that could be used to shape a better platform for the Democrats next time. You won't win elections by fighting a straw man invented by your echo chamber.
Living in Trump country doesn’t give you any extra credibility. I also live in “Trump Country” and say that the real reason is because they’re all goofs that fell into a personality cult due to the decline of US education and this country’s obsession with celebrity. Who is correct?
> people who actually understand Trump voters and try to vocalize their needs and perspectives just silences the voices
We’ve been falling over ourselves trying to understand these poor misunderstood Trump voters for nearly 10 years now. We’ve all heard these rationalizations many times before.
That's what populists do, everywhere including Europe - they take real issue and low-income & low-education folks (usually big overlap), tell then how they were wronged, play on their emotions, dumb down things to us-vs-them yada yada.
But they never ever deliver any real solution. Never. What trump solved in first term? No wall, he was joke of the world for that. No middle east peace - fuck, he made the invasion to Israel by giving Jerusalem official israeli status. Palestinians lost all hope at that point (I know its way more complex than that, I know, but this was the trigger point to go full mental like a cornered animal). Afghanistan withdrawal? Thats his contracts with taliban which made US look so weak they were shooting ducks as you guys and rest of west literally ran away for your life.
To make any successful long term massive changes, you need a steady leadership. trump is the opposite due to his mental & childhood issues, heck he is the epitome of instability. And so he drags whole world into same instability, changing global markets from bullish to bearish within a week, losing literally all friends and allies, globally. No, puttin' ain't your friend and never will be, he is a murderous sociopathic p.o.s. till his last breath.
If simpler folks refuse to see all this and much more and connect those few dots, your idea of babysitting them and hald-holding in ever changing environment is laughable. Even in Europe you guys consider semi-communist we don't do that, we can't do that, its idiotic. This problem is not unique to US in any way and solution ain't what he wants to do. But its so nice to hear all that crap, "I will fix your woes", "the others are to blame for all your issues" and so on. Full on emotions, 0 rationality. Folks, even societies work like that, but get ready China will overtake you sooner than you would like.
I kept thinking he is just a russian agent brainwashed in 80s during his visit to moscow (maybe deep hypnosis or something else), but it seems more and more he is doing massive favors to China actually, since russia is already insignificant globally. I don't mean some pesky tariffs, I mean whole world will realign around China, and he is giving it all to them for free. Bravo.
How much is also the hate on LGBTQ and woke people? Just curious, I see in Romaia the rise of such fascist group that suck on Putin because he also wants the woke and LGBTQ dead and he is a Christian men that kills the assassinated the traitors in the name of God.
The culture war stuff FOLLOWS from economic depression. Once someone is in the financial dumps, they're already angry, and it's easy to redirect that anger to meaningless culture war stuff.
The anti-woke grassroots rhetoric around here is more about how much of a waste of time it is when they should be focused on issues that matter to people's livelihood. It's not hate on LGBTQ so much as irritation that something that doesn't seem to matter (to them) is given so much emphasis while the working class struggles.
It’s… largely being given emphasis by ‘their’ side, though? Which side of the political divide spends all their time going on about trans people? I mean, it’s very much the right.
But is it given so much importance by the politicians?
The reason I ask is that here in Romania the issue is completly fabircated by the social media and amplified by the algorithm. What I mean there was not a single law pro LGBTQ passed in Romania, the educational system is not teaching children about LGBTQ, there are no changes in schools or other places to unixes bathrooms, no forced or assisted transitioning programs.
It is just media with conspiracies like the COVID vaccines makes you gay, 5G makes you gay, Bruxelles wants to make your children gay, Soros wants to make the children gay. There are also staged video with transexuals making a circus and shared on TikTok. So now we have a lot of idiots that actually thinks that we need to surrender to Putin so he can kill the traitors and the gays.
The saddest part is that Biden's infrastructure, manufacturing, and chips work would benefit them a ton. They cannot see cause and effect, and in the end they will get hurt the most.
It's odd to me that you start your post with "No, that's not it", because I think that both your post and the one you are responding to are exactly correct.
