On the alleged failure of “liberal progressivism”

The Rawlsian ideal of society as a system of co-operation that both guarantees basic liberties but ensures that society works for the benefit of everyone, and especially the least advantaged, looks further away now than it did in the 1970s.

I’d perhaps like to comment properly on this later but just on this point: I agree the term ‘liberal’ can be slippery but it seems a bit much (for the purpose of washing one’s hands of New Labour, Clintonism, etc?) to try to identify it with the egalitarian component of Rawls’ views. If that were appropriate then the normal description of Rawls as an egalitarian liberal would be pleonastic.

Obviously Mr. Deerin is, on its face, utilizing a very disputable definition of “liberal.”

However, I think a stronger case could be made for something like Mr. Deerin’s argument, although it doesn’t necessarily get to the same conclusion.

My observation is that the New Class (professionals, lobbyists, financiers, teachers, engineers, etc.) have ruled the country in recent decades. For much of the twentieth century this class was in some tension with corporations, and used their skills at influencing government policy to help develop and protect the welfare state, since they needed the working class as a counterweight to the natural influence of corporate money and power. However, somewhere around 1970 I think this tension collapsed, since corporate managers and professionals realized that they shared the same education, background and interests. Vive la meritocracy. This “peace treaty” between former rivals allowed the whole newly enlarged New Class to swing to the right, since they really didn’t particularly need the working class politically anymore. And since it is the hallmark of this class to seek prestige, power and money while transferring risk away from themselves, the middle class and blue collar community has been the natural recipient. Free trade (well, for non-professionals, anyway), neoliberalism, ruthless private equity job cutting, etc., etc. all followed very naturally. The re-alignment of the Democratic Party towards the right was a natural part of this evolution.

I think the 90% or so of the community who are not included in this class are confused and bewildered and of course rather angry about it. They also sense that organized politics in this country–being chiefly the province of the New Class–has left them with little leverage to change any of this. Watching the bailouts and lack of prosecutions during the GFC made them dimly realize that the New Class has very strong internal solidarity–and since somebody has to pay for these little mistakes, everyone outside that class is “fair game.”

So in that sense–to the extent that you define liberal as the ideology of the New Class (neoliberal, financial-capitalistic, big corporate-friendly but opposed to non-meritocratic biases like racism, sexism, etc.) is “liberalism”, I think it is reasonable to say that it has bred resistance and anger among the “losers.” As far as having “failed”, well, we’ll see: the New Class still controls almost all the levers of power. It has many strategies for channeling lower-class anger and I think under Trump we’ll see those rolled out.

Let me be clear, I’m not saying Donald Trump is leading an insurgency against the New Class–but I think he tapped into something like one and is riding it for all he can, while not really having the slightest idea what he’s doing.

Perhaps some evolution in “the means of production” or in how governments are influenced will ultimately develop to divide or downgrade the New Class, and break its lock on the corridors of power, but I don’t see it on the horizon just yet. If anyone else does, I’d love to hear more about it.

If liberal progressivism means political correctness, social constructivism (about gender, race, etc), identity politics, and mass immigration then of course it has grown in influence over the past 30 years. It is wilful blindness to say otherwise.

To give a view from somewhere up past low orbit, where the globe is the size of a boardgame, it comes down to this. The US, or perhaps the 5 eyes countries, are a faction. That faction has two assets that cause it it favor ceetain strategies. One asset is the most advanced military, the other the best high-end educational system.

The strategy for the 40 year-period since the final gasps of formal imperialism has been to use the military only just enough to ensure a playing field on which the educated elite can press their advantage. And of course use the educated elite to develop better weapons.

This strategy is falling apart because the educated are no longer willing to volunteer effort out of patriotism to develop better weapons; hence the F35. And because those who have plenty of patriotism, but no particular globally-marketable skills, are offered no narrative that empowers them, only insulting welfare.

Trumpism increasingly sounds like a viable strategy; start more and bigger wars so that valor is favored over cleverness. Win those wars, and take tribute from the defeated, instead of paying to rebuild them. If you change a regime, change it to a dictatorship; only a dictator can pay tribute.

Arrest your domestic political opponents, or simply have them killed, and you don’t need to worry about meeting the demands of anyone outside your support base. So you have more money to spend on weapons, even if they are not as high tech: F17s and A10s are enough to beat anyone without nukes.

That change of strategy is what people mean when they say the end of ‘liberal progressivism’; the end of the period where the educated were a key strategic resource.

+1 to William Meyer

Adding: that liberal class had its internal factions, one of which started using conservative Christian cultural mores to get votes / funding in the late 70s but never delivered much on policy

The conservative Christians noticed. They’re in power now. And hungry.

“Liberal progressive” is a redundancy. These words have histories

Richard Kline from Naked Capitalism Liberals, Progressives, and Radicals 2011, mostly America but some UK references

Posted without comment, wanting to reread both Kline and Bertram.

I am a very minor part of the Jacobin crowd, but today I think I will visit The New Inquiry at the right and read what their crew of minority women have to say. And I want to mention race in every comment.

ugh, it’s an oxymoron not redundancy. And I spent some time thinking. Sorry.

Meyer at 4 says it well. In my own deep-blue state of Washington, we have two Democratic senators. They have safe seats and don’t face any realistic challenges from the right given voter demographics.

Yet I expect only the most tepid and symbolic action by them to resist Trump’s likely policies. They are already so tied to large corporate interests, including defense contractors, that they will find ample opportunity for compromise, usually getting nothing of substance in return.

Their reputations as liberals rests mostly on supporting social justice issues. I do not mean to minimize the importance of social justice but for these senators it carries no cost or risk. But when it comes to issues of income inequality, foreign policy (remember those defense contractors), substantive action on climate change or single-payer health care they are nowhere to be found. They will fight on trade issues, both being supporters of TPP, validating the view that they don’t care about people working outside of liberal enclaves.

Too many liberal politicians sold out to lip service on identity politics while refusing to antagonize their corporate supporters by pushing for economic changes which might have defused some of the anger and alienation behind Trump’s victory.

Hidari #9
“As I pointed out in previous threads the decline of Empires can be as dangerous as their rise and now that the American Empire is now unarguably in decline sharks will start to circle: indeed they are already doing so.”

How is the American Empire in decline? And how do we measure its decline? Maybe the question sounds naive, but I see lots of comments in threads here and there about purported U.S. decline with no explanation for said conclusion.

I subscribe to Jacobin (and sometimes even get around to reading it) but I hate the way the Jacobin crowd (#notalljacobins) are so contemptuous of liberals. I mean, I get it, but how many radical socialists weren’t ordinary liberals first? Most liberals don’t even don’t know the Jacobin/Dissent/New Left Review world even exists. I don’t see the point in calling fellow leftists liberals, unless you’re talking about Brad DeLong.

Once again the hard left comes crawling out to blame the left’s “distractions” – i.e. women and gays – for the failure of the mainstream left to beat a political movement backed by big money and a belligerent press that has no respect for the institutions of the countries it cannibalizes. No, it’s not the fault of Trump voters that Trump was elected, it’s the fault of the effete urban left!

