Why Trump? We too are cause.
#2651
The e case of Trump is strange, It really comes down to how could a quasi democratic society elect such a person? Trump had no interest in governing, He had no platform, no direction, yet the Republican party elected him anyway.
IT was small-minded on the part of voters, party elites and much of the press.
One of the resins it is weird is because the attacking parties on the 6th were led by such peripheral groups as Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. We would expect a rebellion to be more grounded. If it weren't tragic it would be funny.
What is going on?
Let's start with the end of World War II.
After the war the people were weary and moved to the economy as the focus of their activity. Politics did not attract interest. The series of presidents - Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson. Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump did not inspire interest or support. They seemed disconnected from the real prolems that should have been of concenrn. At the same time the parties, Democrat and Republican, were fading in significance, very few people knew who their party officers were nor even where the state and national offices were
Also the agenda for congress seemed increasingly to be serving finance and not social issues. If it meant jobs, people went along, even if wealth and income inequality was increasing.
What was missed was that the overall situation was ripe for further control by the rich who cut social services and kept wages level so that the top one percent got most of the benefits of a swelling economy, their income rising - and still is - rapidly while the bottom 99% were staying level and the bottom few percent actually losing effective income after inflation. Social services were constantly cut and things like roads infrastructure and trash badly maintained. The country began to look warn and tattered, a forty year process that politics should have responded to. So we get Teslas and potholes.
Since the middle class basically works as professional service to the rich: accounting, law, tech support, teachers and professors, they have remained content but increasingly disengaged and failed to notice the drift of pain in the economy for much of the country. Small town were hollowed out, kids of the middle class down had no perspective on how school could lead to a good life beyond a phone and a car, while the children of the rich were guaranteed a path to college, world travel, and a good job.
The lower income nations were and are targets of extracting industries pulling wealth out of the ground or the partially educated population. The world situation is not a collection of democratic countries trying to find a place in the global market. Some struggling to get there - like Ukraine - but some struggling to regain their old empire's dominance: Russia, China, India maybe, and Iran. We in the US are mostly deeply ignorant of their histories which leads us to conjure up unreal images of the dynamics we live in. Even our image of the quality of life is way behind what had actually happened in much of the world's middle class who benefit from more: free school, health and retirement and live in societies who understand that parks, traffic-free streets and paid vacation and child care are important. In the less developed world things are worse: to make extraction easy for international corporations and local elites, people are removed from villages and moved to high rise concrete block apartments where the quality of life - sociability and contact with nature - are reduced,
There are deeper issues. Technocratic vs an organic view of life, an education that treats humanism as important as STEM. These "modern" cities lack cafes and even grocery stores. Moreover climate change is making life difficult and failure of electricity a serious threat to those high-rises.
We are not good at thinking about what makes quality of life. We have adapted to the market view that things add up to good times. Obviously false. But we don’t know enough to do much about it.
The Internet has given us a world view but it lacks mystery and breeds dissatisfaction . So collectively we elected Trump .But note, we also failed to elect Clinton who is a prime example of being satisfied with the upper middle class status quo, the very people who managed us into our mess.