As promised, my big feature went live tonight on the Washington Monthly website. As a special bonus, there’s also an interview I conducted with Virginia gubernatorial candidate Tom Perriello. They should be read in tandem.
Here’s my favorite part of the Perriello interview:
WM: You’ve been campaigning on this anti-monopoly theme all over the state, from the D.C. suburbs of northern Virginia to small Appalachian towns in southwestern Virginia. Are these really issues that voters are already thinking about and asking questions about?
TP: I actually think in many ways the challenge is people inside the Beltway having too low of an opinion about the sophistication and knowledge of people outside the Beltway. What will often happen to me on a given day is that I will start the day out in a red county, where people are talking to me about consolidation and automation, and then end the day inside the Beltway talking to people who say, “Tom, you sound like a think tank, that kind of thing will never go down with those people out there.” So I think that if we could actually get folks to sit down together, those inside the Beltway could really understand again, this is something voters across the Commonwealth are talking about because they are living the experience.
And I get the exact same response from liberal blog-readers every single time I write about these issues. Every single time.
These articles are my big effort to break through the cognitive dissonance and the resentment and the disappointment and the despair and the cynicism and the apathy and, ultimately, the nihilism that is gripping the left in the aftermath of its most bitter election season in modern history. I know it’s just a start, but I hope it’s a good start.
But I think you are falling for the myth that the move to Trump was primarily an economic phenomenon. I’m white. I grew up in upstate NY, have family all over the South (mother’s from MO), and live and work in north Florida. As you might expect, I know a lot of Trump voters. My experience dovetails with the data: Trump voters aren’t in economic hardship. A lot of them would say things in line with the Kevin Williamson quote.
They feel like they are “losing their country” to the non-whites, who are “cutting in line,” and hate “PC.” I am 100% behind policies to fight monopolization. Many of these Trump voters might be, too. That doesn’t mean they are voting for the candidate of the “other,” which is what the Democratic party is, in their eyes.
Fighting market consolidation just isn’t a priority for most Americans, even though it should be. To be honest, I don’t think there’s much the Democrats can do, other than field Blue Doggy types in rural areas.
I am sorry to be pessimistic, but we are where we are. Time is on our side, but the next 15 years will be tough.
You are forgetting that the most important goal is to win back the Obama voter that gave up and switched to Trump.
The affluent exurban Trumper was never this voter, and again, don’t lose sight of the fact that its a matter of degree. Most of these rural counties are not “winnable” but their vote totals under Trump swamped the blue counties. the R vote needs to be cut back from 80% to 60%, and to get that Ds have to address the needs of two constituencies:
Combined these are the economic ecosystem that has been so terribly harmed by monopolistic business in rural America. And consider that if you are #2, you might have considerable “assets” but still be economically distressed. #2 is not lower-economic status, but has a lot to lose.
Preventing the bottom from dropping out of WWC support of Dems would have made 2016 close to a wave election for DEMS, unprecedented after 8 years of a Dem president.
A clever charlatan took advantage of the situation, but he’s not going to deliver and his party won’t even acknowledge the problems, staying instead in thrall of the current way of business.
If you look at it this way, Trump is an opportunity that cannot be squandered; it may never come again.
Agreed, But I wonder what portion just cannot vote for the other as they have been tagged as those who have special treatment.
Just How Many Obama 2012-Trump 2016 Voters Were There?
The 2008-2016 switchers are an even bigger universe.
As noted in your excerpt:
If there were some way to tease truth from fiction here, the answer could be interesting, indeed.
Sadly, no.
We aren’t going to get them back, or not in any way we can predict and try delibertely to bring about. They are “fuck you, blow it all up and try something different” voters many of whom simply said “I’m so pissed off I’ll even vote for the n****r”. They are not responsive to policy proposals of any kind.
Excellent attempt, booman! I think it will be essential to get some quantitative data on the prevalence of the respective attitudes, otherwise all liberals will always throw their anecdotal observations about racist red staters around and nothing will change in our discourse.