The best example so far in this thread is William Meyer’s insightful analysis of the “New Class”, which would be perfectly at home on Stormfront if you replace “New Class” with “Jews” and perfectly at home in a Stalinist rag at about 1933 if you replaced “New Class” with “kulak”. And what a masterful stroke – one might call it “culturally revolutionary” – to include teachers in this effete urban class, on a blog for academics. Solid gold win! Here was I thinking that teachers are just ordinary middle-aged, middle class people trying to make the world a better place by ensuring children learn useful shit, when in fact they were agents of a vast and nebulous global conspiracy. Or were they the drivers of it? I guess we can find out once the “means of production” (did you put that in quotes because you understand it’s a buzzword, or because you don’t quite know what it is, or you think it’s a book title?) have been seized. Once all those elitist teachers are in prison we can find out exactly what role they played in this grand conspiracy to stop the white working class from winning!

Here was I thinking that Ms Krstic, my year 12 maths teacher, a nice woman fresh out of teaching college, just wanted to do her best to teach me linear algebra, but actually she was secretly scheming to work out how best to deploy me as a tool in her quest to seek “prestige, power and money”. If only I’d known that the school counsellor who told me about university and helped me achieve my career goals was actually “transferring the risk” onto me!

I mean, seriously dudes, do you read what you write? Do you think about it carefully before you commit this terrible nonsense to the screen? Or do you just open the floodgates and let the stalinist psychobabble come flooding out, without regard for the actual meaning of words and the implications of what you write? Because if this is the best analysis you have of the last 30 years of the left’s political wins and losses, you are not adding anything useful to the struggle.

And can you not try, just once, just please try, to understand that for people from poor backgrounds, for black people, for women and gays, this “lip service” to “identity politics” that Dr. Hilarius sneers at, this effete caring about why people are discriminated against that is a hallmark of “liberal enclaves” and “urban elites”, is the difference for us between a life of no hope and no future, and real self-fulfilment? Not all of us come from privileged backgrounds where we can get self-fulfilment by rebelling against daddy and becoming a socialist – for a minority of people on the left, who grew up poor or black, the welfare state and equality achievements (sorry! “distractions”) that the left has achieved over the past 30 years have been hugely important to us.

So just once climb down from your stalinist high horse and try to think about what you’re saying, and what you’re advocating, and wonder to yourselves why your rhetoric drives poor people and people of colour and non straight people away from your old, white, beardy and decrepit ideas. And then wonder why you consistently say these things about how we need to build a broad struggle and not get distracted, but all the people you want to support you are not listening. It may be that it’s got less to do with us being distracted by our identities, and a lot more to do with the complete and utter rubbish you’re spouting.

It’s worth pointing out we’d be having quite a different conversation if 2 per cent of people in the UK and US had voted differently.

Also, we’ve seen this week a lot of (rueful) mirth from African Americans floating around in our facebook feeds, laughing at how liberal America is expressing shock that America can be so racist as to appoint a fascist like Trump – as if liberal America hasn’t been listening to a certain section of the population and has suddenly noticed something. The same thing goes for the UK – since Brexit we have seen a few posts here from Chris as he comes to terms with the fact that the “British values” he believed in are not actually commonly held. The liberal progressive project is failing in these countries because they are fundamentally conservative – America is radically right wing, a country of god and guns and no free lunch, and the UK is comfortably centre-right. But in countries that are actually progressive – Australia, the nordic countries, Canada – we are seeing Social Democratic projects hold despite sustained global onslaught by the power of capital, and fundamental social structures extended to more out-groups, especially in the form of anti-discrimination laws and gay rights. These countries are also quietly exporting their vision of social democracy, welfare, and governance to developing countries that are carefully skirting around the American and British models and adopting sensible and rational development paths. The world makes progress while its biggest right-wing polities go backwards. This is unsurprising – right wing ideas are everywhere and always bad, and it’s no surprise that a country like America will struggle to achieve UHC 50 years after the rest of the developed world, because Americans don’t want it.

What happened in America was a not particularly good moderate right candidate – a radical, by American standards – lost by small margins in a couple of key states, and thus lost the presidency in a system stacked to protect slave states, and as a result a lunatic got in. It’s no surprise that the system is stacked to protect teh slave states in a country that still reveres a flag that is iconic of treason in defense of slavery, and it’s no surprise that people who still respect treason in defense of slavery enough to erect public monuments in its honour cannot understand the potentially ruinous consequences of Trump. But this doesn’t say much about the global march towards better, more humane, more liberal societies.

‘It’s worth pointing out we’d be having quite a different conversation if 2 per cent of people in the UK and US had voted differently.’

That’s what in soccer the coach of the teams says which has lost because Ronaldo had a bad day.

and otherwise it’s @25

‘But this doesn’t say much about the global march towards better, more humane, more liberal societies.’

“My observation is that the New Class (professionals, lobbyists, financiers, teachers, engineers, etc.) have ruled the country in recent decades.”

What is your definition of ‘rule’?

And…teachers?

(Also you left out ‘lawyers’ but I guess they would grouped into professionals.)

@29, I assume he meant certain professors. Actually on @4, there’s a good chapter on the topic in a Thomas Franks latest.

Yeah, no: teachers? Among educated lefties, teachers, and some types of artists and writers tend to be the least disconnected. Especially teachers, because, you know, they deal with the real lives and problems of a chunk of the population.

Also, the end of the era where educated people were a key strategic resource? That era began, I think, at the latest some time during the Baroque, when administrations required trained and professionalised specialists recruited from a nascent bourgeois class. (The school I went to was founded in the 1740s by a ruler who needed to train up boys to enter his administration. Now, of course, it’s a regular state Gymnasium (university-preparing secondary.) I’m not quite convinced, given the atrocities of the 20th century, that we’re at the end of an era that started then.

Bob Zanelli, I don’t know you, so I have no idea how you normally try to talk with people about liberal values. I approach it similarly to talking about climate change and other badly understood science topics: One step at a time. Right now, obviously, I’m still a little raw and resentful, but I’m practicing saying one thing at a time, calmly and clearly. “You care about the debt, but yet you voted for someone whose program is going to increase it.” (Regardless of the fact that caring about the public debt is the least problem the nation faces.) “The attacks on random Muslims and other people right now is exactly what happened after Brexit. I find it heartbreaking, and Trump isn’t saying anything to condemn them.” “No, Clinton didn’t have people murdered. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet.” “Look, there’s just no basis whatsoever to what you say about Muslims. You live in a remote village … I think you should at least have met a few Muslims and made up your own mind before you say stuff like that.” “It is actually possible most of the time to figure out whether a news report is correct or not.” “We have students who came to this country age 5 and just want to get on with their lives. Do you REALLY think it’s a great idea to rip them from their communities and send them to a country they don’t even know? And that’s what’s going to happen. I’m German. You know what I’ll think about this.” “Obama didn’t come for your guns.” “Well, there’s more to the Constitution than the 2nd amendment. I think all the others are just as important.” Scalzi has some approaches even how to talk about racism. Also, it might help talking with the pinkos that live in rural areas.

They may only be 30% of the population there, but they know what people’s hopes, fears and frustrations are. We had a candlelight vigil today (maybe a little less than 100 people, in the snow, taking turns to talk). Black Lives Matter, NoDPL and arctic conservation topics on the stickers. The driving forces behind it are groups like the Quakers, the Unitarian Universalists, and some Native activists. I don’t really think of “liberal values” as much different from what’s in whichever human rights charter you want to pick. (Liberal politics, and even more liberal-progressive economic policies, sure. But I don’t think we’re talking about defending those so much. Or do we?) 30% even in a red state… who probably know more about talking liberal values than many who live in the centers of liberal power.

