by Doomstead Diner
— this post authored by Eddie
The election of 2016 is over, and the mood in the country is that the People Have Spoken. A majority of voters have soundly rejected Business As Usual, as personified by Hillary Clinton, and voted for what they perceive as Change, with a Capital T, as in Trump.
The truth is that there was never a better poster child for crony capitalism and corruption than Clinton. The thousands of leaked emails and the revelations about shady deals with foreign despots funneling money to her through her non-profit front disgusted anybody who took the trouble to read during the election cycle….and for those (most Americans) who don’t bother to read, Mr. Trump was happy to Tweet about it and call her a criminal day after day on the campaign trail.
I expected Ms. Clinton to win, not because she was a good candidate, but because she was a very savvy politician with a well-established constituency among the black and brown urban poor and the educated liberal elites, and because the Big Money was behind her. She knew how to play the game, as it has always been played.
But this election threw a monkey wrench into the gears of electoral politics. For the first time in history, we have seen an election shaped by social media. Mr. Trump, himself a TV personality with lots of name recognition, was able to shape the election by saying things that most political observers would have called political suicide, and he made it work to deliver the Presidency of the United States.
For the past several years, Republican candidates had courted the same people who turned out to vote Mr. Trump into office, with some success. But they never delivered on their promises and this time that group, the high school educated working class whites, showed their dissatisfaction by abandoning the Republican Establishment in the primary, and further demonstrating their anger and frustration with BAU by sweeping Trump into the White House.
I don’t think Trump will deliver the goods either because declining energy resources dictate that the pie will keep getting smaller, and because the ship carrying the US industrial economy set sail for China long ago now, and it won’t be coming back. Never mind the widespread effects of global climate change, which Mr. Trump and most of his base don’t believe is even real.
Mr. Trump will have to depend on his bombast and charisma to keep his support. The figure he most reminds me of in recent history is Hugo Chavez. Poor Venezuelans still love Chavez, even though he threw their country into total economic chaos. I’m sure Trump will be able to keep some of his base behind him for the next four years, or longer. But it won’t be because he was able to make America great again.
I think it would be good to examine Mr.Trump’s coalition of support, and Ms. Clinton’s, because even though she lost the election, her base still exists, and it is outgrowing Mr. Trump’s support base over the long haul. In other words, they will be back with a new candidate, who might appear in four years to completely dismantle whatever Mr. Trump creates. They might even come back with a vengeance. Time is on their side, as long as the country can rock along without a complete systemic collapse.
It’s easy to understand Clinton’s support. At the bottom are the extremely entrenched have-nots in our society. They can’t get along without a SNAP card and Medicaid. There is a very large group of Blacks and Hispanics (and even a few whites) who have, for nearly three generations, benefited from free food and free medical insurance and subsidized rent. They are motivated to AVOID making much money in the mainstream economy, and they are motivated to AVOID being legally married, to qualify for the benefits they depend on. These benefits are almost always restricted to being doled out to single mothers with children. Families have to avoid the appearance of being a family when social workers come around, and any significant income has to come from the black market economy.
The black and brown Americans who pull themselves up above poverty still identify politically with this group, and largely vote with them, although some of the most successful do abandon ship and turn conservative. The black working class remains firmly behind the Democratic Party, which always gives lip service to taking care of “the unfortunate”. The Hispanic component favors open borders and free immigration because a large number of them are from immigrant families, many of whom arrived here illegally.
To that bloc (which is growing by leaps and bounds because of the Hispanic component with their Catholic religion and large family size), the Democrats add a much different demographic group,which are the liberal whites, who have been brought up to believe in policies of racial and gender equality, and who feel sorry for those at the bottom. These whites are not all rich, but they are,as a group, well educated, and they have jobs in government, education, and technology that allow them to achieve a measure of financial success. Enough to keep them from being angry, and make them in favor of a diverse society, which they’ve been taught to value anyway.
The Trump constituency, examined in hindsight of the election, appears to be a coalition too. The base is the white working class, the people who once constituted the bedrock of American society, not college educated, but who managed to make decent livings in our industrial manufacturing sector. Union workers and unskilled and semi-skilled laborers. At one time a man could make a reasonable living in this country if he was just willing to get up in the morning and go to work and give a reasonable effort. Jobs were plentiful, and if one didn’t work out you could always get another one.
These people are now strongly anti-immigration, because they perceive that new arrivals take away employment that is their birthright. It is a little more complicated than that, but they don’t see the fine detail of how technology just eliminates the need for so many working stiffs.
They accuse the Democratic party of bringing in more and more immigrants in order to build the liberal welfare state political base, and that makes them angry too. They happen to be right about that one.
The other part of the coalition, which includes some of the above group, and some other, better educated white people, is the Religious Right, the very same people who brought you the likes of Ted Cruz and even Marco Rubio (who wasted no time last night in giving all the credit for his re-election to Jesus Christ his personal savior. I don’t know if Jesus was listening, but the Evangelicals were, and gave Rubio a huge round of applause when he said it. Little Marco knows which side his bread is buttered on.)
This group is motivated by their shared agenda of ending abortion in any form for any reason, making birth control difficult, and bringing public prayer (Christian prayer, that is) back to public schools. Ending sex education is another issue. They want kids raised like mushrooms, kept in the dark, and fed a diet of horse shit. They are people who have been conditioned to believe that our society’s decline is due to moral decay, and who see nothing wrong with making America into a Conservative Christian theocracy.
The working white poor, as a demographic group, are in decline, but the Religious Right keeps growing. Their churches have turned into huge mega-arenas that put thousands under one roof on Sunday morning, where preachers skilled in hypnosis techniques drive home the message. The Religious Right doesn’t love Trump, but they were willing to hold their noses and vote for him in droves because he comes from a Catholic family background and has been careful to (at least in recent years) give lip service to the Christian Conservative agenda.
Both the Democratic base and the Republican base are motivated primarily by emotion, and neither one is willing to understand that the decline of our country and Western Civilization has to do resource depletion, overpopulation, and climate change.
They cling to their own particular emotional lifeboats, and have no interest in hearing that all of us are going to be living on less energy, less money, and less complexity in the near future, and that many of us will simply not be living at all, as our ability to use technology to produce more and more food and labor from less and less effort, goes away forever.
They deny climate change because they don’t live on waterfront property. Or if they do, they’d like to flip their house before it becomes worthless. The city just needs to build more storm drains and do a little more backfill. All those storms are just normal climate variation. Floods and droughts have always happened. Watch your step, there, don’t get your feet wet.
That’s my view. Pardon me if I’m not excited by the wave of change sweeping the country. I see another kind of wave coming, one that will give both of these groups of willfully ignorant Americans a reality check they aren’t looking for.