Recommended: Why Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump.

Donald Rank, writing in the US Edition of The Guardian, has one of the better speculations on Donald Trump's appeal. Read his article: Why Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. It is trade policy that is the fundamental basis of Trump's appeal, he argues, not racism.

I have always bought the pervasive argument of our political and academic elites, Republican and Democratic alike, that free trade agreements are good things.  And they are good things - for corporations, and for workers in lower-wage nations, and for politicians and those wealthy people who support and fund them and get stock dividends.  But as Rank points out, such agreements are frequently disastrous for US blue-collar manufacturing workers.  And that, he argues, is the real root of the growing voter support for Donald Trump, boorish and racist as he may be.

This is an interesting perspective, and one I haven't seen elsewhere. And it raises some interesting questions in my mind - just what obligation does the political system have to preserve domestic blue-collar jobs, even if that is not the "optimal" economic answer? And can the US economy ever recover if a substantial portion of its workers are put out of work by such agreements?  And can any political party long survive if it ignores this problem, as both major parties seems to be doing?