I do not mean to invalidate what comment Nr 1 observed, but we have to know how typical these voices are compared to what Periello encounters. You have written often about the need to convince just a few Trump voters. Those few may be easily overlooked by a liberal talking with red staters. It is human nature that our memories and generalizations are very lousy at statistics.
Also we have to find out to what extent the racism is the causal category here. If somebody is resentful because culture and economy passed him by, then they will latch on something to justify their attitude. That something may be racism, but then one could consider racism the derived feature, not the original one.
I have yet to meet a Trumper who is really concerned with the economy. Its all tribalism and being “great” again. Its reactionary backlash to a more open, forgiving society. The centrist apologists mask this using economic mumbo jumbo and reflections of their own angst.
However, Perriello’s efforts might encourage the 40%+ who don’t vote to get off their asses. That would do the job without compromising the D base for the will-o-wisp of “lost democratic white man”. And since I firmly believe that most of these people are crowd followers, the increase in voting percentage will pare off more and more of the less doctrinaire.
Anyway, the article is a solid attempt to give hope where there is little but anger and pain right now.
That’s where I think the only hope is. We are not going to get the Scott Walker-voting union members, and the like, back. We’ve got to figure out how to turn out people who support Democratic proposals but generally don’t bother voting, at least in non-leap years. And when the Dems finally take back power, making voting easier in every possible way (eg. weekend / national holiday for starters) should be a top priority.
Okay, but does that matter? I suspect that Book is arguing for a real policy change (and I like the article, though I’m looking for to the second installment where he says how), but if we’re largely trying to recapture Obama>Trump voters, isn’t it more important having something, anything emotional, to say?
Right now it’s:
Trump: They’re laughing at us! You’re being humiliated. I’ll make you great again.
Us: Economic change is painful, and your communities have been hurt, but with better training and health care reform, we can begin to address some of these issues.
There’s no narrative there. There’s no enemy. There’s no call to the barricades. Instead, it can be:
Us: Monopolies are killing your towns. They’re salting your earth. Together we can chop them into little pieces and piss on them!
It’s a much, much better story. I’m not sure it’s one that can be believably told by the Democratic Party as it currently exists, but it’s better.
(also, from 2009: “Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has had enough – he has called on the Justice Department to investigate the dairy giant Dean Foods as a monopolist.” https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/sen-bernie-sanders-cries-monopoly-collapsing-milk-market)
This stuff is out there. But how do we get the party on board?
Excellent article, BooMan. Why I hope that WaMo keeps you turning out that sort of thinking. The first change that needs to occur is to break the Democratic habit of writing off any district from the get-go. Republicans have proved already too many times that PVI is not destiny. It’s time that Democrats started contending the geography.
And concentration of capital is indeed what has made rural lives much more miserable. It is why they have to go to cities for almost everything now. When rural areas start having physicians’ practice these days, it is because they are now exurban bedroom communities, a major health care system is putting out a branch office, and they are about to get overrun with new shopping centers and subdivisions with houses price 3 and 4 times what they could get for their house. Think that doesn’t give native rural people a sense of colonization. If they had wanted to live in the city, they would have found jobs and moved to the city like a lot of their relatives did. With urbanization, gamelands disappear and fishing places become privatized. Part of the reaction is the diminishment of the ability to have a Mayberry lifestyle; no matter how nostalgic that way of life is in video, there was a reality underneath that in Mt. Airy NC that Andy Griffith was trying to communicate. And Andy Griffith understood the kind of past Democratic progressivism you are talking about.
MAGA for Trump was framed in terms of the consequences of America’s diminishment and was hammered against cultural, not economic causes. And that opened the door for bigotries of all kinds and “A Handmaid’s Tale” kind of misogyny that is present only in a loud minority of rural voters. Underlying that is a Republican base schooled for 70 years in “free market” opposition to capital-C Communism and “creeping socialism” (in the form of any public infrastructure).