@22
‘I mean, seriously dudes, do you read what you write? Do you think about it carefully before you commit this terrible nonsense to the screen?’

I don’t – but in defense of Mr.Meyer – I read what he wrote mainly as ‘it was about time that WE -(however we call ourselves) – show a bit more interest and empathy for our – once major constituency – the workers.

And for sure – that was about time – don’t y’all think?

Chris, I cannot speak for UK liberals, but here is a sense in which liberal hegemony can be used in US politics, wherein free trade and multiculturalism became not only the core platform of the Democratic Party but of politics in general. Those who would critique either were rejected as deviants, irrational, etc. You might say, but George W. Bush! On trade, Bush is as liberal as any other. And as right wing as Bush is, he toed the PC-line and never verged into Trump territory, giving voice to hate. Trump represents an obvious crack in the liberal hegemony. And indeed that crack is partially the fault of the Democrats. They pushed free trade at the same time it undercut the social safety net. They created with the Republicans a true political center defined by the reduction of entitlements and state services. Obama is as guilty here as Clinton, and he bequeathed to Clinton (and Trump) a population of poor and middle class voters who felt that no party spoke to their economic interests (and they were right!). Contrary left voices along the way—Edwards, Kucinich, and Sanders—were either self-imploded, were mocked, or were militated against by the party.

So why does the Jacobin crowd condemn the liberals? Because they know what liberalism, as a philosophical doctrine, is and they saw what it looks like when it’s in power! Liberalism is for individual liberties and tolerance (multiculturalism), free commerce (free trade agreements), and a limited state (reduction of state entitlements and services). Democrats enacted precisely a liberal platform while in power. And in so doing they created an underclass attracted to democratic socialist (Sanders) and authoritarian (Trump) ideas. So yes, I do suggest liberals have a great deal of blame to shoulder going forward, and I hope they can realize that a liberal society with capitalist economy requires a healthy pinch of state socialism.

‘So just once climb down from your stalinist high horse and try to think about what you’re saying, and what you’re advocating, and wonder to yourselves why your rhetoric drives poor people and people of colour and non straight people away from your old, white, beardy and decrepit ideas.’ (faustusnotes, 22)
Here was I, thinking that the recent US elections had been lost by a liberal party who failed to get their supporters to the polls, but apparently what happened was that a stalinist party suffered the defeat and needs to have a hard think about what they have been doing wrong.

Trump got slightly fewer votes than Romney. Clinton got a lot fewer than Obama. 2016 isn’t a story about what liberals did to to turn Trump voters against them, it’s about what they DIDN’T do to turn non-voters towards them. Tons of people of all ages, races, and sexes looked at the two parties and didn’t find anything worth showing up for. (Even among those who showed up in Michigan, the margins between Trump and Clinton was 20k, 90k cast ballots that selected no presidential candidate. Only 40k such ballots were cast in 2012.)

Turning against identity politics or immigration in U.S. is incredibly stupid–unless women and PoC show up you lose. But tons of them didn’t show up! If you can’t get them to turn out against Trump and Pence of all people, that proves pretty damn definitively that identity politics, despite being absolutely indispensable, are also insufficient. We could have used way more economic populism. Maybe full blown socialism wasn’t called for in 2016, but in 2020 I expect us to be in one of two situations: Trumponomics have failed so catastrophically that nothing but massive expansion of government in the economy can expected to fix it, or Trump’s combination of tax cuts, financial deregulation and infrastructure grows the economy but makes inequality much worse and redistribution much more popular.

Anyway, Trump voters are utterly defeatable, stop caring about them. (People who voted for GOP state legislatures are another story–the GOP almost has enough legislatures to pass whatever constitutional amendment they want.). Care more about non-voters!

There are a couple issues where I would suggest Democrats totally change course, though. First is trade deals. The margins were so close in Rust Belt states there’s no question Clinton would have won if there were no TPP. Whatever benefits you imagine new trade deals to have, they aren’t worth Trump. Second is gun control. Just give up. It might not be what gave Trump the win, I dunno, but it definitely turns out more Republicans than Democrats and makes retaking Congress or state legislatures pretty much impossible.

Oh yes Magari, the liberals undercut welfare. You say this after Obama enacted the biggest expansion of the welfare state in 50 years, one viciously opposed at all levels by the republicans. But it’s the liberals fault for bringing in multiculturalism and undermining the welfare state when they expanded Medicaid to 20 million people.

Facts: irrelevant when there are liberals around to take the blame.

I was thinking of Clinton’s welfare law that has dramatically reduced the number of people on the dole. And then Obama’s willigness to bargain away social security (not entirely, but reducing its benefits) to the Republicans as part of a “grand bargain”. Which, luckily, the Republican troll-wing was too purist to accept.

But you’re right about the Medicaid expansion. That was a significant expansion of the welfare state and probably the most important thing Obama did in office. The problem there was that it came with a give-away to the insurance industry, which everyone hated except policy wonks and insurance companies. Meaning, the expansion of Medicaid goes unmentioned, and slips the mind (even mine, and I am a professional student of politics!).

PS: multiculturalism is awesome! I have nothing but praise for the individual liberties of liberalism when it comes to questions of culture.

@33 I disagree that it is paranoia, though would not necessarily endorse the list of professions. It is merely descriptive of the phenomena in both the US and UK of parties of the left, moving rightwards under that assumption that certain economic questions are settled along particular lines.

One of the big results of this was the reluctance to regulate the increased financialisation of everything, even in the aftermath of GFC and the extreme reluctance to intervene on behalf of the poor unless it was via some kind of market driven phenomena.

It’s not just “they”. Something like 65% of Americans view the mandate unfavorably. I suggest that the majority of people hate the mandate (as opposed to Obamacare more broadly) because it forces them to buy a product from a company they despise. It’s bad politics of the very highest register. The Platonic Idea of Bad Politics.

Jesus Christ this kind of mealy mouthed both siderism is incredible. Trump is the dems fault because they didn’t enact perfect welfare laws in a system that was stacked against them for most of the time Obama was in office… Obama thought about compromising on social security and thus trump even though obamas compromise never happened…

The reason we have trump is that a bunch of racist alt right revanchists combined with immoral republicans in an environment of completely saturated anti Clinton media, and too many people didn’t vote because they didn’t understand the danger that was plain as day in front of their face. And part of the reason they didn’t understand the risks was exactly this both siderism we see here. Of course you guys aren’t driving this – you’re symptomatic of a media environment so heavily dominated by the Clinton rules that you don’t even see how vile and untrue the things you’re saying are.

Trump is the republicans and the media’s fault, nothing to do with the “New Class” or the dems’ rightward shift.

Bob Zanelli, I don’t know you, so I have no idea how you normally try to talk with people about liberal values. I approach it similarly to talking about climate change and other badly understood science topics: One step at a time. Right now, obviously, I’m still a little raw and resentful, but I’m practicing saying one thing at a time, calmly and clearly. ”

I think there is going to a lot of buyer’s remorse over this election result. That might work better than trying to reason with the unreasonable

Faustusnotes

The reason we have trump is that a bunch of racist alt right revanchists combined with immoral republicans in an environment of completely saturated anti Clinton media, and too many people didn’t vote because they didn’t understand the danger that was plain as day in front of their face. And part of the reason they didn’t understand the risks was exactly this both siderism we see here. Of course you guys aren’t driving this – you’re symptomatic of a media environment so heavily dominated by the Clinton rules that you don’t even see how vile and untrue the things you’re saying are.

