Friday, August 5, 2016

Trump supporters, Trump, and Hillary

Trump is a mess.  As a friend of mine wrote early on, Trump isn’t a political problem, he is a human problem.  My Republican friends are in a tough spot.  Some of them think they have to vote for him because he is a “Republican” and he isn’t Hillary.  But he is not a Republican - he is an unstable child.

Trump voters are in a mess.  The best thing about the Trump vote is the elevation of the of the Trump voters into the national consciousness.  They are the poor whites who have been left behind by the Free Market forces of globalization.  These folks are no longer seduced by the normal Republican theology of cutting taxes for the rich and deregulation as a way of creating jobs for them.  It doesn’t. It creates great wealth for the upper classes but they get very few crumbs.  Trump voters deserve better than Trump.  All he did was listen to talk radio and Fox News to find out which hot buttons to push to get their support, but he is in way over his head and he doesn’t have a clue, and doesn’t even think he needs to learn anything. 

Trump supporters need both parties to pay attention to them, their pain, and their despair.

Since a substantial percentage of them are of the Appalachian honor society mindset – Scotch-Irish honor driven personalities – they don’t want handouts.  They want work and the honor that comes with honest labor and careers. They don’t see the “elite”, educated experts in both parties, as creating jobs for them. 

Welcome to the Great Recession, and its fallout.  FDR and the Democrats responded to the Great Depression by creating jobs for those devastated by the Depression.  They were government programs, make work programs, much of which provided lasting benefit to the country, from bridges to dams to power plants.  It gave people work, not handouts.  The beneficiaries received pride rather than shame. 

We need the modern equivalent of FDR’s jobs programs today.  Government jobs programs aren’t the answer, but what is?

Well, it turns out Hillary has a plan.  Of course she does.  Hillary always has plans.  Unlike Trump, she is not a walking, talking bumper sticker; she has dedicated her life to thinking about, creating, and managing actual government programs and departments.  

Whoa! say my Republican friends, Government programs?  Saint Reagan said Government is not the solution, government is the problem, so how can a government program solve any problem?  Well, by focusing on the goal rather than the process.

The goal is to lift the middle class - the Trump voters - by creating jobs, work, careers, lives.  You don’t have to have Government paid works programs, you can have a public-private partnerships to create jobs.  It is her infrastructure plan that includes creating an infrastructure bank to finance, public goals, public leadership in dealing with regulatory issues, etc. that finances private industry to build infrastructure.  It is detailed.  It is thought through.  It is smart.  It will work.

It is so good that even the guy who thinks about nothing (except how admired he is), the guy who knows nothing (except what the polls say and how much money he has) decided to offer the same thing, without any detail of course, only better, he wants to double the size of the bank.  What a creative guy!!

Underneath it all is a massive economic change in the world. 

Communism collapsed as a total failure 25 years ago.  What the forgotten white Americans may be shouting at us now is that unfettered Free Market capitalism is a failure too.  They are living proof. They are dying proof, as a matter of fact, as terrible drug addiction and suicides become part of their story. 

Both parties need to face up to the plight of the abandoned working classes, and face up to the collapse of obsolete capitalist dogma and create new models of how to grow the economy, how to grow the middle classes, how to once again create America as a Shining Light Upon the Hill.  

The world needs America’s leadership.  Not the stupid brute force of an authoritarian despot, but the brilliant ideas of a creative economy.  It can’t be Communist because Communism is a brutal failure – for the people.  It can’t be Unfettered Free Market Capitalism because it is also a brutal failure – for the people.

It is time for the Reps to give up their dogmas.  So say the Trump voter. It is time for the Dems to reach out to the powers of private enterprise.  Seems to me that is what Hillary is doing.