What "the deplorables" tells us about the nation's ruling elite

Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" outburst a week ago fits right in with Obama's 2008 dismissive "clinging to guns and religion" comment and George Romney's 2012 "47 percent" comment. What all of these comments from wealthy elites - Republican and Democrat alike - show is that they are completely intolerant of views and world views that differ from their own, and completely ignorant about the lives of millions of the people they aspire to lead.

I don't happen to be very religious, but I certainly don't think that those who are religious are deplorable.  I don't happen to be a gun owner, but I certainly don't think that owning a gun puts a person beyond the pale. I am personally fairly liberal in outlook, but I understand perfectly why some people would feel threatened by a massive influx of people from an entirely different culture, or by significant changes in the social contracts they grew up with.

But Clinton and Obama and Romney - wealthy and well-connected - are completely insulated from the real world, and for the most part completely unaffected by the very policies they are trying to put in place. And these comments simply demonstrate that.  Indeed, if anyone is "deplorable" in this situation, it is Obama and Romney and Clinton, and those like them.

Recommended: Donald Trump Does Have Ideas, And We Had Better Pay Attention to Them.

Joshua Mitchell had a good piece in Politico yesterday: Donald Trump Does Have Ideas, And We Had Better Pay Attention to Them. Since the establishment - Democratic and Republican alike - are solidly against Trump's candidacy because he is an outsider and doesn't represent their world views or interests, it is a bit hard to discern exactly what it really happening.  And of course the media have demonized him for the same reason, which also obscures the underlying processes.Mitchell's piece is one of the better analyses I have seen.

Mitchell points out that since World War II the ruling elites of the world - the Davos crowd - have been selling identity politics (ie - segregating people into identity voting groups, like Afro-Americans, or Hispanics) and supra-national organizations and trade deals. This has been wonderful for the wealthier investor and professional classes, and for large corporations, but disastrous for the working classes. As he says:

Yes, Donald Trump is implicated in that unraveling, cavalierly undermining decades worth of social and political certainties with his rapid-fire Twitter account and persona that only the borough of Queens can produce. But so is Bernie Sanders. And so is Brexit. And so are the growing rumblings in Europe, which are all the more dangerous because there is no exit strategy if the European Union proves unsustainable. It is not so much that there are no new ideas for us to consider in 2016; it is more that the old ones are being taken apart without a clear understanding of what comes next. 2016 is the year of mental dust, where notions that stand apart from the post-1989 order don’t fully cohere. The 2016 election will be the first—but not last—test of whether they can.

If you listen closely to Trump, you’ll hear a direct repudiation of the system of globalization and identity politics that has defined the world order since the Cold War. There are, in fact, six specific ideas that he has either blurted out or thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter; (2) immigration policy matters; (3) national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter; (4) entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters; (6) PC speech—without which identity politics is inconceivable—must be repudiated.

These six ideas together point to an end to the unstable experiment with supra- and sub-national sovereignty that many of our elites have guided us toward, siren-like, since 1989. That is what the Trump campaign, ghastly though it may at times be, leads us toward: A future where states matter. A future where people are citizens, working together toward (bourgeois) improvement of their lot. His ideas do not yet fully cohere. They are a bit too much like mental dust that has yet to come together. But they can come together. And Trump is the first American candidate to bring some coherence to them, however raucous his formulations have been.

There is no question that Trump has disrupted the Republican Party - and it badly needed disrupting. Bernie Sanders, had he won the nomination, would have done the same for the Democratic Party. If Trump loses, which is more likely than not, the Republicans will have to start the rethinking process while the Democrats, at least for the next four years, will most likely continue down their current dead-end path (and probably lose disastrously in the next election).

In any case , this piece is worth reading and thinking about.