Trump is the republicans and the media’s fault, nothing to do with the “New Class” or the dems’ rightward shift.”

)))))))

Yes I agree. African Americans had low turn out because there wasn’t an African American running so they had low interest They had this pot guy which grabbed a enough one issue millennials to swing the race to Trump in key states , given low democratic turn out and the racist white population was energized because they had someone running they could identify with, that is white, racist, sexist and ignorant. You don’t win votes using logic and evidence. It’s mostly the amygdala at work election time very little reasoning. Stupidity and ignorance are the foot solders of evil.

@52
‘Jesus Christ this kind of mealy mouthed both siderism is incredible. Trump is the dems fault because they didn’t enact perfect welfare’

As a proud American ‘Dem’ I insist that ‘F..face von Clownstick is NOT my fault – but what does that have to do with going to one of the Rust Belt States looking around and coming to the conclusion that we -(not only so called Dems) should have done a lot more to help ‘our’ workers?

Or let’s say it like this: There are kids in Maranello Italy who can’t think about anything better in live than to become a (Ferrari) mechanic and let’s say – if the average Harvard Student would have thought the same – and instead of concentrating on creating facebook -(a completely useless and quite destructive adventure) – would have gone to Detroit and made sure that German luxury cars don’t dominate the US car market – the Rust Belt – a few days ago wouldn’t have elected an Orange Orang Utan as their savior.

So actually it’s NOT Trumps or the republicans or the media’s fault and it might have nothing to do with the “New Class” or the dems’ rightward shift – it’s all because too many Harvard and Yale and Stanford student wanted to become some type of ‘Wolf on Wall Street’ instead of learning how to built a Ferrari – and as a famous Italian Communist once stated: ‘Communism is when everybody drives a Ferrari’ – and if you think this is just too absurd – not as absurd as a fight between the left and the left which side of the left is now guilty about the election of a Fascistic Racist Communistic Birther as President of the Unites States of Trump…

We really need to begin by discarding the claim from the pundits that this represents the “white working class” turning against the Democrats. Journalists have been using this phrase as a shorthand for “white, no college degree”, and now they’ve convinced themselves– plus a bunch on the left who are only too happy to blame Trump on (neo)liberal sellout.

Here’s what the exit polls say:

Clinton won all income groups below the median; Trump won all income groups above the median.

Clinton won all age groups up to 45; Trump won all age groups above 45.

Clinton won people who said the most important characteristic in a President was “cares about people like me;” Trump won with “will make needed change.”

Clinton won with people who said the most important issue was the economy, Trump with those who chose immigration.

Sorry, this doesn’t sound like a revolt of the white working class. This sounds like an essentially reactionary revolt of the old against the young, the well-off against the badly off, whites against non-whites, etc. Them’s the facts.

@45 Layman 11.14.16 at 1:00 pm
Manta @ 35, I’m trying to figure out whether you’re genuinely ignorant of the media antipathy for Clinton and how it manifested itself in this election cycle; or whether you’re just assuming that pose.

“Donald Trump is unfit to be president”:
Huggington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/davidhalperin/electoral-college-can-sto_b_12899016.html
NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/opinion/donald-trump-unfit-to-command.html
Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/10/20/the-three-times-donald-trump-demonstrated-he-was-unfit-for-the-presidency-in-last-nights-debate/

Should I continue?

One of the clever things the right does when it talks about “liberals and progressives” is to say they’ve had this locked down control for thirty or forty years. The truth is, America hasn’t had a liberal in the White House since LBJ, and the Dems in Congress started running away from their “liberal” legacy soon after.

It’s clever, because even though the Dems have governed from the center-right whenever they’ve had power since the 1960s — including Clinton and Obama — they can blame our economic travails on “the left,” when it actually had zero to do with the economy. It is, in fact, the absence of a real left that has us where we are today, and this led to Trump. This led to those white rural voters, blaming everyone but the folks really responsible for their troubles:

Corporations, billionaire businessmen and women like Trump, and the two major parties that helped them screw us over.

So, naturally, the smartest thing to do is to elect one of those billionaires, who ran as a Republican, a party that’s even worse than the rotten, no-good, terrible Dems. Just. Brilliant. And contrary to all of their talk about “throwing a brick through the window,” we’re just going to get the same old same old GOP we’ve always had, though without any constraints on their toxic agenda.

Counting on Medicare, for instance? Better make other arrangements, cuz Ryan will privatize that out of existence in the first ten days.

Clinton would have been awful. But Trump is truly going to be catastrophic.

Mark H 11.14.16 at 5:32 pm

What happened in America was a not particularly good moderate right candidate – a radical, by American standards – lost by small margins in a couple of key states, and thus lost the presidency in a system stacked to protect slave states, and as a result a lunatic got in. It’s no surprise that the system is stacked to protect teh slave states in a country that still reveres a flag that is iconic of treason in defense of slavery, and it’s no surprise that people who still respect treason in defense of slavery enough to erect public monuments in its honour cannot understand the potentially ruinous consequences of Trump. But this doesn’t say much about the global march towards better, more humane, more liberal societies.=

)))))))))

Well said Mark, exactly right

Bob Zanelli, #54 and 56:

We don’t reason with the unreasonable (if that’s what they are) because doing so comes with such a high reward. We do because not doing so comes with such a high punishment.

Also, as far as I know we don’t yet have good turnout figures by race. It seems quite premature to me to claim African-American turnout was low. The last times, African-American women were the single highest turning-out demographic. Despite the fact — as would have been expected — African-American turnout will have been lower this time than when the first African-American president was elected, I don’t expect it to be low. Also, voter suppression in NC, Ohio, and apparently Wisconsin is a thing.

Manta: “Should I continue?”

Well, you’re just moving the problem. I no longer wonder if you’re striking a pose (the answer is yes). Now I wonder if you’re ignorant of the fact that it could be true both that the media said Trump was unfit and that they relentless hounded Clinton with pseudo-scandal stories; or if that, too, is a pose.

Layman@45

Incredibly, it appears that Manta is indeed unaware. He responded to you by citing ati-Tump articles. Manta, that’s not point. Sure, the media in the end came out against Trump. Layman was talking about the campaign-long media obsession with Clinton’s emails, the constant references to her as a “deeply flawed candidate,” etc.

Chiming in after Omega Centauri… this outcome happened in a complex situation with many causal elements. Among them, the authoritarian populist’s tools of propaganda. Fear-mongering works, and affirming not just untruths (which they did with abandon), but the opposite of the truths they needed to deflect from (“the media is giving Hillary an unfair advantage”, “elections are rigged against my voters”, “Hillary is the real abuser of women”) works.

(I admit I feel a little vindicated, because from the moment I heard Trump’s RNC speech I was in the “PLEASE throw everything there is behind Clinton – hateful foreign policy or not, squishy rich soft liberal or not” camp. It didn’t go over well here on CT.)

