Trump’s core constituency covers about 39 percent of prospective voters; and this raises certain questions about whether this percentage is coextensive with the entire “people.” Do the 4 out of 10 college students who would silence “hate speech” (that is speech from the Right) belong to “the people”? Do the 60 percent of those polled in a recent CNN survey who disapprove of Trump’s criticism of NFL players who took to their knees during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, belong to this mystical whole known as “the people”? What about the more than 60 million individuals who gave their votes to Clinton in our most recent presidential election? Do these voters belong to “the people”? If not, why not?
.. The Revolt of the Elites by Christopher Lasch—a work that tries to dissociate “the people” from the vile, transnational “overclass” that Lasch blames for the decline of the family and a traditional sense of community. Lasch studiously ignores a major reason that the entertainers, authors, and other celebrities whom he deprecates have done so remarkably well. It’s because “the people” adore them and their cultural products and have made them what they are. Without Lasch’s “people,” the overclass that he despises would not be prospering.
.. Lasch, a defender of settled communities, typically holds up as his paradigm a mid-twentieth century working-class family, featuring very traditional gender roles. Lasch’s ideal mommy packs a lunch pail for his ideal blue-collar dad, who goes off to work in a factory.
.. By contrast, most of those who I hear celebrating Trumpian populism—like Sean Hannity and Newt Gingrich on Fox News—are not about to restore “the people” as they used to be, or at least how they were perceived to be
.. Our self-advertised populists do not therefore attempt to take us back to mid-twentieth century communities, lest they be accused of praising the bad old times. In any case, Trumpian populists have different priorities. For example, Hannity and other pundits on Fox News want to mobilize their viewers against the Democrats and in favor of Republican political candidates.
.. Reading Breitbart, one gets the impression that their staff’s understanding of populism is simply to support Trump at every turn, except when Steve Bannon decides to break ranks (such as on DACA).
.. These would-be populists were disciples of Strauss’s student, the late Harry Jaffa, or in some cases of Jaffa’s student Charles Kesler at Claremont University, and are promoting their trademark views about the United States as a propositional nation founded on natural rights theory. Jaffa combined his view of America’s founding with obligatory worship of certain democratic statesmen and heroes, including Lincoln, Churchill, and Martin Luther King Jr. For more than 50 years, “West Coast Straussians” have been feuding with more mainstream Straussians, who are centered mostly in Chicago or else on the East Coast. Not surprisingly, this second group of sectarians has come to be known as “East Coast Straussians.”
.. I would be delighted if these websites simply stated some of their signature positions, such as criticizing judicial activism, without claiming to represent an entity called “the people.”
.. All that seems left of populism, a movement that arose in late 19th century America among rural and small-town populations, are a political style and distrust of elites. Unlike those who today appropriate this identity, American populists historically desired to return all domestic politics to the states and to create public utilities.
Culture Clash at a Chinese-Owned Plant in Ohio
a major culture clash is playing out on the factory floor, with some workers questioning the company’s commitment to operating under American supervision and American norms.
.. The union, which began meeting with workers in 2015, escalated its public efforts in April with a fiery meeting highlighting arbitrarily enforced rules and retaliation against those who speak up.
.. a former employee named James Martin said the company had exposed him to harsh chemicals that blistered his arms and diminished his lung capacity. (Mr. Martin lost his job for excessive absences while on workers’ compensation leave in January.)
.. But projects can suffer when investors are unfamiliar with the American regulatory and political environment, as is true for many executives in China, where labor standards tend to be less strictly enforced.
.. He said the Chinese had little interest in training, sharing responsibility with or even engaging with American employees.
.. He lamented that productivity at the plant “is not as high as we have in China,” adding that “some of the workers are just idling around.”
.. entrepreneurs like Mr. Cao often populate their factories with migrants from rural areas, whom they expect to be relatively submissive, unlike American workers, who expect a more collegial management style. “He hasn’t ever had probably this type of pressure from a work force,” she said.
.. But he conceded that “the fundamental difference between Chinese and Americans is that the Chinese have a bias toward speed; Americans like to process things, think it through from all angles.”
.. Chinese overseas investments in Africa and Asia showed a pattern of reluctance to transfer operations to local control.
.. “At the managerial level, you see that the technical staff tends to be from China,” she said. “The one local employee they hire at a senior managerial level would be the human resources director.”
These Guys Really Like Trump
an unshakable faith in Donald Trump .. the outsider too rich to bribe and too strong to intimidate.
.. “When Joe first told me about Trump, I said no, that guy’s a bragger,” Mr. Paslow said. “Then I started listening to him, and I noticed, he’s a billionaire. If somebody comes along and says, ‘President Trump, I want to keep my plant in China and I want to close my plant here, here’s $50 million,’ he says, ‘I don’t need your money, mister.’ ”
.. They had both been out of work for more than a year, laid off from their jobs in oil and gas exploration with two weeks’ notice, no severance, no pension and no unemployment insurance — like many American workers, they were independent contractors, without the protections of full employment
.. offered them hope. He pledged to the crowd that he would bring back the oil and gas industry
.. They are quick to suspect conspiracy and corruption, in their state and in Washington. They thought even Mr. Trump might have his price — but luckily, it would be too high for most to afford.
.. They dismiss protesters as sore losers, and pundits who attack policy swings as establishment voices bent on sabotage. Where critics point to promises unfulfilled, they see obstacles that are not their president’s fault.
.. When fact checkers pounce, the two men see an insistence on petty detail when they know what their president really meant.
.. Even though Mr. Paslow welcomed the cleanup of a Pittsburgh once so polluted that streetlights went on by noon, he and his friend criticized Obama-era rules they saw as helping scuttle the shale gas boom and putting them out of work.
“There were thousands of rules; you had to wait six, eight months just for paperwork,” Mr. Peterson said. “It cost millions of dollars.”
“You couldn’t drill because the owls were mating,” Mr. Paslow said. Or the bats, Mr. Peterson added.
.. “The things that made this country great are disappearing — factories, jobs, education,” Mr. Paslow said. “Someone could get a job at the mill and live happily ever after. Now it’s Walmart and Best Buy. Come on — a job at Walmart when you could have had a nice life working at a factory?”
.. Mr. Paslow is grateful to have work, but he chafes at all the software he has to use, and misses the secretaries who used to help him input data. “It’s giving me headaches,” he said. “Now we’re typists.”
Everything We Knew About Sweatshops Was Wrong
As the economist Joan Robinson said, “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.”
.. Unlike agriculture or informal market selling, these factories pay a steady wage, and if workers gained skills valued by the market, they might earn higher wages.
.. The factories seemed professional and clean. Whenever a new factory line opened, we saw long rows of applicants — mostly young, unmarried women.
.. By the end of a year only a third of the people who had landed an industrial job were still employed in the industrial sector at all.
.. the factory jobs carried dangerous risks. Serious injuries and disabilities were nearly double among those who took the factory jobs, rising to 7 percent from about 4 percent. This risk rose with every month they stayed. The people we interviewed told us about exposure to chemical fumes and repetitive stress injuries.
.. Why were people lining up for hazardous jobs? Partly it was because they did not appreciate the risks, or how hard the work was, until they started. Others anticipated the risks but used factory work as a safety net when times were tough. The people who stayed longer had few alternatives.
.. In 1913, the Ford Motor Company recorded turnover rates of over 300 percent. Pay was poor and the work hard, and workers left in droves. Many of the modern management strategies we think are about factory efficiency started as attempts to lower this turnover.
.. For poor countries to develop, we simply do not know of any alternative to industrialization. The sooner that happens, the sooner the world will end extreme poverty.