You state "the big cities and the coasts might be better off, but the middle of the country wants to go back to when they had opportunities and jobs for working class Americans. ...globalization has not helped them as much as it's hurt them. Cheaper goods don't make up for dying towns."
I 100% agree with that. But I think that many folks are so enthralled with Trump because he was the first politician to really acknowledge this simmering rage, give it legitimacy, and say that it's all those woke, city-dwelling liberals fault. The GP comment says "The best explanation I've heard is that this (almost) half of the US population doesn't care if it hurts a bit, as long as it hurts the other half of the US population more", but that fits perfectly in with your explanation as well. A lot of Trump supporters are pissed as hell about the hollowing out of their communities, and they're looking to bring retribution for those they blame for their downfall (or the ones Trump has convinced them are responsible for their downfall). Heck, Trump even said it loudly and proudly, "I am your retribution."
It doesn't matter that Republicans are slightly more to blame then Democrats in the thinning out of rural places - the folks who live there, IMO, see both parties as the same thing.
They remember how their towns were when they were young, they had a bustling locally owned and operated main street full of commercial activity, they also often had a factory, or mill which provided good jobs too.
Some of the parallel commenters here only think rural = farming, and thats not true. If you look at the Carolinas for example, there were textile and lumber mills - farming there is still more or less as healthy as its every been - but all of those other sources of employment which brought money in from outside of the community are gone.
This story repeats itself in a bunch of places, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Michigan, and across the greater west too.
This rot started well before Reagan though - it's something I've called "the 1971 problem". If you go on a road trip across rural America, you'll rarely see a locally funded building (aka, not a chain store), built after 1971-3 - with the notable exception to this being places with a military base, college, or some other government facility - and I think the causes are multiple here, post vietnam drawdown of forces, détente, the 1973 oil crisis, stagflation, the Nixon shock, then later the so-called peace dividend after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war.
Globalization thru the 80's-90's just made all of these issues worse, and hollowed out manufacturing too - now all of this this effected cities too, to some extent, but as you mention, cities got benefits of globalization - more information economy jobs, greater wealth flowing in from the financialization of everything, which while didnt replace the jobs lost in manufacturing, did replace the wealth generated by it. (there are even more things I've not really touched on - like the steady decrease in local ownership of businesses, and the corresponding civic rot that kicks in when this happens)
There is another issue I also want to touch on here - "jobs for regular people" - for a significant portion of the population, the best job they can hope for is a decent factory job, a job in the trades - or more likely today, a not so great service job. One of the reasons I want to onshore manufacturing is that we need those higher quality jobs to ensure the benefits of our economy are shared more broadly.
I'm a proponent of tariffs as a way to solve this - not what Trump is doing which are penalty tariffs - but what I've called cost adjustment tariffs - tariffs that adjust the price of imported manufactured goods to the same level as if they were made here, where you price in labor differences overall regulatory burden, environmental and climate rules, and other factors - on a fundamental level, I feel it is immoral to export all the externalities from manufacturing to another country (pollution being the primary one I'm thinking of).
While tariffs, even at some low level may result in slower GDP growth. People cannot eat or pay their rent with GDP - a more ideal answer (one I support) is UBI, but UBI doesn't appear to politically possible - and there is also value in being able to do work where you can see the fruits of your labor (both in the physical good you've made - and the pay check you get at the end of the week), for good or for bad, it gives you self worth and a feeling of purpose too.
So I get why rural voters vote for Trump, and its because my side has failed to understand the economic pain that anyplace that isn't a tier 1/2/3 city has experienced over the last 50 years - and what their needs are for the future. In the end, I think Trump will fail them, and probably make everything else worse - but he's the horse that the American people who could be bothered to show up to vote picked (I'll note much to my consternation, that 3m less people voted in 2024 vs 2020).
>(I'll note much to my consternation, that 3m less people voted in 2024 vs 2020).
I wonder how much of that is due to the media and the polls claiming that Kamala had this in the bag? The same way that they claimed Hillary had it in the bag? This would cause people to stay home no?
Also there have been reports of accelerated efforts to disenfranchise voters by challenging their registration and not telling them until election day when they go to vote. A combination of these two things could have swung the election.
