Economists routinely talk about how this or that policy — on trade, taxes, whatever — creates “winners and losers.”
A big part of Donald Trump’s winning appeal in the 2016 election was that Americans were on the losing end of trade policy. Trump took it further, arguing that we don’t win wars or anything else anymore. Elect me, he promised, and you’ll grow tired of all the winning.
The logical and semantic inference of this rhetoric is that Americans, Trump voters, or the American military are losers.
.. “loser” is one of Trump’s favorite insults.
.. a lot of the people attracted to Islamic extremism are losers in all the meanings of the word.
- .. Omar Mateen, the avowed disciple of ISIS who killed 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando, was a screw-up and school bully who dreamed of becoming a police officer but ended up a very disgruntled security guard instead.
- The Manchester bomber, Salman Abedi, a college dropout, appears to have been a misfit.
.. Islamic terrorist organizations are hardly the only groups to recruit from the ranks of loserdom. Street gangs, neo-Nazis, and countless Communist fronts have been seducing resentful oddballs, outcasts, and misanthropes. It simply makes sense that such people would be attracted to such groups. Radical causes provide a sense of meaning, belonging, and importance to people who lack such things in their daily lives.
.. Osama bin Laden was the scion of a wealthy and prominent family. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s successor as the head of al-Qaeda, was from a successful Egyptian family of doctors and was himself a surgeon. They chose to become terrorists for ideological reasons. Subscribing to a doctrine first explicated by Sayyid Qutb, an Islamist intellectual, they believed that the true faith was losing the battle with the forces of modernity and the West.
The Dumb Politics of Elite Condescension
To win in 2018 and especially 2020, Democrats need more identity politics — not less. They must address the widespread working-class revolt against global elites.
.. we must attend to what the sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb call the “hidden injuries of class.” These are dramatized by a recent employment study, in which the sociologists Lauren A. Rivera and Andras Tilcsik sent 316 law firms résumés with identical and impressive work and academic credentials, but different cues about social class. The study found that men who listed hobbies like sailing and listening to classical music had a callback rate 12 times higher than those of men who signaled working-class origins, by mentioning country music, for example.
.. This first concerns social honor. Too often in otherwise polite society, elites (progressives emphatically included) unselfconsciously belittle working-class whites. We hear talk of “trailer trash” in “flyover states” afflicted by “plumber’s butt” — open class insults that pass for wit. This condescension affects political campaigns, as in Hillary Clinton’s comment about “deplorables” and Barack Obama’s about people who “cling to guns or religion.”
.. If class-based insults were as politically incorrect as racial or homophobic slurs, Rush Limbaugh’s rants against P.C. elites might hold less appeal. Mr. Limbaugh, like Mr. Trump, feeds off class resentment. Let’s stop making their jobs easier.
.. In fact, the United States has a well-documented dearth of workers qualified for middle-skill jobs that pay $40,000 or more a year and require some postsecondary education but not a college degree. A 2014 report by Accenture, Burning Glass Technologies and Harvard Business School found that a lack of adequate middle-skills talent affects the productivity of “47 percent of manufacturing companies, 35 percent of health care and social assistance companies, and 21 percent of retail companies.”
.. In some cities, a construction boom is hobbled by a lack of plumbers. We might ameliorate this problem if we stopped talking about plumber’s butt.
.. Democrats have given Republicans the priceless gift of letting them be the party that talks more about good jobs for working-class Americans. What’s the Republican jobs program? Supply-side economics, which is bad science but savvy politics, because it communicates to working-class whites that Republicans understand what they want: jobs.
.. When economic resentments are not addressed, they morph in ugly ways. Immigration provides an example.
.. In other words, he turned immigration into a wedge issue by turning it into a jobs issue. Democrats need to reverse this process. Expressing a commitment to good jobs for Americans of all races can help keep economic anxieties from exacerbating racism.
.. Martin Luther King Jr. “Equality means dignity,” he said. “And dignity demands a job and a paycheck that lasts through the week.”
Opinion Journal: The Trumpian Pope
They’re both pretty good at the insult and name calling.
The pope talks about Catholic Moms breeding like rabbits. Anyone who disagrees with him can’t be honest, must be disturbed.
They share a debilitating view of trade. The Pope has a flat materialist view of capital and sees it as exploitive Yankee Imperialism. Doesn’t see Capitalism has helping unlock people’s potential.
Trump see trade as a zero sum game. The Mexicans have just as much right to find their place in a global economy.
Trump needs to see people as valuable assets.
Where is the Pope on the tragedy of Venezuela? He doesn’t distinguish between crony capitalism of Latin America and Singapore.
The Trump presidency doesn’t seem sustainable
But Trump himself is turning out to be the full-fledged disaster of our worst fears. He understands nothing and is uninterested in learning anything — not just the dreary substance of things such as tax reform but constitutional values, governing norms and the United States’ unique role in the world.
He sees things only through the distorting prism of an all-consuming ego. There is only one Trump instinct — “fight, fight, fight,” he said at the Coast Guard Academy — and one Trumpian dichotomy: friend or foe. He is impervious to embarrassment, no matter how blatant his falsehood.
.. Authoritarianism? Trump summarily fired his FBI director over “this Russia thing”
.. Trump met unapologetically with yet another dictatorial thug, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and remained shamefully silent as Erdogan’s security goons beat up protesters on U.S. soil.
.. No surprise there, from the candidate who urged his crowds to “knock the crap out of” protesters and as president reportedlypressed Comey to jail reporters for obtaining leaks.
.. derided Comey as a “nut job” whose firing relieved “great pressure” on him.