Chris S: One group that didn’t vote for Clinton as much as they did for Obama (or voted for Trump more than for Romney) was white voters. This is something to consider. Obama tried to leave race out of his argument, though when pressed and in trouble, he gave that big speech in 2008. (Clinton should have taken a leaf out of his book to evacuate some of the attacks against her – but yeah, big rhetoric isn’t her strong point.) With Romney, I think both colluded in not bringing it up. Colorblind – let’s play pretend. Someone also remarked that in 2008, Clinton practically ran as a man. Now of course, Clinton very much ran as a woman. She defended late-term abortions right in the debate (against the ridiculous notion that they consist of ripping 9-month old fetuses out of women’s wombs a week before due date, but still). Her program contained many of the basic social protections that are commonplace in Western Europe and benefit women at least as much as they benefit men. She also grasped Obama’s diversity legacy (which he HAD developed outside campaigning .. .and he also started talking about race a lot more) with both hands. Mentioned implicit stereotypes. This was a lot bolder than anyone I saw at this level. So… this is the sense in which the aspect “this was a referendum about white supremacy” has a ring of truth. Not the only or the whole truth, but a strand of it.

Yeah, I don’t think the exit polls are really compatible with the idea that this election was just about racism, at least when we’re trying to explain why 2016 was different from 2012.

But more important there is something that all factions need to understand here: exit polls are garbage: http://www.latinodecisions.com/blog/2016/11/10/lies-damn-lies-and-exit-polls/

I don’t know if I’d necessarily blame “neoliberalism” or a “rightward shift” in Democratic party ideology for what happened, but two things seems absolutely clear to me:

Clinton was such a terrible candidate that all of the institutions that enabled her path to the nomination owe us an apology and must be reformed. No, the media did not treat her fairly when talking about things like the emails and the Clinton Foundation, but those problems were due entirely to avoidable decisions on her (or Bill’s) part. She’s uncomfortable speaking to large crowds. And she made terrible campaign decisions (next time visit Wisconsin!!!). Even with the media, running against Trump should have been extremely easy for any Democrat. This was Clinton’s to lose.

The other is that if you want another Democratic wave election like 2008 (and if you don’t want to live in permanent one-party government we need one soon), you’re gonna to have to explain to disheartened voters why everything will turn out better than 2009. If Obama had gotten everything he promised or wanted–public option, larger stimulus, card check–maybe the last eight years would have gone very differently. But other failures were purely executive branch–unprosecuted bankers, none of the bailout money going to distressed homeowners.

There’s an excellent report here which I got from the excellent Mark Blyth’s Twitter feed. Points out a few things that render some of the points made above moot.

‘The reason Trump won should be obvious to anyone who pays attention to the electoral map rather than exit polls.

The Rust Belt revolted against the rolling out of a neoliberal New Economy and multicultural society.

The Rust Belt has a lot of black people, but few Latinos. When workers were in unions alongside others who had different color skin, holding together a viable multiracial working class coalition was possible. But unions have been destroyed, with the Democratic Party complicit, and stunning economic decline has made it easy for narratives of zero-sum competition between different social groups to take hold. Democrats have offered precious little to prevent people in the Rust Belt from feeling embattled and forgotten. More to the point, the Clintons are avatars of free trade, financialization, and identity politics, a triumvirate of characteristics that associates them pretty directly with what many people associate with the causes of Rust Belt decline and crisis. But it didn’t matter that Democrats stood for these things when Republicans stood for most of them as well….

Trump changed that particular calculus. It may have been cynical, but the message was clear: he would be a protectionist president. This is a part of the country that does things like smash Japanese cars at civic events. Trump’s message was likely to resonate, but probably only in the Rust Belt….

Because of the obsession with exit polls, post-election analysis has not come to grips with the regional nature of the Trump phenomenon. Exit polls divide the general electorate based on individual attributes: race, gender, income, education, and so on, making regional distinctions invisible. However, America doesn’t decide the presidential election that way. It decides it based on the electoral college, which potentially makes the characteristics of individual states decisive.

Trump won Ohio, Indiana, and West Virginia, more or less as expected, but he also won Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. He nearly won Minnesota. Trump cracked the Democratic coalition and he did so decisively. The votes that switched were in the Rust Belt. Depressed Democratic turnout did matter, but this wasn’t indifference or apathy alone. It was also because Clinton was a terrible candidate for the Rust Belt, a region with a lot of people who were particularly likely to remember Bill Clinton’s move to free trade and abandonment of manufacturing as well as Hillary Clinton’s advocacy for TPP and defense of Wall Street. Trump, on the other hand, had higher turnout than Romney in some of these states. Indeed, to the extent that there was Trump “enthusiasm” anywhere, it was in the Rust Belt.

The electoral shift was highly concentrated in territorial terms and Rust Belt territories were ground zero. Trump flipped a full third of the counties that voted for Obama twice. Clinton flipped 6 of the 2200 counties that didn’t vote for Obama. Many of the counties Trump flipped are Rust Belt communities in the Midwest. And those counties, in turn, flipped the electoral college votes of Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, from Democrat to Republican. Obama’s coalition managed to bridge the dying Rust Belt and the New Economy, but Clinton didn’t and, given her baggage and her policies, could not. Trump snatched the Rust Belt from the Democrats.

Trump is president because of a regional revolt.‘

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2016/11/11/23174/

So there you have it. Oh no! Wait a second! Actually Ethan Cohen has explained that it was actually all Jill Stein’s fault. What was I thinking?

Jack Shafer explains a related point very well
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump-wins-2016-media-214442
“Newspaper investigations cemented into the public mind the pre-existing image of Donald Trump as a bad person, as exit polls showed that 60 percent of voters viewed him unfavorably. But that didn’t keep 15 percent of those who thought he was deplorable from voting for him…. the election of Trump doesn’t render the many journalistic findings published during the campaign worthless. Journalism at its best can provide only a set of traffic advisories. It is not and it can’t be an autopilot for life’s trip”

This is the year of the cockup. I think the EU referendum and the Clinton presidency were winnable and I say that as a Brexit voter.

Cameron got nothing out of the Europeans. Juncker and Merkel humiliated him. When he was pushed on immigration he had nothing to give and resorted to hysterical threats. If a deal had been done on immigration controls he would have won. I suspect Juncker and Merkel are not unhappy with the outcome as they get UK departure on their terms and can push ahead on EU integration, but again they are engaged in an all-or-nothing gamble. In my experience those kind of bets quite often end up with nothing.

My reading of the US election is this. Clinton assembled a tent of assorted groups – Hispanics, Blacks, educated women, and metropolitans – which she felt confident she could satisfy when in power. But due to the electoral college she needed the swing states of the mid-west to win. To make an explicit appeal to them would have meant putting white-working class low-education men in the tent, and that would have made satisfying the various groups impossible due to the contradictions in interests between WWC and the other groups. So she gambled she could leave them outside the tent and win, and lost.

There is no doubt that this year has been a significant setback for many on the left. My view is the left can make progress, but they will need a lot less hubris, need to lecture less and listen more, and knuckle down to the hard work of assembling policies that deliver a winning coalition.

Howard Frant @60

Clinton won all income groups below the median; Trump won all income groups above the median.

Clinton won all age groups up to 45; Trump won all age groups above 45.

Obama won all income groups below the median; Romney won all income groups above the median.

Obama won all age groups up to 45; Romney won all age groups above 45.

Obama won all income groups below the median; McCain won all income groups above the median.

Obama won all age groups up to 45; McCain won all age groups above 45.

I could go back to Gore v. Bush

You just quoted basic facts about Dem v. GOP voters since like, 2000. Dems always win below median income, below 45 years old votes. GOP always wins above media income, above 45 year old voters. It means absolutely nothing in the context of this election.