Framing of the concentration issue needs to start with the consequences of power gravitating to the American oligarchs. That opens the way again for using Russia’s experience as a foil for the opposition party. Do it honestly and without paranoia; I think that that will be effective. The economic issue in Russia is not that Putin is an oligarch, but like the emerging Trump administration operations, he brokers the interests of a competing structure of oligarchs only. This is the face of emerging corporate feudalism in which the oligarchs are the liege lords demanding loyalty in exchange for economic survival and a monarch (putatively elected, but note the assumptive presence of dynasties, of patronage if not heredity) brokers their interests. And the serfs are reduced institutionally so that they have no independent power of agency.
Breaking up concentrations of power and money deals with this. Increasing the minimum wage deals with this. Providing effective rural infrastructure to reduce the compelling forces of urbanization does this. Promoting thinking in how rural areas can be as sustainable as the concentration of resources in cities does this. Note that I am not among the folks who believe this: “Want to live sustainably; move to a city.”
What we found in the 1960s and 1970s was that generalized prosperity eases cultural relations and makes dealing with bigotry much easier. In the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s we keep finding how many people are working through the injuries and experiences of “stinking thinking” dysfunctional families. There is a huge in pop psychology industry appealing to these people; some effective, some just profiteering. Religious movements of all kinds mostly work in this psychological swamp of PTSD. Any thinking about framing of issues must consider these issues without stereotyping them to one party or the other. They occur in Democratic constituencies as well. A lot of the behaviors that most concern people and are framed cultural derive from the pain of dealing with struggling families and neighbors and thinking that those dependent on government assistance, charity, and begging are as capable as they are or finding employment unassisted. That this is not true is a hidden issue that really cannot be talked about yet. But it affects how to frame campaigns and conversations with personal networks. It is the elephant in the room that hides under the veteran PTSD label. This is deeply historical, related to trauma and unequal power, and ripples down the generations of abused and abuser alike. Just far from every one of them because change is possible. This is the third rail of politics that Democrats keep touching without figuring out how to turn off its power.
Two points.
First, I think you misinterpret Populism as a political force and its impact and alliance with Progressivism. Progressives held most Populists at arm’s length, and Populism was primarily a reactionary movement rather than a progressive movement, whereas Progressivism was more about increased democratic governance. THAT might be a resonating message more than anti-monopoly: The Little Guy versus the Plutocrat. Explicit class warfare.
Second, I’m very skeptical of the idea that ANY message will make a bit of difference. Policy proposal? Who actually gives a damn? Trump didn’t offer policy proposals, he offered emotional impulses. Adding another policy proposal – albeit a laudable one – will simply get lost in the noise.
Democrats win when they offer a charismatic candidate. Bill Clinton’s charm, Obama’s cool, yet soaring rhetoric. The Democrats are the technocratic party. They have actual policies that will objectively make people’s lives better.
It doesn’t matter. Health care, family leave, EITC, job training, free community college…anti-monopoly. You could have the bestest policy evah, and it won’t get through the filter of personality that dominates our politics.
People vote for Republicans because they are Republicans. And they vote for people who reflect back to them their cultural priorities.
They then retroactively justify that vote through motivated reasoning.
These voters loved Reagan. Reagan fucked up their world, but they adopted Reagan’s politics to justify their original support.
If people don’t trust government, no policy proposal will matter one bit.
It is a good article. I tend to think Good Policy matters. I am profoundly skeptical, though, that anti-trust comes close to solving the issue, and I do not think it comes close to an organzing principle for the simple reason that I don’t think it really will solve what is behind wage stagnation.
But breaking up the banks is both good policy and good politics. Breaking up Walmart? Yea, rural people like Walmart.
One criticism: too much of the dialogue has focused on the rural white working class. I think this dialogue is almost guaranteed to create disagreement where none should exist.
Economic stagnation is affecting African Americans too. By phrasing this is as WHITE problem we simultaneously make a policy and a political mistake of the first order. 20% of African Americans are in the bottom 20% of Americans in terms of income.
To be clear, the problem is not rural, though it easier to see the symptoms there. In economic terms, the problem is that lower skill and lower educated workers are seeing the incomes stagnate.
As I have posted here before, you can see the political results of this in the shifts WITHIN Bucks County in PA.
We are too narrowly defining the problem. When we do so we create tension where there should be one.
