But Donald Trump won by campaigning on making the election a referendum on President Obama’s failed economic policies.
.. Middle class voters, especially in “flyover country,” came to believe on November 8 that the Obama administration’s economic recovery was the worst since the Great Depression in the 1930s, according to Peter J. Ferrara of the Heartland Institute.
.. But more than half of that supposed decline during the Obama Administration was due to the equivalent of about 7.5 million Americans giving up looking for a job or dropping out of labor force. Furthermore, the current level of part-time employment, at 18.3 percent(about 27.8 million), is a higher percentage than at any time since the Great Depression.
.. Friedman observes: “Liberals are concerned with inequality. People in the lower-middle class are simply concerned with making enough money to live a decent life. They are two very different things.”
.. Friedman credits Trump for also understanding that “these people had lost the culture wars that had been waged for the past generation.” Their churches and parents raised and taught them “gut values.” The pride that comes to the lower- and middle-class from working hard and making a good living for their families was lost had been displaced. In order to be politically correct, the “values they were taught as children could no longer be expressed in public.”
Ringside With Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect’s Strategist Plots “An Entirely New Political Movement” (Exclusive)
“Darkness is good,” says Bannon, who amid the suits surrounding him at Trump Tower, looks like a graduate student in his T-shirt, open button-down and tatty blue blazer — albeit a 62-year-old graduate student. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they” — I believe by “they” he means liberals and the media, already promoting calls for his ouster — “get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”
.. The focus on Bannon, if not necessarily the description, is right. He’s the man with the idea. If Trumpism is to represent something intellectually and historically coherent, it’s Bannon’s job to make it so.
.. What he seems to have carried from a boyhood in a blue-collar, union and Democratic family in Norfolk, Va., and through his tour of the American establishment, is an unreconstructed sense of class awareness, or bitterness — or betrayal. The Democratic Party betrayed its workingman roots, just as Hillary Clinton betrayed the longtime Clinton connection — Bill Clinton’s connection — to the workingman. “The Clinton strength,” he says, “was to play to people without a college education. High school people. That’s how you win elections.” And, likewise, the Republican party would come to betray its workingman constituency forged under Reagan. In sum, the workingman was betrayed by the establishment, or what he dismisses as the “donor class.”
.. They — liberals and media — don’t understand what he is saying, or why, or to whom. Breitbart, with its casual provocations — lists of its varied incitements (among them: the conservative writer David Horowitz referred to conservative pundit Brill Kristol as a “renegade Jew,” and the site delighting in headlines
.. He absolutely — mockingly — rejects the idea that this is a racial line. “I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” he tells me. “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver” — by “we” he means the Trump White House — “we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed. They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”
.. Bannon can seem to be not just a focused voice, but almost a messianic one:
“Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he says. “It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”
.. “The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country,” he continues. “It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f—ing idea what’s going on. If The New York Times didn’t exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on The New York Times. It’s a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information — and her confidence. That was our opening.”
.. it is not just the liberal establishment that Bannon feels he has triumphed over, but the conservative one too — not least of all Fox News and its owners, the Murdochs. “They got it more wrong than anybody,” he says. “Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump. To him, Trump is a radical. Now they’ll go centrist and build the network around Megyn Kelly.”
.. a Bannon insight: When the campaign seemed most in free fall or disarray, it was perhaps most on target. While Clinton was largely absent from the campaign trail and concentrating on courting her donors
.. He shows up 3.5 hours late in Michigan at 1 in the morning and has 35,000 people waiting in the cold. When they got [Clinton] off the donor circuit she went to Temple University and they drew 300 or 400 kids.”
.. “I am,” he says, with relish, “Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors.”
What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class
What’s driving it is the class culture gap.
One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,”
.. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareaufound tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.
.. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day.
.. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.
.. Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. “Directness is a working-class norm,”
.. “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp,”
.. Trump promises a world free of political correctness and a return to an earlier era, when men were men and women knew their place. It’s comfort food for high-school-educated guys who could have been my father-in-law if they’d been born 30 years earlier. Today they feel like losers — or did until they met Trump.
.. Many still measure masculinity by the size of a paycheck.
.. For many blue-collar men, all they’re asking for is basic human dignity (male varietal). Trump promises to deliver it.
.. The Democrats’ solution? Last week the New York Times published an article advising men with high-school educations to take pink-collar jobs.
.. WWC women voted for Trump over Clinton by a whopping 28-point margin — 62% to 34%. If they’d split 50-50, she would have won.
.. Obama sold Obamacare by pointing out that it delivered health care to 20 million people? Just another program that taxed the middle class to help the poor, said the WWC
.. Means-tested programs that help the poor but exclude the middle may keep costs and tax rates lower, but they are a recipe for class conflict. Example: 28.3% of poor families receive child-care subsidies, which are largely nonexistent for the middle class.
.. they lived a life of rigorous thrift and self-discipline.
.. Vance’s book passes harsh judgment on his hard-living relatives, which is not uncommon among settled families who kept their nose clean through sheer force of will. This is a second source of resentment against the poor.
.. I fully understand why transgender bathrooms are important, but I also understand why progressives’ obsession with prioritizing cultural issues infuriates many Americans whose chief concerns are economic.
.. Massive funding is needed for community college programs linked with local businesses to train workers for well-paying new economy jobs. Clinton mentioned this approach, along with 600,000 other policy suggestions. She did not stress it.
.. Being in the police is one of the few good jobs open to Americans without a college education.
.. although race- and sex-based insults are no longer acceptable in polite society, class-based insults still are.
.. If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, Ohio, the consequences could turn dangerous.
Trump’s Economic Prescription. First: Do Harm.
Donald J. Trump is positioned to achieve the most radical reshaping of economic policy since Ronald Reagan. Even under Reagan, Republicans never controlled both houses of Congress.
.. if he follows through on his ideas, we could face higher prices on imported goods, rising interest rates, substantial inflation and a further shift of wealth to the upper classes.
.. Lower-income Americans — including Mr. Trump’s core supporters — would be hurt the most because they disproportionately buy less expensive imported items.
.. While some manufacturing jobs might come back as a result of the tariffs, a greater number of domestic jobs would most likely be lost because Americans would have less spending power.
.. rather than bringing jobs back to the United States, Mr. Trump’s tariffs could result in a trade war that would cost our economy five million jobs and possibly lead to a recession.
.. As soon as Mr. Trump’s ascendancy became clear on Tuesday night, interest rates on Treasuries began to rise. Usually, an unexpected event causes a flight to the safety of government debt, pushing yields down. That the opposite occurred reflects fears that the deficit might balloon out of control.
.. As a fiscal conservative, Mr. Ryan is unlikely to accept large tax cuts unaccompanied by major spending reductions. That could lead to the evisceration of many of the discretionary federal programs — think education or research and development — critical to putting our economy on a stronger footing.
.. As a fiscal conservative, Mr. Ryan is unlikely to accept large tax cuts unaccompanied by major spending reductions. That could lead to the evisceration of many of the discretionary federal programs — think education or research and development — critical to putting our economy on a stronger footing.
.. If Mr. Trump sticks to his pledge, it will be open season on regulations, as businesses go after their most disliked provisions and agencies. Industrial companies will take aim at the Environmental Protection Agency. Financial institutions, including the big banks, will push to repeal Dodd-Frank. That’s just for starters.
.. Some of the efforts at dismantling government may face hurdles in the Senate, where 60 votes are required to break filibusters, more than the Republicans will have. But under a process known as “reconciliation,” matters relating to taxes and spending — and potentially the repeal of Obamacare — can be passed by a simple majority of 51.
.. The conservative American Action Forum calculated that his deportation plan would cost $400 billion to $600 billion and, because there are not enough citizens and legal residents to fill the demand, the plan would shrink the labor force and reduce gross domestic product by $1.6 trillion.
.. Mr. Trump’s proposals would confer vast monetary gains on wealthy Americans while leaving middle- and working-class Americans — his electoral base — further behind. For his supporters, the irony of a Trump victory is that they may end up even less well off.