This has been a pretty consistent theme with a lot of the post election analysis. As others have said, it’s the shifts in support that matter. For example, Trump did better than Romney with voters making less than 30k by 16 points! I believe that was the biggest demographic shift of support for Trump as compared to Romney.

Consumatopia, the press’s mendacity on the Clinton foundation – and that of many commentators here – had nothing to do with clinton’s personal decisions, but to a press (and people here) who believed and recycled every discredited and wrong lie the right wi g echo chamber fabricated about it. These attacks were laughably wrong but they never went away no matter what anyone said because of the Clinton rules.

Now, it could be argued that for all her merits, the mere existence of the Clinton rules and the insane inability of the press to treat her fairly made Clinton an impossible candidate, but the us primary system allowed her to run and she won by several million votes. Of course in any other system she would have been told to stay away but America doesn’t have that system, so the dems had to choose between a nice guy who would have been slaughtered by the press and a nice woman who was slaughtered by the press.

Like is aid above, America is a radical right wing country with a broken political system and weird rules of public discourse, and despite this Clinton came close to winning and won the popular vote. This isn’t a repudiation of her policies or obamas legacy, it’s the result of a white supremacist upsurge in a country that still reveres and protects its slave states. But when assessing what went wrong it really helps if leftists don’t fall for the idea that the dems aren’t radical enough, or that the problem is their neoliberalism. You want to see neoliberalism, wait till the dude the alt right elected starts channeling Paul Ryan.

AND furthermore – I kind of forgot – that if you sell your manufacturing to the extent US did -(from over 20 percent of GDP to now around 10 percent) – you also sell your people – and you finally need a wake up call -(we have gotten now) – and now we all will visit a Tesla Factory – or watch how a seat for a Bentley is build -(you know there is a yoga demand for luxury stuff) – and then we will understand – that ‘building stuff’ – always will be YUUGE and a very ‘winning’ part of the future –
Especially if the F..face von Clownsticks are insisting – that their golden toilets are all handmade – and so I’m sitting on a ‘unikat’ by a Swiss manufacturer – which is not ‘cheap’ – but as we all will be fabulously wealthy in the future – ‘liberal progressives’ can learn it too – to become (again) ‘productive parts of society and everybody who knows how to make a real good cheese will become famously wealthy too…

“expert persuasion” – you don’t seriously consider Trump an expert?

Inside the Trump Bunker Bloomberg Oct 27

“On Oct. 19, as the third and final presidential debate gets going in Las Vegas, Donald Trump’s Facebook and Twitter feeds are being manned by Brad Parscale, a San Antonio marketing entrepreneur, whose buzz cut and long narrow beard make him look like a mixed martial arts fighter. His Trump tie has been paired with a dark Zegna suit. ”

I saved this one and keep studying it. Questions like did Trump luck into a kid genius, and can that kinda luck be cultivated (character). Or did this kid like Gates or Jobs, fall into the right idea at the right time?

To a degree I am tempted to say that Trump won the election with Facebook, by Facebook. New Social Media? Understand this wasn’t top-down, but networks of networks.

PGD@65

Yes, it would be better to be able to look at changes. That said, noisy data does not spontaneously sort itself. Granted that the number of groups is small, when all the groups above the median vote one way and all the groups below another it’s very unlikely to be random.

Whites without a college degree voted for Trump. What does that mean? To get a better answer we really need individual level data. But absent that, the fact there was a strong tendency for rural voters to vote for Trump, and for urban voters to vote for Clinton, makes it seem unlikely we’re talking about a “working class.” Based on my ethnographic studies of Trump voters (n=1), as well as the fact that a majority of Trump voters (but not Clinton voters) said they were primarily motivated by dislike of the other candidate, I think we’re talking basically about a Fox News audience, which Trump somehow activated. I certainly see no basis for blaming this on specific things about Clinton or the Democrats, however tempting that might be.

“Liberalism didn’t fail and we need to defend liberal principles now.”

SOMEONE please explain what exactly “left” means any more. If HRC was the “liberal” candidate, let’s remember that she refused to release the transcripts of her GS speeches to the general public. Obama failed to fix the banking sector and instead created a behemoth of a monster called ACA, which is not affordable. When the “hope and change” president leaves banks bigger and more consolidated than when they were too big to fail, there is a failure of capitalism and of the “left” to rein in the excesses of capitalism.

The pollsters referred to WI as a blue state – WI, the state that destroyed state unions and elected Scott Walker TWICE. NC was supposedly in the bag for HRC – it is the home of the KKK and Franklin Graham. Not really “liberal” by any stretch of the imagination.

The evangelicals hit one note – pro-life – when they voted for Trump. They could justify voting for a clearly flawed man because he will protect life before birth. We all know that GOP will never protect life after birth, however. Defunding Planned Parenthood actually increases infant mortality.

@nastywoman

You keep referring to the decline in the GDP share of US manufacturing. In fact, manufacturing’s share of US real GDP has been pretty much constant since 1960 (see fig. 1 of the linked article). It’s employment in US manufacturing that has declined, not manufacturing output as a percentage of GDP.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/us-manufacturing-past-and-potential-future-baily-bosworth.pdf

Manta: “I showed ample evidence that the press was and is deeply hostile to Trump (very easy to find: google news “Trump unfit president”)”

Given Trump’s core electorate, the established press declaring him unfit boosted him. Providing him with oodles of free coverage as a curiosity during the primaries also boosted him. Applying radically lowered standards to declare his public performance “successful” or “improved” also boosted him. Providing ample headline and title page space for the email server and leaked emails bullshit also boosted him. Following the twists and turns of his multiple scandals without ever taking any single one as seriously as Clinton’s also boosted him. Giving in-depth comparative policy reporting low priority also boosted him. Reporting more on how the latest event might “play” with the electorate rather than analysing it and giving it its proper importance also boosted him.

I don’t blame them for the first of these – he is unfit after all. However, they then acted as if everyone would agree on that anyway and reported on him with the breathless fascination you afford a celebrity curiosity.

The resistance of the ones who were refused Whiteness.

CT (dis)misses one of the most important fault-lines in non-Republican USian politics today, the rejection *by* those constructed as ‘women of colour’ *of* the solidarity and association of those constructed as ‘white women’. This, for me, is a variation of what was playing out here on CT, and thinking back now, it seems obvious that this chasm would depress turnout for HRC.

The resistance, expressed in such biting formulations as #GuessImWithHer wasn’t led by anarchists, not even radicals or left liberals. The entire campaign period self-identifying ‘PoC women and queers’ were very loudly dismissing HRC, calling them out for their pandering, describing their solidarity as false and fleeting, reminding HRC of a lifetime of actions and pronouncements against women, minorities, the poor and the vulnerable. They were actually calling HRC ‘racist’. They went there.

It is easy to understand the long history of elision playing out here. These inconvenient voices were most explicitly drawing an equivalence between HRC and Trump, and sometimes going so far as to declare that HRC and the Democrats – for their perfidy and exploitation of PoC – were worse. This was all over social media waxing every time the system showed its true colours, responding to revelations from the Clintons’ archive of corruption, and triggered by Hillary’s terrible encounters with protesting activists. Incredibly, the Jess Phillips tendency here with their supposed centreing of race and gender, found a way to (dis)miss this spectrum of minoritised voices. One can still read confidently expressed opinions that HRC was a great champion of the put upon.