But when we narrowly define the problem we also narrow articulating the arguments for the proposed policy.
This is a major mistake, particularly in light of turnout numbers among young African Americans.
There is a great article this morning in the Times that DOES describe the problem very well.
How does Anti-trust solve that problem?
But well done, Booman.
An aside: should you be crediting the source for Steve Schale’s comment? The quote I read in Shattered, and I don’t think the same quote is on his website.
A good piece by Stanley Greenberg today on the same subject.
http://prospect.org/article/democrats%E2%80%99-%E2%80%98working-class-problem%E2%80%99
Yea, rural people like Walmart.
Do they really? Or are they just okay with it because they can get everything under one roof, especially since Walmart drove everything else around them out of business?
And it drove them out of business because they were cheaper. Thats whats liked.
Walmart only has the opportunity to drive anybody out of business if people prefer to shop there.
“To be clear, the problem is not rural, though it easier to see the symptoms there. In economic terms, the problem is that lower skill and lower educated workers are seeing the incomes stagnate.”
It was clear that this was going to be a big problem in 1980, if not sooner. The question is what (if anything) should (or can) be done about the problem. It was clear way back then that the blue collar job that provided an above average income to a person with commonly held skills was going to disappear. This was going to have an obvious impact on middle class earnings and income inequality.
Furthermore, in 1980, we (anybody who knew anything about labour market economics) knew that this would have a disproportionate impact on the earnings of working class white men because white men held most of those great union jobs. (Note that the charts that show middle class wages stagnant for the past forty years are a little misleading. In fact, middle class white males have seen wages fall by several percentage points in real terms, but middle class women and middle class minorities have shown real gains.)
In other words, this is a problem that emerged a long time ago. The issue we were trying to address in 1980 is “What do we do with workers, particularly older workers displaced by the changes?” We did not believe that this was going to be a problem 40 years down the road. I’m still stunned that this was actually an election issue in 2016 when it was, for the most part, ignored in elections way back when.
The reason that we did not believe this was a problem that would persist because it was obvious to young people. I – and many others – regularly gave talks to high school students. We revamped all the career programs. The message repeated again and again was “You have to acquire skill. Go to University or College or get an apprenticeship. The same forces destroying jobs at the mill are creating enormous opportunities if you acquire the right skills. But you may have to move to realize those opportunities. If you do not… Well, the mill hasn’t hired anybody new in ten years…”
But okay, lots of people in lots of places did not acquire any skill or move to greener pastures, and – surprise! – they are not in a happy place today. I don’t have better answers than I did forty years ago. The past is past. Acquire new skills that are in demand. Move to take one of those jobs.
If anyone has better ideas for solving the actual economic problem, I’m all ears.
The political problem has nothing to do with the economic issue. How do you win the vote of these people? Republicans found the answer – they lie and pretend they can turn the clock back. I don’t think Democrats can compete with that.
Even young people who really do that struggle. They make less out of school than used to 30 years ago. Not a huge amount, but in practical terms its about $3000 less in comparative income.
That’s not what we are discussing. We are talking unskilled and uneducated, and more specifically white unskilled and uneducated. If you are black and poor and unskilled and uneducated, it is your fault you did not pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Whites in the rust belt are victims even though the handwriting has been on this particular wall for decades. I don’t get it. Especially since the black often has no real chance to acquire skills or experience and can’t relocate. Most whites do have choices.
There are plenty of reasons college graduates could be earning less today. I haven’t studied it but off the top of my head? Unlike 30 years ago, most graduates today are women and women are paid less. If I was a woman, I’d argue that equal pay would turn that decline into a healthy surplus.
Also, baby boomers had the same problem in the 1960’s. There were too damn many of us all trying to get into the labour market at the same time. I was underemployed for three years after I graduated before I got the first job in my career. Employers looking for college graduates have dozens of millennials to choose from. Supply and demand and all that.
The good news for young people is that most baby boomers are still in the labour market but we are retiring in droves. The market will open up for them.
Poujadism with a human face.
Thanks for working on this, Boo. and the interview, great!