Recommended: How the Democrats Lost Touch on Trade

I recommend the article How the Democrats Lost Touch on Trade by Thomas Frank of  Politico. He makes the point, now obvious to all except apparently the politicians in Washington, that the trade deals to date have benefited one portion of the population - owners, CEOs and investors - while decimating other portions of the population - largely workers. No wonder we have a populist uprising going now!

The lesson of Trump

Polling still suggests Donald Trump will lose the election to Hillary Clinton, barring any new surprises. Nevertheless, a substantial portion of the nation – something around 40% - apparently favors the Donald over Hillary. Whether they really like him or just see him as the lesser of the two evils is an interesting question, but he certainly has an appeal, and politicians in both parties would do well to ponder why that is.

My own interpretation at the moment, after watching his rise over the past few months, is that he offers four things that traditional politicians in both parties do not offer:

1. He says what he is really thinking.  Yes, often that turns out to dumb or offensive to someone. But at least it is real. I think we as a voting public have gotten tired of and cynical about politicians trotting out the same of standard phrases that we all now know they really don’t mean; the politically correct, focus-group tested,  mealy-mouthed statements designed not to really take a clear stand on anything that might lose votes.  The repeated assertions that they are “serving the American people” when we all know perfectly well they are serving themselves and their biggest donors first. More often than not I don’t agree with Trump, but I do find his candor – erratic as it often is – to be refreshing.

2. He is willing to talk about “sacred” topics – topics that need discussion but that the “politically-correct” politicians carefully tiptoe around and avoid.  Immigration is an example. In our current “victim-centered” society illegal immigrants are “victims”, but in fact it is not at all clear why we have any obligation at all to people who sneak across our borders illegally. Now I often don’t agree with what he has to say about these topics, but at least he is willing to say something about them, and he often expresses what a fair proportion of the voters are thinking. which is more than most traditional politicians are willing to do. 

3. He doesn’t look like he has been bought, or even that he can be bought. That may be an illusion, but he doesn’t seem to be in the pockets of Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers, or the oil companies, or the coal barons, or any big corporations, or any super-PAC that controls his ideology, or any big donors. Nor in fact does he seem to be ideologically committed to the pet causes of either the liberals or the conservatives. Of course that is why the Washington establishment is so profoundly against him – he isn’t one of them, and he doesn’t seem to be prepared to look out for their interests. He will certainly look out for his own interests, of course. But considering how little support he has gotten, even from his own party, he certainly doesn’t seem to be beholden to anyone.

4. He is unabashedly pro-America.  After eight years of President Obama apologizing to the world repeatedly for America, it is kind of refreshing to see someone who seems prepared to stand up for the nation he wants to lead. I can’t think of another nation in the world that isn’t proud of itself and of what it has accomplished – even nations mired in endless civil wars retain a sense of self-worth in their history and cultures. So I suspect many voters are a little tired of the constant East Coast liberal attitude of apologizing for our faults.  Yes, America has faults, but in fact as near as I can tell our democratic systems is working as hard as anyone in the world to grow past them.

Of course none of us – TV talking heads and op-ed pundits included – have any idea how he would actually be as president. As Scott Adams pointed out in a recent blog, no one really knows who would be the best president, because no one knows what challenges she/he will face. A person who would be good at handling a war might be disastrous in handling a recession – and we have no idea ahead of time which of these they might face.

But traditional establishment politicians would do well to ponder Trump’s success.  If he loses, which he probably will, this voter discontent isn’t going to disappear. Thus far it seems to me the establishment has been blaming everyone else, including the “dumb” voters”, for this unsettled election season. But in fact I think most of the voter discontent is with the establishment itself and its policies. Until/unless the establishment can overcome it’s hubris and look honestly at itself, it is going to continue to face these sorts of voter revolutions.

PS - having said that, I seriously doubt that the current political establishment - liberal or conservative - can bring itself to that sort of self-examination.  It has gotten so insular, so isolated from the lives of average Americans, so sure that its views are the right ones and everyone else is either dumb, uninformed, or bigoted, that it would take something fairly drastic to shake up the system.