The important lesson from the last couple of years, evinced by millenial stay-aways was that the game may be up for liberals, forever. What is responsible for this? The revolutionary networking that those who have been refused Whiteness have achieved on the internet with teach-ins, hashtags and a radical, far-reaching programme of collective education, particularly on gender, and on White Supremacy’s curse – race. In an age of alienation, they have found community and a collective voice, struggling together to figure out another world. Many minoritised people have realised that in electoral politics, their subjugated identities are weaponised – used as both warring shield and cudgel – by liberals against conservatives. The convenient insistence on restricted choices, is exploited by liberals to corral minoritised populations with the threat of the ogre yonder, to scapegoat conservatives as the exclusive White Supremacists, to foreclose and undermine more radical possibilities, and consequently to present the liberal programme as the only available option.

Really, liberals ought to pay attention to the fact that the mobilising and organisational power and networks of BLM, Dreamers, the anti-pipeline Native Americans did not bring more minoritised voters out. In the year of a living ogre that breathed fire, the old good-cop strategy refused to ignite the presumed Demographic victory. While White Supremacy’s B-team were out on their expiatory ritual, those refused Whiteness ‘stayed woke.’ Some of them, rural, rust-belted, disenfranchised, and ‘rednecked’ resisted by voting with the Trump rebellion. Many others refused to legitimise the farce by participating. Some preferred to vote for a dead gorilla.

Chris Deerin’s article is like a Rorschach test; the content is so indefinite that the meaning people perceive in it tells you more about the people doing the perceiving than it does about the article.

okay CB. The failure of “liberal progressivism” is this: the prized possession of liberal progressives in the UK is the Welfare state. Welfare states are very expensive to run. You can’t just give everyone access or you will end up destroying the thing you cherish. At some point you have to put up a wall, literal or metaphoric, and say “You are in, here is your free education, healthcare, housing. You are out, none of this is for you”

Everyone knows this. Even Progressive Liberal Academics like you know it. But the left insists on pretending it isn’t necessary so they can jump on the other side and call them racists and bigots when they argue for restrictions on access to welfare.

so if Liberal Progressives want to be taken seriously they need to come to the table with serious discussions on how to control access to the Welfare state.

It’s not automation, it’s that US manufacturing has shifted to sectors that involve less manufacturing labor. If you follow LFC’s link, it says manufacturing has only maintained it’s share of GDP when that includes manufacturing of computers and electronic, but “the 90 percent of manufacturing that lies outside the computer and electronics industry has seen its share of real GDP fall substantially, while it’s productivity growth has been fairly slow.”

@109 nastywoman
“– and as Americans favorite cars are nearly all German -(or some are Japanese or Italian)”

Sorry – that’s not even close to truth. Only 30% of cars sold in the US market are manufactured outside of the US and only 25% for light trucks. Your anec-data about Porsche may or may not be accurate, but a clear plurality of cars sold here are made here and that’s been the case for ages.

http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html

@113
‘Manufacturing employment is declining worldwide, including in the usual suspects like Mexico and China’

‘Great subject’ as –
‘America’s manufacturing sector has retreated faster and further in relative terms than that of any other large, affluent nation. US manufacturing as a percentage of GDP declined from 27 percent in 1950 to 23 percent in 1970 to 14 percent in 2000 to 11 percent in 2009. While manufacturing as a share of GDP has also declined in Germany and Japan, both countries have retained relatively larger manufacturing sectors at 17 and 21 percent, respectively. The contribution of manufacturing to per capita GDP is also higher in Germany ($6,900) and Japan ($8,300) than in the United States. The most shocking, but underemphasized, fact about global manufacturing is that Germany’s share of global merchandise exports is actually higher than America’s (9 percent vs. 8.5 percent in 2009), despite having an economy just one-quarter of the size.

As a consequence, the United States is lagging as a global economic competitor. In 2009, Germany and Japan had large manufacturing trade surpluses ($290 and $220 billion, respectively) while the United States had a massive manufacturing trade deficit ($322 billion).5 The other key measure — little known in popular discussions of manufacturing — is export intensity, the ratio of a nation’s exports to its total manufacturing sales. The global average export intensity is twice as high as that of the United States, which ranked 13th out of the 15 largest manufacturing countries in 2009, higher only than Russia and Brazil.6 Meanwhile, the leading EU countries had export intensities 2.5 times to 4 times higher than America’s. Comparisons of the value of manufactured exports on a per capita basis are even more dramatic: they are higher in Spain ($3,700), Japan ($4,000), Canada ($4,600), and Germany ($11,200) than in the United States ($2,400).’

There’s a weird disconnect between the debate among online leftists/liberals and the debate among Democratic politicians now. Online it’s socialists saying “they hate neoliberalism, reach out to them!”, social justice activists saying “they’re racists, screw them!” In party institutions, it’s the same except the second group is saying “they’re racists, we must avoid antagonizing them!” Seriously, they’re arguing that Bernie would have lost because he’s Jewish and his ally Keith Ellison shouldn’t lead the DNC because he’s Muslim.

So I just hope the people saying “they’re racists!” understand that if the Democratic party comes to agree with you then the party will move to the right on race–or at least it will pull back from some of the rhetoric Chris (merian) described at 76.

Anyway, from the OP, “These have indeed failed people, and policies of austerity coupled with bailouts for the banks have enraged the voters, so that many people, nostalgic for a more equal and more functional society but confused about who to blame, have channelled their resentments against immigrants and minorities. ”

I think this is almost but not quite correct. There definitely exist some people for whom this is true. But there are also people who either liked Trump’s economic rhetoric and just disregarded the racism/sexism stuff the same way Clinton voters like me disregarded her warmongering (Republicans:domestic minorities::Democrats:foreigners), and other people who didn’t have their resentments channeled at all and just stayed home.

More that that, I just don’t think anyone has a good understanding of what moves the white working class to the right. It isn’t just racism and sexism, and it ends up playing out differently in different regions. It’s not necessarily true that they’re ready for Sanders–look at Kentucky voting for a governor promising to end Medicaid expansion in 2015. This is a poor but very white state. Lower middle class whites turned against further downscale whites. Poor whites didn’t show up. It wasn’t racism that drove this, but it wasn’t hatred of neoliberalism either–it may be a response to pain neoliberalism caused, but they haven’t been prepared to point the finger there.

JD @101
it matters to determine who is “responsible” for electing trump. Which, to tie in to the theme of the OP, would help to figure out if “liberal progressivism” lost or if it was particular elements of liberal progressivism or even how advocates for liberal progressivism communicate.

If trump was a reactionary revolt by the relatively well off (b/c trump voters had an above media income) the election might have a different meaning than if the real explanation is the shift in votes by the working class/poor (b/c trump was able to get more votes from this bloc than previous GOP candidates).

Re: mfg productivity and automation and off-shoring

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-26/manufacturing-s-productivity-myth

“On the whole, the U.S. manufacturing sector does not appear to have been a hotbed of innovation and productivity gains in recent years. It has gotten by with fewer workers, but in many cases that seems to have been more about managing decline through layoffs and plant shutdowns than boldly leaping into the automated future.”

I liked WLGR’s at 115 a little better than Dipper, but there are many comments coming better than anything I can do.

