Scared, desperate people are easy prey for demagogues promising easy solutions, scapegoats, and a return to the "good old days". The blame falls on the Dems for not putting forward a populist message to counter Trump's BS.
Indeed, the Dems did the exact WRONG things, putting up a candidate who is the embodiment of the establishment in an election year when the electorate was out for the establishment's blood. Praising years of economic growth that folks in Middle America are not seeing because all that new wealth is concentrated among the wealthy and middle class on the coasts, sounding completely tone-deaf in the process and reinforcing sentiments that the Dems have become the party of the "coastal elites", representing Wall Street and Silicon Valley rather than the average American. Not restraining over-the-top activist types who imply that working class whites have no right to complain about their problems because of "white privilege". Telling older blue collar workers that they just need "retraining", ignoring that older workers would still struggle to find work because of effectively ageist hiring practices, and also ignoring that many of these new jobs mean moving across the country, destroying the bonds of community these people and their families have built up over the years.
In the long term some form of guaranteed minimum income is the only answer, but that requires overcoming centuries, millennia even, of cultural conditioning involving the belief that the only valid source of income is from one's own labor. In the mean time, folks here in the heartland need jobs. and folks in the big cities on the coasts need to quit treating folks out here as objects of contempt and scorn. You might not agree with their religious convictions and what you perceive as "backward" social attitudes, but they are still human beings who deserve respect.
Indeed, the Dems did the exact WRONG things, putting up a candidate who is the embodiment of the establishment in an election year when the electorate was out for the establishment's blood. Praising years of economic growth that folks in Middle America are not seeing because all that new wealth is concentrated among the wealthy and middle class on the coasts, sounding completely tone-deaf in the process and reinforcing sentiments that the Dems have become the party of the "coastal elites", representing Wall Street and Silicon Valley rather than the average American. Not restraining over-the-top activist types who imply that working class whites have no right to complain about their problems because of "white privilege". Telling older blue collar workers that they just need "retraining", ignoring that older workers would still struggle to find work because of effectively ageist hiring practices, and also ignoring that many of these new jobs mean moving across the country, destroying the bonds of community these people and their families have built up over the years.
In the long term some form of guaranteed minimum income is the only answer, but that requires overcoming centuries, millennia even, of cultural conditioning involving the belief that the only valid source of income is from one's own labor. In the mean time, folks here in the heartland need jobs. and folks in the big cities on the coasts need to quit treating folks out here as objects of contempt and scorn. You might not agree with their religious convictions and what you perceive as "backward" social attitudes, but they are still human beings who deserve respect.
#MakeTheDemocratsGreatAgain