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.