It may be that global manufacturing jobs are declining due to automation, but my recent reading has convinced me that capital is now able to move low wage low skill manufacturing jobs so fast that it is hard for analysis to keep up. LTV says that as long as the profits and wealth and accumulation (and political power) are showing up, somewhere there is superexploited labor. They very likely in our current regimes will not show up in the same places. Neoliberalism and neoimperialism show pretty much the contradictions of the older globalist orders (late 19th c), they are just now distributed so as re-intensify the differences, the combined etc, and concentrate the accumulation.

And elites are fighting over the spoils.

‘Is that easier to understand?’

– or perhaps I never should have used such a lame word as ‘favorite’ – concerning Audis, Porsches, Mercedeses, BMW’s, Bentley’s, Roll’s, Ferraris or Lamborghinis?

– as I never meant ‘favorite’ – concerning sales numbers.

@115

Liberal democracy has always depended on its relationships with an illiberal Other of one sort or another, and all too often “liberal progressivism” merely means responding to such relationships in one’s own society, the capitalist exploitation of a domestic proletariat, by “outsourcing” our illiberal tendencies to consist largely of the imperial domination and subjugation of foreigners.

(Which can even happen inside one’s own borders, as long as it remains suitably “illegal”; notice how much less ideologically problematic it is to document the presence and labor of the most brutally exploited migrant workers in e.g. China or the Gulf Arab states than in more liberal societies like the US or EU.)

It’s the height of either hypocrisy or obliviousness for those who consider themselves liberal progressives to then act surprised when the people charged with carrying out this domination and subjugation on our behalf — our Colonel Jessups, if you will — demand that we stop hiding our society’s illiberal underbelly and acknowledge/celebrate it for what it is, a demand that may be the single most authentic marker of the transition from liberalism to fascism.

In Pareto “elite rotation” terms, the election of Trump definitely means rotation of the US neoliberal elite. “Status quo” faction of the elite was defeated due to backlash over globalization and disappearance of meaningful well-paid jobs, with mass replacement of then by McJobs and temps/contractors.

Whether openness about domination and subjugation is an “authentic marker of the transition from [neo]liberalism to fascism” remains to be seen, unless we assume that this transition already happened long ego.

In a way illegal immigrants in the USA already represented stable and growing “new slaves” class for decades. Their existence and contribution of the US economy was never denied or suppressed. And even Greenspan acknowledged that Iraq war was about oil. So Trump put nothing new on the table other then being slightly more blunt.

@ Chris Bertram: Sure, but the danger here (assuming a baseline humanism and universalism) is analogous to the danger in arguing that gay rights should be permitted because homosexuality is “natural” or gay people are “born this way”. To articulate these premises is to imply that if homosexuality was unnatural or gay people weren’t born this way, it would be justifiable to continue persecuting and/or prosecuting people for it, or else why waste one’s breath on an argument irrelevant to one’s case? Whether accepting any given immigrant contributes to the economic well-being of the flag-waving granfalloon in which I reside is beside the point, and emphasizing that argument can’t help but strengthen the concurrent argument against accepting immigrants if or when my granfalloon doesn’t benefit.

As far as the economic arguments themselves, it’s trivial to understand (or at least it should be) that absolute immobility of human labor across borders would make a global capitalist economy impossible, which is why such absolute immobility won’t ever actually happen. What we’ll have instead (what we in fact do have) is mobility with conditions and exceptions: a variety of legal, semilegal, and illegal-but-necessary flows of people to ensure that different possessors of labor power can be exploited to different extents, with an ideological superstructure to ensure that as many people as necessary come to view this differentiation as only right and natural. Even for an explicit fascist, for whom this ideological superstructure has crystallized into an elaborate theory about a natural hierarchy of races and nations, immigration can still be a good thing under certain circumstances — as long as immigrants don’t imagine that crossing a border gives them the right to usurp someone else’s higher position in the hierarchy.

Dipper’s point still stands that First-World-style welfare states can only exist under capitalism if their access is ultimately restricted along these lines, since any such welfare state is funded through taxation of global capitalist commerce and thus ultimately through the exploitation of people deprived of its benefits. A global capitalist economy with universal access to First-World-style welfare states would be just as impossible as one without any immigration, or as a couple bearded leftists once put it, it would be like having “a bourgeoisie without a proletariat”.

efcdons

it matters to determine who is “responsible” for electing trump.

If it matters, the people who voted for Trump are responsible for electing Trump — not just some of them, all of them — but I don’t get how it matters.

Whats it about status symbol cars that makes some people go “must have that too in our ountry” mad. Even stranger, what makes people go so crazy about wanting those factories that put the final thing together.

Nastywoman compares the us with Germany and Japan in industrial output, but where is her evidence that America could ever or is willing to be like them? First Germany is part of a huge free market area with a population about five times its own, and free movement of labour throughout. This is like the US being in a barrier free trade agreement with China, and Chinese labour free to move undo strained to the us. Could this be why Germany has such a high proportion of employment in manufacturing?

Then also germany and Japan have large cradle-to-grave welfare states that require heavy taxation, highly educated populations and a culture of corporate responsibility (including much lower ratios of Ceo to worker salaries) that are inconceivable to modern Americans. Any democrat who campaigned on turning the us into Japan or Germany would be toast.

Also note the difference between these two countries with large manufacturing share. One is in a huge free trade area with mobile extra-national labour; the other is not, and is protected from labour mobility by language barriers. Yet both have a large manufacturing sector, and neither has a significant uprising against liberal “elites” selling out their workers (as far as I can tell this debate doesn’t exist in Japan even though offshoring is quite a common strategy here). Given these differences, it is almost as if the US’s manufacturing decline has nothing to do with nafta or free trade …

@129
Sure, clearer,
Said differently – manufacturing skill is certainly a thing worth having, but its not the only skill and harnessing relative strengths via outsourcing is also a value creator.

But it somehow doesn’t create enough happy workers – in the homeland – and isn’t that the main issue that counts?
Or let’s say it like that: When we toured the rust belt – and when we toured the areas in Great Britain – were still to a certain extent – the interiors for Bentleys and Rolls are produced – which afterwards get send to Germany to be put into a Bentley body and combined with a German Chassis and machinery – you can get quite… ‘romantic’ about the pride such workers -(like once in Detroit?) display about ‘their product’s’.

And that’s the thing – some people in Europe much rather admire a mechanic of a Bentley than a Banker – but not so much anymore in the US –
And isn’t that kind of a shame?-
-(and perhaps in a strange ‘philosophical way’ the main cause why the rust belt elected F..face von Clownstick’?)

‘Any democrat who campaigned on turning the us into Japan or Germany would be toast.’

No Democrat should suggest ‘turning the us into Japan or Germany’ but what’s about suggesting to bring -(especially high paying) manufacturing jobs back to us?

I think that could be a ‘winning’ proposition don’t you think?

And as I seem to be the only commenter on this thread who kind of… supports? -(and defends) the return of manufacturing – as a ‘win win’ I more and more believe that (some) US liberals have to do a lot more to understand their workers mind?

What’s about working once in a car factory – there is a absolutely great one in Fremont California? and just to tour could be an very ‘liberal-rating’ experience…?

nastywoman

No Democrat should suggest ‘turning the us into Japan or Germany’ but what’s about suggesting to bring -(especially high paying) manufacturing jobs back to us?

How?

@138
‘How’

Buy all the car companies Germany bought from Great Britain – and make them work as well as they are working now?
– okay – just (kind of) joking…

I recommend Japanese cars and German comedy: