Saturday, November 18, 2017

Shannon Monnat and David L. Brown — How Despair Helped Drive Trump to Victory

Economic, social and health decline in the industrial Midwest may have been a major factor in the 2016 US presidential election, Monnat and Brown’s INET research finds, with people living in distressed areas swinging behind Trump in greater numbers. Trump performed well within these landscapes of despair – places that have borne the brunt of declines in manufacturing, mining, and related industries since the 1970s and are now struggling with opioids, disability, poor health, and family problems.
Hillary's "deplorables"?

These people should have been part of the base of a Democratic Party that is the party of FDR rather than Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. First there were the Reagan Democrats and now there are the Trump Democrats.

It's wasn't "the Russians" that did the Democrats in, with the GOP controlling not only the presidency but also both branches of the federal legislature and the majority of governorships and state legislatures.

The Democratic Party under the New Democrats lost the plot and remain clueless, trying to blame "the Russians" for their own corruption and ineptitude that brought them down.

However, the GOP establishment lost control of the Party to a base that was fed up with false promises.

Now both party establishments are trying to wrest back control, which is further dividing the country not so much on party lines as class structure, with populism rising in the bases of the both parties as the precariat swells.

INET
How Despair Helped Drive Trump to Victory
Shannon Monnat, Associate Professor, Syracuse University, and David L. Brown, Professor Emeritus, Cornell University
ht Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

See also
Feelings of uncertainty and losing control bring a preference for “dominant” versus “prestige” leaders
Scientific American
Explaining the Global Rise of “Dominance” Leadership
Niro Sivanathan, Hemant Kakkar

4 comments:

Ryan Harris said...

At some point Roseanne Barr moved from the elitist Dems to MAGA. I know that shouldn't be important but she was the original Trump to the entertainment industry: A hugely flawed person with a giant middle finger to the establishment. No one could look away and everyone cheered her on as she demolished cultural totems and norms.

More and more people on the left will have to abandon their self anointed positions as enlightened benevolent overlords.

Tom Hickey said...

Time to evict the limousine and latté liberals and bring in the progressives.

But without enlightening them about MMT they will likely fail, too.

Matt Franko said...

Why what will they do say “the deficit is too small? Please...

Tom Hickey said...

What they will do is explain how affordability it no problem. The constraint is availability of real resources — just like Alan Greenspan told Paul Ryan about paying for Social Security down the line.