> It doesn't matter that Republicans are slightly more to blame then Democrats in the thinning out of rural places - the folks who live there, IMO, see both parties as the same thing.
Yes, and they're very aware that Trump is not a Republican in the traditional sense. It doesn't matter to them which banner he hijacked, they know he's different.
I'm more skeptical of that statement - sure, I think some are aware.
Some are just blind partisans, otherwise those places wouldn't have been voting for team red for the last 35 years or so.
There is also the paradox of the low information voter too, which seemed to have broken for Trump 2:1 - that does concern me some.
Trump also has a huge benefit with low information voters, he spews noise all the time which the news media covers with baited breath.
I call it the "Trump says alot of things" problem - it allowed people to paint whatever they wanted him to be onto him by essentially cherry picking the various things he's said to make up their own collage view of whatever they wanted him to be.
Isn’t that wanting your cake and eating it too? Conservativism rejects progress and changes by definition, so these people purposefully didn’t adapt to changes since the rust belt occurred, and NOW they are so worse off and want blood in the water.
What changes should the Rust Belt have made that would have prevented the gutting of their communities when financiers and board rooms decided to ship their livelihoods to third world countries?
There isn’t a “progress” switch to turn on. The current state of the Rust Belt isn’t because they are full of knuckle dragging idiots inferior to the coasts. It’s because they were dealt the economic equivalent of a traumatic brain injury, and have spent decades trying to recover. Meanwhile, the areas of the country that inflicted this injury on them are now trying to convince everyone that it was their own fault.
I’m as disgusted by Trump as anyone, and would never vote for him. But I am from the Rust Belt and absolutely sympathize with the anger that would make someone want to burn the system down.
Half my family is from the south and I lived in Ohio for years. They could have stopped giving tithes to churches on every corner and giving away their land and resources at pennies to massive corporations that have no allegiance and invested in education and social programs for the long term instead or in addition. The Rust Belt and the South were WEALTHY economies don't ever forget it. You can see the remnants of that wealth in the slave quarters adjacent to every house in certain neighborhoods, the massive plantations, the rusting industrial areas. They HAD money to invest in the past for securing a better future.
I don't necessarily agree with Bernie Sanders about the medicine either, but his diagnosis is correct: the Democratic Party abandoned middle America and the working class, so they abandoned it.
America decided in the 1970s to liquidate its interior and its manufacturing base to make Wall Street rich from the labor arbitrage trade, and did so with the full throated support of both parties.
I live in the outer suburbs of a middle American city. The idea that all Trump supporters are cult members is vastly overblown. There is some of that, but much of his support is exasperation. Rural and working class Americans have nothing to lose and nowhere to go but down. The choice is to vote for Trump or keep watching everyone commit suicide with fentanyl. They know Trump might be full of shit or might not have any real solutions, but they also know Democrats and mainstream Republicans will continue to sell them out.
It's also important to understand that for the most part working class and small town Americans don't want welfare, which is the only thing the Democratic Party (possibly, maybe) offers them. They want jobs. They want to feel useful, to do useful things. Unless you are disabled, accepting welfare is disgraceful. I remember my mom (a lifelong Democrat BTW who hates Trump) feeling humiliated to use food stamps for a brief period when I was a kid. "These are for people who really need them. I don't need them." She worked as hard as she could to get off them. Americans want to do things.
MAGA is as much anti-traditional-Republican as it is anti-Democrat. In fact I know a few Trump voters whose hatred for the likes of Bush II and the Cheneys is greater than for Democrats. It's a third political party that has taken over the corpse of the Republican party that Bush II destroyed.
I didn't vote for Trump because I don't think he actually cares either, and I loathe the man in general. I also have two daughters, and his MAGA movement is full of people who cheer for pro-rape influencers like Andrew Tate or want to LARP the Handmaid's Tale. I can't vote for a movement that is openly allied with such people. Their performative scapegoating of LGBTQ people is gross too, and then there's the crazy autocrat ideologies lurking at the margins. Even if MAGA has some policy points I agree with, the movement is just too intellectually batty and personally disgusting to support.
I see nobody on the US political stage that I actually like. I voted for Harris as a "holding pattern" vote in the hope that something better will appear in the future. It's better to stay with the bad option than to go for obviously worse options. If you look around the world "just shaking things up" with nothing better waiting in the wings usually results in a bad outcome. Successful major political shifts or revolutions require a superior alternative with better ideas.
Do you think they'll be able to observe that prices are higher and their lives are even harder? My greatest concern is that the disaffected voters will be persuaded to go on a "long march," for some sort of "five year plan," that prevents them from reacting to the extreme negative effects.
They're not as dumb as you think. They know tariffs will raise prices. What they think is that tariffs may repatriate manufacturing, leading to more and better jobs and higher wages. Lower prices have resulted from outsourcing, which has resulted in their unemployment and under-employment.
They had a different reaction to price increases under Biden because those were not resulting from pro-American-worker trade policies, or at least were not perceived as such. In reality Biden was doing some things to try to repatriate manufacturing, but these policies were badly communicated if they were telegraphed at all, and they were not enough.
Constantly assuming these people are all just stupid isn't winning back any votes. To be fair: Republicans and MAGA spend a lot of time attacking straw man Democrats and liberals too.
BTW -- I see what they're thinking, but I suspect a lot of repatriated manufacturing will be so heavily automated it will not result in the mass employment gains they're hoping for.
Accepting price increases, agricultural failure and significant hardship because in five years someone might build a factory describes the five-year plan - the real one.
Sure. There are certain similarities between all authoritarian revolutionary movements with populist roots. MAGA shares commonalities with European fascism but also with Leninism and Maoism.
The basic template here is that the people (populism) become so discontented that they see no salvation in any of the existing elites or political movements, so they essentially appoint a dictator or an oligarchy to sweep it all aside in favor of <insert magical thing that will fix all their problems>. The level of naked authoritarianism and brutality varies between these movements -- some are more gloves-on and some more gloves-off -- but they all have an ultimately authoritarian character. The whole thing nearly always backfires into some form of "meet the new boss, worse than the old boss."
>> Except, that's the exact same outcome you get even if you vote for Trump, unless there's something I'm not seeing?
I think you are correct.
Trump promised change and had "concepts of a plan".
Democrats promised more of the same, and then realized that that was unpopular and then threw together a plan that they said would work.
The reality now is that Trump's promised change may or may not help those voters economically, but the accompanying geopolitical disruptions may be worse.
insightful -- you should know that California Senator Dianne Feinstein and husband Richard Blum, personally made a billion dollars from creating the China -> USA cheap goods conveyor belt. Blum also owned oil transportation business. This occurred over the decades between the Oil Shock 70's and dot-com 90s. The trade changes are still playing out.
The way I look at Trump/MAGA is they took over an ineffective, sclerotic Republican party that spent 40 years talking about “family values” while selling off the productive base of the country to globalization and letting rural America rot. The tea-party movement of the late aughts was their last chance to avoid being decapitated. They failed. The Republican party has been hollowed out and is simply not the same entity it was 10 years ago. It has been taken over by a very angry insurgent force.
As I see, the Democrat Party is where the Republicans were in 08/09. They have, perhaps, a few more years of whatever it is they are doing before they similarly get taken over.
Best case scenario: we end up with a new political party (or two) that represent the more sane interests of the old guard and of the population as a whole. Worst case scenario: we end up with two absolutely insane zombie versions of our two legacy political parties fighting for control of the nation.
At least we don’t have more guns than people and a bunch of nukes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I did read "Hillbilly Elegy" and come from a rust-belt city with rural family.
I understand your perspective, but I don't think that explains most of Trump's actions. The (very valid!) critique of globalist profiteering you shared has been boiled down into something beyond economics and into tribalism.
I blame decades of right-wing media dominance on cable TV and rural radio.
_and_Manufacturing_Employment.png){kind=link}
They're almost certainly wrong about the medicine, but their diagnosis isn't far off: globalization has not helped them as much as it's hurt them. Cheaper goods don't make up for dying towns.
Edit: Downvoting people who actually understand Trump voters and try to vocalize their needs and perspectives just silences the voices that could be used to shape a better platform for the Democrats next time. You won't win elections by fighting a straw man invented by your echo chamber.